Inventing salsa
The Juilliard School, New York’s prestigious music and performing arts conservatory, recognized Pacheco’s talents and efforts with a scholarship to study composition and theory. During his education and afterward, Pacheco played percussion and other instruments in New York City’s Latin dance orchestras, eventually forming one of his own. He found his greatest early success as a flutist—a success he advertised on the cover of the 1961 album “Spotlight on Pacheco,” which sold more than 100,000 copies.
In the decades around World War II, as more and more people from the Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico, had moved to New York City, they had brought this distinctive musicality with them. One of Pacheco’s contemporaries and collaborators remembered of East Harlem in the 1960s that men and boys could be found all over, “keeping time and pounding out rhythms on whatever was in sight”—evidence of “a special kind of inheritance that’s in our blood.”
Fania’s records also attained a following in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1974, Pacheco, Celia Cruz, and others attended a massive music festival in Zaire with the likes of James Brown, B. B. King, and the Pointer Sisters. Thousands of people (many chanting “Pa-che-co! Pa-che-co!”) greeted the Fania All Stars at the airport as they climbed out of the plane. The festival resulted in an Academy Award-winning film by Leon Gast, which further raised Fania’s profile at home.
In the mid-1970s, Pacheco’s business partner, Masucci, began to push Fania’s music toward mainstream tastes and worked in other ways, too, to boost record sales outside American coastal cities and Latin communities. He even signed a contract with CBS to have its label, Columbia Records, produce and distribute the Fania All Stars’ albums. Many of these would go abroad, to Europe especially, where Masucci hoped to make inroads, and eventually to Japan and other parts of Asia.
Later in the 1970s, Fania’s salsa boom began to affect mainstream music in unforeseen, exciting ways. Salsa became a principal ingredient in genres enjoyed by people who tended not even to have a passing familiarity with the Fania sound. Patti LaBelle’s audiences would hear it in a track on “Tasty,” her wildly successful album of 1978. The song, “Me Gusta Tu Baile/Teach Me Tonight” (“I Like Your Dance”), featured a brass-forward sound and prominent saxophone that could have come right from Fania’s music sheets. The nasality and pitch of the chorus echoed Fania’s vocals; the percussion and piano anchored the song in the Fania sound.
Eventually, salsa became bigger than any one record label could contain. In the 1980s, as the genre diversified and expanded, labels other than Fania entered the mix and supplanted the original. Masucci and Pacheco eventually sold Fania to South American investors but continued to be involved—Masucci on the business side, Pacheco on the artistic side.
Pacheco kept performing with the Fania All Stars into the 21st century. The label he created—and trademarked—changed hands several more times, its 1,000 albums, 3,000 compositions, and 10,000-plus master tracks lovingly maintained for posterity and periodically re-released to new generations of salsa lovers all over the world.