Willie Colón was a salsa pioneer and the all-round badass of Latin music – literally so when you consider his surname and nickname of El Malo (‘The Bad One’).
The Nyorican composer and trombonist saw salsa as the precursor of hip-hop, transforming what was seen as rural folk music into the inner-city sound of Spanish Harlem in the ’60s and ’70s.
“Salsa came from the same kind of situation that rap does, writing songs about the baddest guy on the block, drugs and sex,” he once said. “It has the raunch and dirt in it.”
Like the rap superstars who would follow in his wake, Colón played up to his gangster image, posing on the cover of his album Cosa Nuestra on the bonnet of a vintage car in his camelhair coat and homburg, smoking a cigar. A later one, La Gran Fuega, showed him on an FBI ‘Most Wanted’ poster.
Colón, more than anyone, spearheaded a New York revival of salsa, the music pioneered by Eddie Palmieri, his fellow Puerto Rican, who died last summer. He recorded this tune when he was just SIXTEEN, back in 1967.
Throughout the late ’60s through to the mid-’70s, Colón helped launch the career of future household names Rubén Blades, Celia Cruz and Héctor Lavoe, who all sang in his band from the late ’60s through the mid-’70s.
His name is synonymous with Fania Records, the label best known for its international supergroup Fania All-Stars, popularising salsa, Latin big band, Afro-Cuban jazz, boogaloo and Latin R&B to such an extent that its signature musical style became known as the “Fania Sound.”
In the ’80s Colón won the hearts and eternal gratitude of the LGBT community – risking his popularity among elements of his conservative Catholic community – with a song called El Gran Varón, about a trans woman who is rejected by her parents and dies of AIDS.
His popularity may have faded over the decades since salsa’s ’70s heyday, but he remained a legend in the Hispanic community, demonstrated during the now-notorious Superbowl appearance by Bad Bunny – another Puerto Rican – when he performed his hit Nuevayol, which pays homage to Colón
As his manager Pietro Carlos said: “Willie didn’t just change salsa, he expanded it, politicised it, clothed it in urban chronicles and took it to stages where it hadn’t been before. His trombone was the voice of the people.”