Book Reviews 201

Juan Flores Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 260 pp. (Paper US$21.95)

The unexpected and tragic passing of Juan Flores, author of this remarkable cultural genealogy of the New York Latin music scene, demands that we con- tinue an open dialogue on the singular experience we call popular music in and across the Americas. Salsa Rising challenges conceptions of New York musi- cality as an isolated phenomenon and brings to center stage the experimental repertoire of music born out of interactions with such genres as charanga, pachanga, boogaloo, Latin jazz, Latin soul, and salsa. Readers of this captivat- ing book will be exposed to a contextualizing and critical discourse devoted to the living communities and, in some cases, the still living protagonists that spearheaded the salseros’ uprising during the 1970s. Flores’s critical impetus is a meticulous representation of the sixties generation in New York and these peoples’ artistic commitment to experimentation. It is by no means accidental that Flores keeps his distance from all the assorted nationalistic squabbles that occasionally fill and degrade sophisti- cated conversation on the salsa archive. He decides early on to demonstrate the complex historical resonance chamber that makes possible the collective embrace of any aesthetic. Salsa Rising perceptively avoids cultural idealization to a certain extent, and discourages starry-eyed depictions of the subjects and objects catapulted to world recognition by the Salsa Boom of the 1970s. From the foundational gatherings at the Tritons Club in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, the Alegre All Stars improvisational sessions or descargas, Eddie Palmieri’s paradigmatic creation (in close collaboration with the mythical trombonist Barry Rogers) of the mighty orchestra Eddie Palmieri y La Perfecta, Palmieri and Ray Barreto’s musical, political, and social upbring- ing and support of the Young Lords movement, Joe Battan’s Salsoul rebellion against Fania’s commercial dominance and “evil empire” fits, to the quest for freedom, in all senses of the word, by the Conjunto Libre, Flores’s book is a coherent exposé of the intersections, contradictions, and commercial uses and abuses of what can be called a “New York feel” that percolated through all these musical experiments. One of the major contributions of this book is Flores’s amazing ability to concisely bring together an impressive set of scholarly articles and news items from the period, and interweave interviews, including personal interviews with key musicians, promoters, and participants of the New York Latin scene, with precise comments and analysis of key albums and songs of the New York Latin music archive. He demonstrates that the most productive and experimental

© juan carlos quintero-herencia, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-09201048 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc license at the time of publication. Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:52:56AM via free access 202 Book Reviews salseros were those artists pushing the envelope in terms of conceptualizing their music, its avant-gardist arrangements, and the mixing up, and even aban- donment, of the Cuban son template. Moreover, Salsa Rising is a clear tribute to the artist who seems to have been Flores’s musical hero and salsa’s foremost unsung founding father: Mr. Eddie Palmieri. While Flores is clearly interested in “historically grounding” New York Latin musicality in specific community experiences (fully aware of its transnational repercussions), he reduces the political imprint of the music to an equivocal “dialectical” notion of the music’s identity, politics, and/or reception. However, is “grounding” necessarily an answer to historicism? For Flores, the political rel- evancy of popular music is always a matter of producing an aesthetic object that mirrors and promotes identification with the actual, everyday, cultural communities from which the musicians came, and where the music circulates. How can we trace different genealogies of “Latin” or Latin American music and even poetics, of possible avenues of thinking otherwise its aesthetic bodies? How can we do this while taking into account the amalgamated and problem- atical identitarian thinking embedded in the genres and its followers, while fostering the conditions of possibility for a deconstruction of such identities? My main concern with Salsa Rising lies in the way Flores’s arguments take for granted a mere communicative conception of “language.” He never stops to consider the uncertain and viscous potential that infuses any deployment of language. In this regard, Salsa Rising seems to lean on those moments when New York Latin music used or “mixed” languages in its recordings—notwith- standing the fact that salsa’s hit parade is basically a monolingual array of lyrics written and performed in Spanish. The “Spanish only” decision was not a prob- lem for the salseros, since they were not experiencing their performances as a way of restricting their aesthetic or poetics to a mere politics of identification with their immediate surroundings and peoples. This monolingual paradox exposes the artificial condition of any native language, since it demonstrates that neither Spanish nor English nor any of what Tato Laviera called mixturao can carry with it a “more authentic” access to the real or to the realities of those communities. These questions and concerns are not intended to call into question Salsa Rising’s undeniable quality. The book is sure to become an indispensable point of reference in the cultural history of salsa. Echa caldo ahí, que los garbanzos están duros, quema.

Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Maryland [email protected]

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