Fania Records: Salsa as the Most Underrated Sampler's Resource

From a car trunk to Yankee Stadium

Fania was founded in New York in 1964 by bandleader Johnny Pacheco and lawyer Jerry Masucci. In the early days they sold records from the trunk of a car to shops in the city's Latino neighbourhoods. Within ten years Fania had a roster that defined the genre, its own all-star band, and a string of subsidiary and acquired labels including Vaya, Inca and later Tico and Alegre.

The Fania All-Stars were the showcase: the label's bandleaders and singers on one stage. Their 1971 concert at the Cheetah club became the film Our Latin Thing, and in 1973 they played Yankee Stadium. Salsa, the marketing name the label helped popularise, was really a modern New York take on Cuban son and mambo, with Puerto Rican bomba and plena, jazz harmony and a harder, brassier edge.

The names to know

• •Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe: trombone-heavy, streetwise records from the late 60s and 70s
• •Rubén Blades: with Colón, Siembra (1978), one of the best-selling salsa albums ever
• •Ray Barretto: conga player whose bands moved between Latin soul, salsa and jazz
• •Larry Harlow, Bobby Valentín, Cheo Feliciano, Ismael Miranda and Celia Cruz
• •Joe Bataan: Latin soul and boogaloo, closer to R&B than to salsa

Boogaloo: the sampler's sweet spot

Before salsa took over, New York had a brief, brilliant boogaloo craze in the late 60s: Latin rhythm sections playing R&B-style songs, often in English, with handclaps, party chants and loose, fun arrangements. Joe Cuba's "Bang Bang" and Pete Rodríguez's "I Like It Like That" are the classics, and the latter found a new audience when Cardi B used it for "I Like It" in 2018. Fania, Tico and Alegre all released boogaloo, and much of it was never reissued widely.

Boogaloo records are especially useful for sampling because they sit closer to funk tempos and structures than salsa does, and their intros often feature piano and percussion alone.

What to listen for

• •The montuno: a repeating syncopated piano figure that is effectively a ready-made loop
• •Moñas: short horn riffs that stack up in the second half of a track
• •The mambo section and percussion breakdowns, where timbales, congas and bongos play alone
• •Coro: group vocal hooks that repeat, call-and-response style

One technical note: salsa is built on the clave, a two-bar rhythmic pattern. If you chop a one-bar loop out of a salsa record it can feel subtly wrong, because you have cut the clave in half. Two-bar loops almost always sit better.

Records to start with

• •Willie Colón: El Malo (1967) and Lo Mato (1973)
• •Willie Colón & Rubén Blades: Siembra (1978)
• •Ray Barretto: Acid (1968)
• •Joe Bataan: Riot! (1968)
• •Fania All-Stars: Live at the Cheetah, Vol. 1 (1972)
• •Larry Harlow: Hommy: A Latin Opera (1973)

Dig it on CrateDrop

Filter to Latin and set the years to 1965–1980. For boogaloo, add the Funk / Soul genre and keep the years at 1966–1970. The RARE and SECRET obscurity settings push you toward the smaller labels and one-album bands that never made the compilations.