The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City (review)

Better late than never. César Miguel Rondón's excellent book on salsa, appropriately entitled The Book of Salsa, has finally been translated into English, more than twenty-five years after its initial publication, a welcome development for which we owe immense gratitude to Frances R. Aparicio and her collaborator Jackie White.

It is somewhat ironic that this excellent treatise on a music that grew and developed in the United States was written in Caracas by a brilliant, non-academic Venezuelan writer. To explain how that happened would deviate from our purpose here, but noted it must be.

One of the amazing aspects of Rondón's text, viewed with the great benefit of hindsight, is precisely how incredibly prescient his analysis of the development of salsa was in 1981 when the music was barely coming into the radar screens of the non-Latino American public. The analytical observations made by Rondón that have stood the test of time, indeed been borrowed by academics in order to further research the history and sociology of salsa, are too numerous to mention in such a short review. A few, however, are obligatory.

In The Book of Salsa Rondón identifies the precursors of the salsa genre, pointing to classic Cuban popular music and the "Latin" music that was popular in the United States in the 1940s and 1960s. But Rondón shows the ways in which salsa itself was a new creation that, rather than providing amusement and spectacle, reflected the spirit of the marginal, urban Latino barrios of the United States, in particular New York City. At the same time he is able to provide examples of the continuities between these two stages in the development of a Latino music scene in the United States. Thus, he emphasizes the great debt owed by the new style to the Cuban blind composer and tres player Arsenio Rodríguez whose "way of conceiving, structuring and approaching the son was highly influential and determined the overall sound of salsa." (50))

Rondón clearly perceived the different approaches to music traditions by the early salsa exponents. On the one had Eddie Palmieri and Willy Colón pursued the fresher, newer, even avant garde treatment of the music, more toward jazz in the face of the former, more toward the dancing barrio in the latter; on the other hand Harlow and Pacheco stuck closer to the Cuban roots with Ray Barretto acting somewhat as a synthesizer of everything that was happening around him in the world of salsa.

Finally, Rondón demonstrates how this early experimentation and varied menu of musical choices succumbed with the adoption, led by Dominican Johnny Pacheco, of a traditional style closer to the Cuban sound of the 1950s, a choice driven by the imperatives of an industry pursuing the maximization of sales and profit which, sadly, not always coincides with the most innovative music ideas of the moment.

The English translation of Rondón original Spanish text is truly outstanding. For the English edition Rondón provided an exciting, if inevitably far too short, summary of developments in salsa music in the last twenty five years. Aside from a few minor mistakes, e.g. Tito Rodríguez is identified as a Cuban singer—he's Puerto Rican, Rondón's book is an encyclopedia of accurate details and an elegant example of well-grounded generalizations about the salsa story. It belongs in the library of anyone wishing to learn about the history of U.S. Latinos and their music.