If you happen to’ve ever been to a salsa class, odds are you’ve heard Celia Cruz. Even when her identify is unfamiliar, as soon as heard, Cruz’s voice – by turns strident and tender however at all times brimming with ardour and a playful sassiness – is rarely forgotten. And he or she minimize an arresting sight, too, dressed resplendently in extravagant stage costumes that consisted of eye-grabbing wigs and dazzling sequined frocks that had been ablaze with riotous coloration.
Her singing profession started in Cuba after the Second World Battle however took off spectacularly in America through the 60s and 70s, when Latin salsa music grew to become one of many hottest musical currencies in New York.
From Cuba To The World
Cruz was born Úrsula Hilaria Celia De La Caridad Cruz Alfonso in Havana, Cuba on October 21, 1925. From a poor household, she started singing at an early age, initially urged by her mom to croon lullabies to place her youthful siblings to sleep at evening. Cruz then acquired extra severe about performing music and started getting into – and profitable – radio expertise reveals in Havana and performing in cabarets.
Although in her teenagers she studied to be a trainer, Cruz’s love of singing prompted her to enter Cuba’s Nationwide Conservatory Of Music. She additionally started singing with native orchestras and, in 1948, her first step on the ladder to stardom was becoming a member of a troupe of dancers and singers known as Las Mulatas De Fuego, with whom she made her first recordings. Two years later, she grew to become lead singer of a extra vital group, La Sonora Matancera, with whom she recorded a raft of albums, a lot of which had been issued by the Seeco label within the US and helped to hold Celia Cruz’s identify past her homeland.
All Hail The Queen Of Salsa
The Fidel Castro-led communist revolution in Cuba on July 15, 1960, occurred whereas Cruz was in another country, touring Mexico with La Sonora Matancera. The brand new regime didn’t look kindly on the group’s international sojourns and forbade them to return to their motherland. Now dwelling in exile, Cruz and the group traveled to the US in 1961. After a profitable first tour of America, they then carried out in Europe and Japan however, in 1965 and after 15 fruitful years with La Sonora Matancera, Cruz determined the time was proper to go solo and left. In the course of the 60s, she additionally married Pedro Knight, who would go on to be her supervisor.
By this time, the singer had taken American citizenship. She then teamed up with Cuban bandleader Tito Puente and his orchestra, recording a number of albums with him within the second half of the 60s for the rising Tico imprint, an unbiased New York label which might later turn into a part of the Fania label group. In 1966, as a 41-year-old solo artist, she recorded considered one of her signature tunes, a brassy percussion-driven dance groove known as “Bemba Colorá,” which helped cement her fame in America.
In 1973, Cruz — by this time already a giant star on this planet of Latin music — stunned her followers by altering path and transferring from conventional Cuban music kinds to a brand new hybrid known as salsa. It was a transfer prompted by Fania recording artist and pianist Larry Harlow, who was directing an Afro-Cuban model of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy (re-titled Hommy) at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Corridor.
After this era, Cruz was persuaded by Fania co-founder Jerry Masucci to affix his label’s new subsidiary imprint, Vaya Data. Over the course of the following decade, she would earn the title The Queen Of Salsa. Maybe most memorably, in 1974 she labored with Johnny Pacheco to supply an album that featured “Quimbara,” an immensely standard tune. It was throughout her tenure at Vaya that she additionally grew to become a part of Fania All-Stars, an elite Latin supergroup which was vastly profitable and took salsa to audiences throughout the globe, notably in Puerto Rico, Panama, and, in fact, New York.
Exporting Cuban Music To The World
Whereas salsa’s reputation appeared to peak within the late 70s, there was no downturn in Celia Cruz’s fortunes when the 80s arrived. That decade not solely witnessed Cruz reuniting with La Sonora Matancera for an album, it additionally discovered her making an entry in The Guinness E book Of World Data for a free outside live performance in Tenerife – at the moment the largest occasion of its type, attracting 250,000 folks. Recalling the live performance in her autobiography, she wrote: “An event like that goes to show the importance of exporting the music of my tiny homeland throughout the world.”
In 1987, Cruz acquired a star on the Hollywood Stroll Of Fame and, a yr later, New York’s then-mayor Ed Koch bestowed upon her the Mayor’s Award For Artwork And Tradition. Then, in 1989, after having acquired 19 Grammy nominations, she lastly gained her first, for the tune “Ritmo En El Corazón” (she would go on to select up six extra Grammys in her profession).
A present from the soul
The following decade was no much less exceptional. In 1990, after 30 years of exile, Cruz was lastly allowed to go to Cuba. A yr later, a avenue in Florida was named after her. Then, in 1993, on the age of 67, she made her Hollywood debut: the movie Mambo Kings was the primary of two huge mainstream motion pictures she appeared in. (She recorded a model of “Guantanamera” for the movie.) The next yr, President Invoice Clinton bestowed on her a prestigious Nationwide Medal Of Arts award. By now dubbed the “Gran Señora” of Latin music, Cruz continued to be honored in her twilight years, together with, in 1997, town of San Francisco declaring October 25 Celia Cruz Day.
And he or she nonetheless hadn’t stopped producing music. In 1998, she recorded “La Vida es un Carnaval,” and in 2001, the Cuban American singer got here out with “La Negra Tiene Tumbao,” that includes Mikey Perfecto. On July 16, 2003, Celia Cruz succumbed to most cancers on the age of 77. Half 1,000,000 folks lined as much as pay their final respects to her — first in Miami, after which in New York, the place she was buried. However this wasn’t the final the world heard of Celia Cruz; she’d been engaged on a brand new album, her seventieth, simply earlier than her loss of life. Launched as Regalo Del Alma (A Present From The Soul) three weeks after her passing, it took Cruz into the Prime 40 of the US albums chart and was acquired with each Grammy and Latin Grammy awards. After Cruz’s loss of life, Gloria Estefan hosted Azúcar, a tribute to Cruz and the mark she left on music.
Celia Cruz’s legacy
Since Cruz’s loss of life, her fame has grown. Just a few months after her passing, the Celia Cruz Bronx Excessive College Of Music opened in New York and, a yr later, a park was named after her in New Jersey. Her posthumous autobiography, Celia – Mi Vida, with a foreword by Maya Angelou, was a bestseller in 2005, whereas her life additionally grew to become the topic of two acclaimed kids’s books.
That very same yr, her profession was celebrated by an exhibition on the Nationwide Museum Of American Historical past and, in 2007, an award-winning musical about her life had a profitable off-Broadway run. She has additionally been commemorated on a US postal stamp in 2011 and had her life made right into a Colombian TV sequence. Extra not too long ago, in 2019, her music impressed a critically-lauded tribute album, Celia, by famous Benin-born musician Angelique Kidjo, who gave ten of Cruz’s signature songs an Afrobeat makeover.
Incomparable, charismatic, and glamorous, Celia Cruz was a larger-than-life determine who was a lot greater than a mere singer. A bona fide Latin cultural icon, The Queen Of Salsa left an indelible mark on the world, and her enchantment and affect transcended each musical and demographic boundaries.
