Sixty years ago, a musician and composer named Johnny Pacheco joined forces with divorce attorney Jerry Masucci and founded Fania Records. What began as a fledgling project to capture the sounds of New York City and far beyond became one of the most influential labels in Latin music history.
By the late 1960s, Fania had become the Latin equivalent of Motown — an industrious factory of legends and hits, the epicenter of tropical music worldwide, and a label whose very name would become synonymous with the passion and joy that Latin American music is known for. The following decade would see definitive releases from an all-star roster, further cementing Fania’s legacy.
GRAMMY.com celebrates six decades of Fania lore with a guide to the label’s essential artists and albums. As you read, make sure to enjoy the Spotify playlist below, or listen on Apple Music and Amazon Music.
A Brief History Of Fania Records
Born in the Dominican Republic, Pacheco had moved to New York with his family at age 11 — but he never forgot the bubbly Cuban dance hits that he grew up listening to.
Masucci and Pacheco set up Fania in 1964 to release the latter’s Cañonazo, a rustic LP featuring a traditional conjunto of piano and trumpets, rhythm section, and the soulful vocals of Puerto Rican singer Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez. It included a rollicking cover of “Fanía” — a Cuban hit by Reinaldo Bolaños that gave the label its name. Its catalog number was LP325, commemorating Pacheco’s March 25 birthday. He was 29.
Fania’s beginnings were humble, but Pacheco and Masucci saw promise in the new generation of New York musicians of Cuban and Puerto Rican origin who, like Pacheco himself, were eager to add a fresh spin to the mambo and cha-cha-chá sounds of the ‘50s. They sold records out of the trunk of their cars, recorded a steady supply of new Pacheco albums, and signed promising young artists such as keyboardist Larry Harlow, bassist and trumpeter Bobby Valentín, and trombonist Willie Colón — unaware, perhaps, that their catalog included the future icons of the burgeoning salsa movement.
By 1967, the Fania sound had become edgy and explosive, assimilating the milestones of the Beatles and Motown. Their artists blended Afro-Caribbean formats of the past with a frantic mosaic of funk and psychedelia, rock and Brazilian, fusion and R&B. Pacheco’s unbridled creativity fueled a frantic schedule of non-stop recordings and concert performances.
A sense of bonhomie nurtured the Fania roster, inspiring a constant wave of collaborations. In 1968, the label created its own mega-orchestra, the Fania All-Stars, a band where every single performer was a star.
Throughout the ‘70s, Fania assimilated most competing labels under its banner: Alegre, Tico, Inca, Cotique, and others. Remarkably, this artistic and financial monopoly did not hinder the company’s creativity, which blossomed throughout the decade and into the ‘80s. By then, the Fania All-Stars had performed in Africa, and the label’s luminaries included Celia Cruz and Ray Barretto, Roberto Roena and Eddie Palmieri, La Sonora Ponceña and Héctor Lavoe.
Perhaps because it was a melting pot of cultures and sounds, the ‘70s salsa explosion spearheaded by Fania became an international phenomenon, influencing tropical bands in South America, and eventually spreading into Europe, Africa, and Asia. Inevitably, Fania experienced a gentle and elegant decay beginning in the mid-‘80s when the new wave of salsa romántica led the music into pop territory — taking the edge away, pasteurizing the grooves.
Fania stopped producing new music around 1998. Today, it is owned by the Concord conglomerate, which mines its past splendor by reissuing an assortment of gems on vinyl. The label’s 60th anniversary has included various concerts and listening events in New York, Miami, London and Los Angeles. The label’s legacy remains indelible; its output a cornerstone of Latin music history.
Definitive Fania Artists
Johnny Pacheco: Unlike most salsa musicians of his generation, Pacheco was a traditionalist and forever obsessed with the graceful dance tunes from the golden era of Cuban music in the ’50s. He was responsible for the movement known among connoisseurs as la matancerización de la salsa, which brought the ‘70s salsa sound closer to La Sonora Matancera, the Cuban supergroup that made Celia Cruz a star. Pacheco was incredibly proud to have collaborated with Cruz on a series of stellar albums that reignited her career and established her as the salsa queen of the ‘70s.
A sympathetic leader, Pacheco also recorded with many other great singers, from his lifelong compadre Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez and Cuban crooner Rolando Laserie, to former Matancera star Daniel Santos, Cuban flutist Fajardo, and many others. He died in 2021 at age 85.
Read more: How Johnny Pacheco Preached The Gospel Of Salsa To The World
Celia Cruz: It may sound surreal from today’s perspective (where la reina’s face is on the U.S. quarter), but Celia Cruz’s career experienced a serious slump during the ‘60s, after she left Cuba and made several albums with Tito Puente that failed to take off commercially. It was keyboardist Larry Harlow who got the ball rolling when he invited Celia to sing the track “Gracia Divina” on his salsa opera Hommy in 1971.
After the iconic 1974 Celia & Johnny LP with Pacheco became a commercial blockbuster on the strength of anthems like “Químbara” and a cover of Afro-Peruvian standard “Toro Mata,” Cruz became Fania’s leading diva. Blessed with impeccable timing, flavor y azúcar, she recorded a series of superlative albums with Ray Barretto, Willie Colón, and the Fania All-Stars.
Fania All-Stars: There has been no other band in the history of Latin music like the Fania All-Stars. Every single member — from instrumentalists like conguero Ray Barretto, bongosero Roberto Roena and bassist Bobby Valentín to singers such as Cheo Feliciano, Héctor Lavoe and Rubén Blades — enjoyed parallel successful careers as bandleaders and solo artists. When they came together to record albums and perform live, the spirit of playfulness and solidarity reminded them of an extended family.
The band was incredibly prolific and well-received, even though some of its studio efforts flirted with disco music and tended to lapse into excessive soloing. By the time of its demise, its discography included 15 studio and a dozen live albums In 1974, the entire orchestra traveled to Africa for a performance in Zaire that was filmed for a not-to-be-missed documentary, Fania All Stars: Live In Africa.
Eddie Palmieri: Born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, keyboard alchemist Eddie Palmieri grew up inspired by the piano chops of his older brother Charlie — a virtuoso bandleader himself. A restless creative soul, Eddie experimented wildly with dissonance and electronics, jazz fusion and funky Afro-Cuban patterns. Known for his free-form improvisations in concert, he stretched the tropical canon to its most extreme avant-garde limits, but salseros loved him because getting people on the dancefloor was his utmost priority.
He recorded a long series of seminal LPs for the Tico imprint, which was acquired by Fania in 1974. By 1981 and the iconic, self-titled session known widely as “The White Album,” Palmieri reveled in progressive salsa, with lush orchestrations and Cheo Feliciano belting out the salsified tango “El Día Que Me Quieras.”
Ray Barretto: Nuyorican bandleader Barretto was a gentle giant; a rock-solid conga player who avoided solos and loved jazz and the Afro-Caribbean tradition in equal measure. In 1962, his early boogaloo track “El Watusi” became a huge hit, and 1968’s Acid was a psychedelic Latin soul classic, but Barretto’s biggest strength was the rugged barrio salsa of 1971’s The Message, with the great Adalberto Santiago on vocals.
The ‘70s was a decade of supernatural creation, and Barretto consistently updated and reinvented the sound of his band. His releases from the era vary from the sophisticated arrangements of Indestructible — he enlisted a new lineup after most of his musicians jumped ship to found competing orchestra Típica 73 — to the experimental jazz-rock of The Other Road and the full bloom of Barretto, with a young Rubén Blades as guest sonero. He returned to Latin jazz at the tail end of his career, but his salsa albums have an intense, timeless quality to them. The conga master died in 2006, at the age of 76.
Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe: When Fania released El Malo in 1967, trombonist and songwriter Willie Colón and his musical partner, Puerto Rican vocalist Héctor Lavoe, were perceived with distrust by some members of the old guard. It didn’t help that they portrayed themselves as streetwise gangsters on their hilarious album covers. Willie and Héctor brought salsa closer to rock’n’roll with a larger-than-life mystique and an edgy sound that brimmed with electric energy on early ‘70s hits like “Che Che Colé,” “Calle Luna, Calle Sol” and the Panamanian bounce of “La Murga.”
Incredibly, their prolific output during the first half of the decade was only the beginning. Lavoe launched a meteoric solo career in 1975, with Colón initially staying on as a producer. Colón branched out into Brazilian grooves, symphonic textures and all kinds of ambitious fusions during a solo career that continues to this day. Overcome by his drug problems, Lavoe — known as el cantante de los cantantes; the singer of all singers — died in 1993. He was only 46.
Rubén Blades: A young, sociopolitically minded tropical troubadour, Rubén Blades had released his salsa debut in 1970 before returning to his native Panama in order to finish his degree in law. In 1974, he moved to New York and got a job at the Fania mailroom. Soon, he got many of the label’s stars interested in his compositions, while also moonlighting as the singer with Ray Barretto.
Sponsored by Willie Colón, Blades released the luminous Metiendo Mano! in 1977 — the warmth and sincerity of his voice framed exquisitely by Colón’s trademark wall of trombones. Their next effort, 1978’s Siembra, combined salsa hymns as sweet as a ripe guava with existential lyrics that decried materialism and celebrated the future of Latin America as a land of unity and freedom. An outspoken communicator, Blades tired quickly of Fania’s then questionable accounting practices, and the relationship soured beyond repair. He continues making ambitious albums to this day — but his Fania output signaled a pinnacle of energy and inspiration.
Cheo Feliciano: Born in Puerto Rico, Feliciano became an early salsa star as a vocalist with the Joe Cuba Sextet in New York — a band that replaced the tropical combo’s customary brass section with the silky sound of vibes. Feliciano’s richly expressive, soulful baritone shone on early hits like the self-penned “El Ratón” — delighting audiences with its interpret-as-you-wish lyrical metaphors.
Sudden success led Feliciano into a heroin addiction that he decided to escape by going cold turkey and retreating to a Puerto Rico clinic. He emerged sober, and engineered one of the most epic comebacks in the history of Latin music with the classic 1971 LP Cheo — boosted by the stellar compositions by the island’s resident genius Tite Curet Alonso. Throughout the ‘70s, Feliciano alternated between tightly woven dance gems and a weakness for embellishing sentimental baladas with delicate Afro-Caribbean arrangements. Feliciano died in a car accident in 2014. He was 78.
Fania’s Genre Releases
The music that we know as salsa is based on Cuban dance formats such as the son montuno, the guaguancó variant of traditional rumba, the mambo and cha-cha-chá — with the addition of Puerto Rican folk styles like bomba, danza and plena. But salsa acts also as an umbrella term that can incorporate other tropical genres.
Salsa: In the 1970s, Fania albums settled on a trusted format that included mostly salsa cuts, adding a couple of sumptuous boleros to the mix in order to create a welcome feeling of tension and release. It also became customary to refresh the repertoire with occasional forays into foreign styles — a Dominican merengue, a Brazilian bossa nova, even Colombian cumbias.
Boogaloo: During the late ‘60s, when the Beatles and psychedelia cast a transformative shadow on global pop, the Latin soul and boogaloo offshoots became insanely popular with their bilingual lyrics and zesty fusion of tropical beats and R&B. Most salseros succumbed to the trend (even Puerto Rico’s venerable El Gran Combo released a number of excellent boogaloo records) in their attempt to compete with the movement’s godfathers: the Joe Cuba Sextet, Johnny Colón, and Afro-Filipino bandleader Joe Bataan. Interestingly, Eddie Palmieri’s foray into boogaloo — 1968’s swanky Champagne with Cheo Feliciano and Ismael Quintana on vocals joined by Cuban master Cachao on upright bass — is arguably the genre’s brightest moment.
Early Latin alternative/salsa sinfónica: Mirroring the apex of progressive rock in England and the U.S., the mid to late ‘70s saw Fania artists daring to record longer songs, and incorporating symphonic textures into their music. And just like the lofty ideals of prog came to a screeching halt with the punk revolution, the salsa romántica sound of the ‘80s ended the reign of the status quo. The classic sound was revived again in the ‘90s, defined as salsa dura (“hard salsa”) to distinguish it from the pop-friendly salsa romántica.
Essential Albums From Fania
**For a comprehensive overview spanning the entire career of the man who started it all — Johnny Pacheco — try the 2006 anthology El Maestro. A double-disc compiled with the guidance of Pacheco himself, it begins with the wide-eyed joy of his pre-Fania recordings and traces his evolution from traditional Cuban charanga (flute and violins) to the rootsy trumpet-heavy conjunto. It also highlights his collaborations with Celia Cruz, Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez and other singing stars.**
