The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves, and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia (review)

Had I not been about to leave for Cali when asked to review this book, being busy, I might have declined the invitation. But the coincidence seemed providential. I had not returned to Cali often since living there from 1978-81, and now I was about to revisit the city's annual feria that has become probably the world's biggest salsa dance party. So, why not The City or Musical Memory? It was the right choice. I would certainly have regretted missing this magnificent book.

Cali may not be, as some Caleños claim, "the world capital of salsa." But no other South American city can rival the intensity of Cali's collective cultivation of salsa music and dance, which figure powerfully both in people's daily lives and in the city's officially indorsed cultural identity. Waxer examines this topic from all sides. She begins with how records of mostly-Cuban música antillana (the musical antecedent of salsa)began to arrive in Cali in the 1940s and gained a following in the city's working-class neighborhoods. She explores how these records became the center of local dance practice in those neighborhoods by the 1960s and, gradually, during the 1970s (by which time it was called salsa) among Caleños of all social classes. She traces the rise of a vigorous live music scene (buoyed economically by the Cali cartel) in the 1980s and early 1990s. And she concludes with a discussion of the annual feria de Cali, celebrated there in lieu of the fiestas patronales one finds most places—a festival that for the last twenty-five years has centered on salsa music and dance.

Waxer (a salsa musician herself) does all this with impressive expertise, empirical thoroughness, and unfailing felicity of expression. Her musicological knowledge (when discussing the stylistic characteristics of Caleño salsa, for example) is deployed with deft concision and clarity. It will satisfy expert readers while not alienating general readers. Cultural Studies inform her discussion but do not clog her pages. To the contrary, her writing is filled with the lucidly presented fruits of her extensive field work: oral histories of evolving social dance practice, the development of salsa radio broadcasting, and the working lives of musicians, for example. She provides maps of the city's neighborhoods and nightlife in various decades, profiles of the city's influential record collectors and DJs, and concert programs for the annual feria. This is not a book that lingers on discographies and lyrics, though both are there. Overall, Waxer's main interest is what we might call the sociology of salsa in Cali. In pursuit of that interest, she spoke with hundreds of people and collected an enormous amount of information.

Waxer uses Cali's salsa culture to enter an important contemporary debate: Is "mass culture," especially globalized mass culture such as that represented by internationally distributed music recordings, inherently homogenizing and destructive of local cultures? Waxer emphasizes that Cali's salsa culture was founded on imported records (not always played at the intended speed!) but that Caleños eventually put their own stamp on that culture, forging distinctive musical and dance styles, and thus making salsa a cherished and profoundly organic aspect of their identity. In addition, Caleños created distinctive forms of salsa sociability, such as the viejotecas where people gather today to listen and dance to the old música antillana that so transformed the city's social life decades ago. (Hence, "the city of musical memory," one of Cali's more recent salsa-related identities, along with the older "branch office of heaven.")

So much excellence makes one eager to hear more from Lise A. Waxer. I was doubly grieved, therefore, to learn of the author's untimely...