EMILY KWONG, HOST:
The salsa pioneer and legend Willie Colon has died at age 75, according to his statement from his family on one of his social media accounts. No cause of death was given. Willie Colon was a key part of Salsa's development in the 1970s as an instrumentalist, songwriter and producer. For more than six decades, he was one of the genre's most popular acts. NPR Music's Felix Contreras has this appreciation.
FELIX CONTRERAS, BYLINE: In retrospect, Willie Colon was the ideal musician to reshape the sound of Afro-Caribbean dance music that became known around the world as salsa. He was born in the Bronx in 1950, and as a young teenager, he was soaking up the popular music of mid 1960s New York - R&B, rock and jazz - as well as Puerto Rican folk music that he heard during summer trips to the island to visit his grandparents. He started playing trumpet at age 12, then switched to trombone, and by age 16, he had signed a recording contract.
At age 17, he released his first album for a new upstart indie record label called Fania Records. It was a mix of jazz, rock and R&B, combined with mambos and cha-cha-cha, and was so raw and unorthodox that critics and older musicians panned it. And yet, eventually, it became popular with young Nuyoricans who were looking for something to hang their identity on.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE COLON AND HECTOR LAVOE'S "JAZZY")
CONTRERAS: The album featured Puerto Rican vocalist Hector Lavoe, who went on to become one of salsa's major stars as a solo act, but only after he recorded several popular albums with Willie Colon between 1967 and 1975.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AGUANILE")
HECTOR LAVOE: (Singing in Spanish).
CONTRERAS: Two years later, Colon recruited vocalist Ruben Blades to join his band. But this time, the music addressed some of the social issues the two musicians were seeing in the Latino community, leading up to their album "Siembra," released in 1978 and still considered one of the high watermarks of salsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PEDRO NAVAJA")
RUBEN BLADES: (Singing in Spanish).
CONTRERAS: Musically, Colon's trombone-based brass section set his band apart from other popular Fania bands. He was also busy as a producer and arranger for many Fania albums, which led him to teaming up with the Cuban vocalist Celia Cruz for an album called "Only They Could Have Made This Album."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "USTED ABUSO")
CELIA CRUZ AND WILLIE COLON: (Singing in Spanish).
CONTRERAS: Willie Colon's later years were a mix of music and politics. In the late 1980s, he was a consultant with then-New York City Mayor David Dinkins. In 1974, he ran as a Democrat in the primary for New York's 17th Congressional District. And he served for over a decade as an adviser to one-time New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Prior to that, Colon took a slight detour from music by enrolling and passing the Westchester County Police Academy. He was sworn in as a police officer in 2014 at age 64, staying with the department for eight years part time while still performing, before resigning his rank of deputy lieutenant in 2022.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE COLON'S "DOÑA TOÑA")
CONTRERAS: Ultimately, it's the music that Willie Colon will be remembered for. He was the sound of the Puerto Rican community in New York, finding its voice culturally and politically, brash when challenging the status quo, sometimes confrontational, other times sentimental, but always with a passion for identifying himself and his community as part of the fabric of this country. Felix Contreras, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE COLON'S "DOÑA TOÑA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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