The band signed with Alegre Records, and their first album sold over 100,000 copies in its first year, making it one of the best-selling Latin albums of its time, according to the official website. This has Mr. Pacheco’s career began with the introduction of a new dance fad called the pachanga. He became an international star and toured the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Fania Records was born out of an unlikely partnership between Mr. Pacheco and Mr. Masucci, a former police officer who became a lawyer who fell in love with Latin music during a visit to Cuba.
From its humble beginnings in Harlem and the Bronx – where releases from the trunk of cars were sold – Fania brought an urban sensitivity to Latin music. In New York, the music got the name ‘salsa’ (Spanish for sauce, as in hot sauce), and the Fania label started using it as part of its marketing.
Led by mr. Pacheco created artists a new sound based on traditional piano knives and the genre Cuban boy (or boy Cubano), but faster and more aggressive. Many of the lyrics – about racism, cultural pride and the turbulent politics of the era – were far removed from the pastoral and romantic scenes in traditional Cuban songs.
In that sense, salsa was “homemade American music, just as much a part of the indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop,” Jody Rosen wrote in The New York Times in 2006 on the occasion of the Fania master’s reissue. tires – after years of gathering mold in a warehouse in Hudson, NY
Mr. Pacheco met with me in the early 1970s. Cruz collaborated. Their first album, “Celia & Johnny,” was a powerful blend of hard salsa with infectious refrains and virtuoso performances. It soon gained gold, thanks to Mrs. Cruz’s vocal skills and Mr. Pacheco’s grand orchestral direction, and his first track, the upward tempo “Quimbara”, helped to advance Cruz’s career to become queen of Salsa status.