Willie Colón
The Wounding Trombone
Translated from Pablo Dintrans.
Published 08-31-2004

A  thin youth, often dressed as a gangster, with a wide brim hat and a case that guarded his most lethal weapon: his trombone. That was the image the was printed on the Fania records that immortalized Willie Colón.

This musician-grandson of Puerto Ricans, born in the terrible barrio of The South Bronx, changed the course and meaning of Salsa at the end of the decade of the 60’s in New York City. At the age of 16 he started to experiment with the execution of the trombone imprinting a music with a raw sound.

They called him El Malo, music critics would wince at the sharp and very loud sound he would produce from his trombone in an orchestra. Colón accepted the nickname and introduced it into his lyrics as well as his music to the place which he directed his art and his life: the Latin Barrio. In New York City there has been the focus point for a great Puerto Rican migration, on March 17 1917, the U.S. Congress declared Puerto Rico an Unincorporated Territory, converting all Spanish citizens to American citizens.

The soul of the Boricua*, his fears and hopes were reflected in the sound of Salsa, a style that took Cuban son, afropuertorican rhythms like Bomba and Plena and combined them with jazzistic improvisations and arrangement inherited from African American musicians.

Willie Colón was also one of the leaders of the Salsa With Conciseness Movement with Ruben Blades. Their music and lyrics spoke to the feelings and everyday life of Latinos in the big cities.
 

The Gangster image opened the door for enemies of Salsa to criticize and associate it with “sociopaths and prostitutes”. For his fans it was the reflection of a hero who would emancipate himself in a hostile, concrete jungle, the land of dream for immigrants.

Today Willie Colón continues composing and fighting for the defense of civil rights in The United States. He continues to compose and play his trombone. In these days he will be recognized by the Latin Academy  of Recording Arts and Sciences (LARAS) for his contribution to Latin American Music. This recognition will also be extended to the Brazilian
Singer Roberto Carlos, and the great Argentine singer and activist Mercedes Sosa.

Willie Colón has known how to interpret the sounds of our cities, he has photographed our streets and has fought for the rights of many Latin Americans that have fixed their destiny to a life in the United States.He has also recorded native rhythms of Puerto Rico like  the Bomba and the Plena, in Spanish like his grandfathers.

* Boricua is the name the Taino Indians gave to the inhabitants of Puerto Rico (Boriken in Taino)

“Thanks to Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, Doris Quiñones and everyone who made this great honor possible.”

WILLIE COLÓN INDUCTED TO BRONX WALK OF FAME

June 26, 2004

There’s a new street sign posted on the corner of 161st street and Grand Concourse as of Saturday morning June 26th. It reads Willie Colón Bronx Walk of Fame. internationally renowned salsero Willie Colón was inducted to the Bronx Walk of Fame along with 10 other famed sons and daughters of the Bronx.

This year’s honorees are Willie Colón, hip hop pioneers Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five; Sonia Manzano, Sesame Street’s “Maria,”; “Will & Grace” sitcom star Shelley Morrison, who plays Rosario the maid, Oscar-winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley of “Moonstruck” fame and singer Bobby Darin was inducted posthumously.

“I am honored to announce that these new distinguished sons and daughters of the Bronx will be inducted into our Bronx Walk of Fame,” Borough President Carrión said. “I invite everyone to join us for an exciting welcome home ceremony, one of the many highlights of Bronx Week 2004.”

Past inductees include Secretary of State Powell, TV host Regis Philbin, entertainer Dolores Hope, author E.L. Doctorow, actresses  and entertainers Diahann Carroll, Rita Moreno and Renee Taylor, broadcast journalist Gabe Pressman, architect Daniel Libeskind, music superstar Valerie Simpson, actor Danny Aiello and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

The inductees unveiled their name plaques at 11 a.m. Saturday morning near the Bronx County Building just south of E. 161st St. before the start of a parade that kicked off at noon on Mosholu Parkway at Hull Ave. and headed over to Van Cortlandt Ave. East for the Bronx Food, Art & Music Festival.

MEDIA ADVISORY

SALSA LEGEND/POLITICAL ACTIVIST WILLIE COLON TO RECEIVE HONORARY DOCTORATE

TO:             All Media — Todos Los Medios

WHAT:       Willie Colón to receive Honorary Doctorate from Lehman College

WHEN:       Thursday, June 3, at 10:30 am

WHERE:     Lehman College South Field

DETAILS:   On Thursday, June 3, Lehman College will confer the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters on Salsa Legend/Political Activist Willie Colón in recognition of his compositions, poems and essays and the effect his work has had on millions of Latinos throughout the world.

Este Jueves, 3 de junio, La Universidad de Lehman College le ortorgará un doctorado en Letras Humanas al Salsero/Político Willie Colón en reconocimiento de sus composiciones, poesías, ensayos y el impacto que su trabajo ha tenido en sobre millones de Hispanos en el mundo.

PARKING:  Call to reserve space.

MEDIA CONTACTS: 

Marge Rice, Office of Media Relations, Lehman College
718-960-4992 (office) / 917-319-2198 (cell)

6/1/04

 Shuster Hall, Room 214 • 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West  • Bronx, NY 10468

The star of New York style “Hard Salsa” is also a respected politician in New York.  Politics and activism impassion him as much as music.  Tonight he will be an activist on the stage of the World Salsa Festival that will take place in Videna of San Luis

Willie Colón, visited the Congress of the Republic and was received, with a great deal of clamour by the members of the Legislature and fans of this famous visitor.  The recording artist/activist took advantage of the opportunity to call for unity amongst Latin Americans in order to meet the challenges ahead and to be prepared for economic and social development. 

Colón arrived at the Legislative Palace past the noon, accompanied by the former soccer star Ramón Mifflin and was received by congresspersons José Luis Risco (GPDI) and Alfredo González (NoA). 

 The parliamentarians accompanied Colón to the Castille Room, where he talked with vice president Carlos Infantas Fernández (FIM), who received him in representation of the President of the Congress, doctor Henry Pease.   

“I believe that what our countries sorely need at this moment is unity; the union of   Latin America, as has been done in Europe, the Economic Community, as they have done in the United States.  I believe that the next step for the Latin Americans is an effective and real union in order to be able compete and achieve the progress we long for”, he commented.   

The artist explained that he is Special Assistant to Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City and that he is his advisor to a commission of 52 commissioners.  He added that he was a counsellor to the Mayor in relation to Latinos and other aspects. 

 ”I have been able to do many works for the Latin American community.  Mayor Bloomberg has entrusted me on various projects and initiatives, and I feel very happy with the position that I now occupy”, Colón commented with regard to his political role. 

Translated from Spanish 
Congress/Elcomercioperu

Salsa star Willie Colon (third from left) helps spice up Better Business Bureau’s Latino Executive of New York salute during halftime of Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. Honorees (l. to r.) were Roberto Herencia, Banco Popular; Jorge Rodriguez, Bank of New York; Salsa Artist Willie Colon; Laura Quintano, Avon; Napoleon Barragan, 1-800-Mattress; Ramon Fuenmayor, Pfizer Animal Health.

WEDNESDAY, February 4 2004

Since his musical beginnings, Willie Colón’s image was associated with that of an intrepid, sage, and fearless boy who –forced himself a space among the big names of Caribbean music, in the complex world that was the New York City of the 60s.

Before the astonished look of those responsible for the Latin sound of the era, this young neophyte, a “nameless”, unknown figure in the field of popular music and, particularly, a musician of scarce resources, strange, inexperienced and foreign.

At first he was admonished and censured for his strong, strident style. He was even accused of being un-harmonic by the veterans of Latin music.

Some say teasingly, that he earned his nickname of “El Malo” (Bad Boy) as an epithet referring to his interpretive capacity on the trombone when he made his first appearance on the musical stage, at fifteen years of age. Others say it was because he was a brawler.

Bronx-born of Puerto Rican grandparents, William Anthony Colón Román was born April 28, 1950 in the South Bronx. He learned very early in his adolescence to address the negative stereotypes that are foisted upon the latin community and the raw reality of the immigrant in the “The Big Apple”.

Willie’s artistic work became a most compelling social testimony dressed in music, with memorable lyrics that related the stories of marginality, prejudice, poverty and misery.

Although there were other musicians of the era that endeavoured to work the same thematic line, nobody better than he knew how to conjugate in harmonies the pain and loneliness of the diaspora.

His music simultaneaously reflects a rhythmic traditional lyric, the lament of farewell and the hope of a new generation forced to abandon their homeland to be congregated in the American metropolis.

Willie Colón is, without doubt, a painter of the faces of his people, an artist that expressed in his songs –above all with a his strong sound– the conscience of a generation that demanded social respect and that fought for a validation of its humanity.

A WISE MAN AMONG GENIUSES

Willie Colón, The musician and arranger, took his first steps in the arts as a trumpetist until he developed a fascination with the work of Mon Rivera and Rivera’s use of the trombone in the interpretation of the Puerto Rican folkloric rythms of Bomba and Plena..

His musical passion, on the other hand, he derived from his grandmother, who raised him whispering the melodies of her Puerto Rican homeland, planting in him a fascination with the typical rhythms of the country.

Early in 1965, this intrepid youth launched himself to the streets to test his talent, during New York’s Latin American music craze, where Tito Puente, Charlie Palmieri, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow and Ray Barretto, ruled.

In 1967, when he was 17 years old, he joined a group of artists that formed part of the nucleus of Jerry Masucci talent pool and who were responsible for creating the boom and the new record label that would unite new Latin American musical expression: Fania Records.

The arrival of Willie Colón to this group marked the most significant moment of Salsa, in fact it was the most impacting and identifiable point of departure in the development of this new musical expression, it was the attempt to homogenize the works that for many years were created in the latin american world of New York, as part of a new sonorous proposal.

In that context, the glory of Willie Colón rested in his capacity to devise the precise sound that symbolized the new rhythmic time, because of it’s broad social acceptance it became the representation of Latin America. Nobody better than he could harmonize the musical tendencies of the Anglo-saxon world with the “old” latin american school of the mambo, the pachanga, the cha-cha-chá and the guaracha, adding the nostalgia of the traditional puerto rican sound, that is etched in Puerto Rican folkloric music of the bomba and the plena.

The great success off Willie Colón’s grandiose musical project is owed, in great measure, to his partnership with a singer from Ponce, Héctor Lavoe, with whom he created the most important duo in the Salsa genre.

Together with the “Singer of Singers”(Hector LaVoe), he elevated his proposal to the highest echelons of the musical scene. Above all because of his assertiveness in projecting a new musical concept that combined the wry and piercing tone of LaVoe’s voice and his attachment to the traditional melodies of Puerto Rico, with the passion of daring young trombonist’s and his ability to project the nostalgic sound of the roots of Puerto Rican music with the aggressive, strong sound of the urban world that surrounded them.

During the seven years that the union of Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe lasted, Salsa reigned and prospered. The formula for success was to embrace the established rhythmic patterns of the day in order to mark the tempo of the new time for Salsa, armed with modern compositions and New York slang and embellished with the familiar, typical phrases of rural Puerto Rico

• Translated from Spanish:
  History of Salsa Project, a special series for PRIMERA HORA

  Director General: Jorge Cabezas Villalobos
  Editor: Hiram Guadalupe Pérez
  Supervisor Gráfico: Diego Méndez Hernández
  Ilustrador: Gary Javier
  Artista Gráfico: Omar A. Cadena Negrón
  Audio y vídeo: www.primerahora.com

By Jaime Torres Torres
End.jtorres1@elnuevodia.com
De El Nuevo Día

SALSA urgently needed a concert like the one Willie Colón & Rubén Blades offered Saturday at the Hiram Bithorn Stadium. An eloquent concert, that, from song to song, would remind us that the future of this genre depends on the receptivity of the contemporary artists to the drama of everyday life. A concert that, to the pulse of a steamroller rhythm section, a demolishing montuno and a violent trombone section, allowed the orchestra to say things that a singer cannot express with words.

The repertoire from the “Metiendo Mano”, “Siembra” y “Canciones del solar de los aburridos” continues to narrate, 25 years later, what today’s Romantic Salsa cannot articulate. That’s why the old music hasn’t lost it’s relevance. The stories about the fortune teller reading her cards, of the nocturnal criminal that pours through the alleyways hunting his next victim, of the con artist, and of the lover whose is incapable of tearing from his soul the pain of love and of the exploited native Indian deep in the plantation are still repeated everywhere and, facing the inexistence of a new Salsa chronicle, they never lose their freshness and originality.

That’s how, Siembra… 25 Years Later”, resulted in an unforgettable spectacular. Although technically César Sainz and Ariel Rivas presented a mediocre production (the sound was poor and the camera shots  projected on the screens flowed without synchronization to the show), conceptually and artistically Willie y Rubén compensated by interpreting for almost three hours a select repertoire. Despite the erratic lecture of some of the arrangements, they reciprocated fully to the mass of humanity that bothered to remember the second shining of the 70s, an era that used it’s conscience and that 25 years later, thanks to their militancy, demonstrates that it is still alive and awake.

The Concert, as this writer has learned, was recorded. The people deserve that record. Willie and Rubén also, because since  1982, the year of “The Last Fight”, they haven’t collaborated on a project with the chemistry, commitment and enthusiasm that they demonstrated Saturday. Yes, in 1994 they were part of a Papo Coss production and a few years later in Madison Square Garden and the Rubén Rodríguez Coliseum in Bayamón, but with Willie Colón as an invited guest and without participation or decisions over the musical direction.

Saturday, Willie directed and pianist Ennio Gatti assisted. His gift for being able to smell what people want was ratified when he changed the charts and in the mambos of “La Maleta” and “Plantación Adentro” he conducted trombonists Ozzie Meléndez, Luis Bonilla and José Dávila through some streety and wounding tags and that took us back to the Héctor Lavoe epoch. The model that inspired Mon Rivera’s  ”trombanga” and Barry Rogers’ attacks with Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta band.

Morally, Willie is obligated to sing to Lavoe and, yet, he deposited the deference on Rubén to the role of singing the Panamanian “Murga” before singing his own tribute to the memory of “El Cantante” (THE Singer) with a smashing medley of “La banda”, “Periódico de ayer”, “El Todopoderoso” and “El cantante”.

Consummating the posthumous salute, Colón and Blades continued their nostalgic passage, delighting us with their duet vocalizations and dramatic routines in “Madame Kalalú”, “Ligia Elena” and  ”Pedro Navaja”.

“Siembra… 25 years later”, also put in perspective Willie Colón’s  enormous contribution to Salsa. Although he knows the heritage of the son montuno and the cha-cha, the bulk of his productions with Héctor, Rubén, Mon Rivera, Celia, Sophy, Soledad Bravo and Ismael Miranda break with the afrocuban scheme, formulating a true Puerto Rican sound enriched at times with harmonies and rythmic elements from Brasil, Venezuela, México, Colombia, Panamá and the Andes.

It is sad, with so much that he could still contribute to Salsa (his work in “Talento de televisión” and “Caer en gracia” on the Tras la tormenta CD will substantiate), that he is practically retired from the record business.

Perhaps the magic and the emotions shared this Saturday with Ruben will motivate him to return
to the studio to harvest his crop with the Panamanian singer-composer or with Domingo Quiñones,
who reconfirmed he has the potential to cultivate with credibility and genius our urban folklore.