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The Cheetah was more like an enormous barn than a ballroom. While it had a great location on Fifty-second Street—the area featuring the most famous clubs of the golden age of jazz in the 1950s—it was set up in the most rudimentary way for dancers and spectators alike. Apparently, the Cheetah had been used previously for a variety of activities, from warehouse to gym, from roller-skating rink to arena for dance marathons and contests. Since the mid1960s , however, it had become a regular spot for Latin dancing, offering wild parties where, for one small price, the average music lover could hear several orchestras in a single night. More importantly , the Cheetah is significant in the development of salsa because of a single Thursday night—August 21, 1971. It is no exaggeration to say that that evening was historical, for not only was that the night the Fania All Stars performed together for the second time, but in order to celebrate the event, a group of filmmakers recorded the performance. Two major productions documented that evening: a four-album set that Fania recorded and the film Nuestra cosa latina (Our Latin Thing), directed by León Gast. Earlier in this book, I argued that as early as 1965 to 1966 a new musical expression with all of the characteristics of salsa already was circulating. After the summer of 1971, however, that expression acquired all the vigor and impetus needed for it to expand into the Caribbean and Latino communities in the United States. Those two documents began that push. Three years earlier when the company had brought its stars together, it had intended only to offer a super salsa-styled jazz jam session, not to produce music for large-scale consumption by dancers uninspired by jazz. Besides, so many of the guest musicians in the first Fania session had been the foundation for the Alegre and Tico All Stars as well that the first Fania All Stars session produced only two albums of a quality significantly inferior to the jam session recordings that had come before. By the time of this second session, however, the Fania label already had some figures with sufficient capital, in terms of both record sales and popularity. More importantly, some of these musicians were totally new to the scene and had nothing to do with the old Latin expressions that had developed in New York. If we analyze the meaning of this second reunion, then, it is not too much to say that the authentic Fania Stars were born at the Cheetah event. At the helm of the orchestra was Johnny Pacheco, the co-owner of Fania 42 O u r ( Låt in ) T hing who already had recorded twelve albums under the label, half of them in the new modality of the conjunto. Next to the Dominican Pacheco, Ray Barretto was the most senior Fania star, and he had abandoned the schemes of the modern charanga completely, producing seven albums in the new style. The third star was Ricardo Ray, a virtuoso Puerto Rican pianist who, along with his singer, Bobby Cruz, had moved to Fania from the TicoAlegre monopoly. In addition, Fania acquired more power from the presence of two of its best sellers, Larry Harlow and Willie Colón, both born into the world of Fania. The final members capping off the group were two Puerto Rican orchestra leaders, Bobby Valentín and Roberto Roena, who succeeded in developing their own original musical approaches under the wing of this relatively new company. In this way, the Fania All Stars were formed as a fusion of the best bandleaders and singers from seven orchestras, complemented by some individual veteran musicians from the New York scene. The company executives wisely decided to promote their major record-selling stars on a larger scale. This was the radical difference between the 1971 Fania All Stars session and all other preceding ones. The main objective of those earlier jam sessions was to release musical impulses that could not be explored in commercial recordings, and this produced a music that did not necessarily invite dancing. Thus, the record Our Latin Thing is a common item in any salsa lover’s collection, while the recordings of the Tico, Alegre, or Cesta Stars are mostly in the hands of collectors or more serious salsa aficionados . Most importantly, we need to explore the master strategy of Fania, which was to produce a commercially viable record without eliminating...

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