It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Johnny Pacheco’s impact on the world was as much on politics and society as it was on music, for this flautist, percussionist, bandleader, arranger and music entrepreneur was a nation builder.
When a Venezuelan bonds with someone from Colombia, Peru or even Chile, it is more likely to be over a song that Johnny Pacheco arranged, sung by Hector Lavoe, Cheo Feliciano, Celia Cruz or Ruben Blades, than any politician or cultural idol. From the offices of Fania Records, which he co-founded in 1964, Pacheco drew on Afro-Caribbean inspiration to produce music and sell it to the world as ‘salsa’. That thing called after a hot sauce, but revealing great music, brought Latinos together wherever they were, giving birth to the ‘Latin nation’.
Juan Azarías Pacheco Knipping was born on March 25, 1935, in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the Dominican Republic. His father, Rafael Azarias Pacheco, was a renowned bandleader and clarinetist. His mother, Octavia Knipping Rochet, was the granddaughter of a French colonist and the great-granddaughter of a German merchant who had married a Dominican woman born to Spanish colonists.
The family moved to New York when Johnny was 11, where he got into the prestigious Juilliard School of Music and started his first band Pacheco y Su Charanga, in 1960. Their first album sold more than 100,000 copies in the first year, becoming one the best-selling Latin albums of its time, and made pachanga into the new dance craze.
After meeting Jerry Masucci, his attorney and business brain, the unlikely couple started a music label out of the boot of their cars. Signing young immigrant talent from Latin America, they took their afro-Caribbean music to the world and called it salsa. The name itself became an important part of the marketing of a new genre.
By the 1970s, Fania Records was the undisputed powerhouse in Latin music. As a songwriter, arranger, Pacheco created and led the Fania All Stars, salsa’s first supergroup. Through touring these fabulous artists from all parts of the Spanish Caribbean took salsa not just to Latinos in the US, but to Latin America and across the world.
Guided by Pacheco, the artists built a new sound based on traditional clave rhythms and son Cubano, but faster and more aggressive. Many of the lyrics — about racism, cultural pride and the tumultuous politics of the era — made it distinct from the pastoral and romantic scenes in traditional Cuban songs.
In the early 1970s, Pacheco's partnership with Celia Cruz, helped propel the Cuban vocalist to Queen of Salsa. Their first album, “Celia & Johnny,” and its first track, “Quimbara,” went gold, thanks to Celia’s vocal prowess and Pacheco’s big-band direction. The two released more than 10 albums together; Pacheco was a producer on her last solo recording, “La Negra Tiene Tumbao,” which won the Grammy for best salsa album in 2002.
On the evening of 26 August 1971, on the cramped stage of the Cheetah – a glitzy discotheque on Broadway and 53rd in Manhattan decorated in aluminium, black velvet and thousands of multicoloured lightbulbs – gathered some of the finest Latin musicians of their era.
The night showcased Pacheco's sound, heavy on the brass and the percussion, and drawing deeply upon Afro-Caribbean - Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican - roots son montuna, guaracha, bomba and la plena, rather than the previously unabashedly Americanised booglaoo.
Two years from now, these Fania All-Stars would headline a sold-out show at Yankee Stadium before more than 45,000 fans. Tonight, Cheetah, they had to settle for merely packing this 2,000-capacity club. But the evening will become an important triumph for Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, who conceived this gathering of Latin luminaries as a showcase for their record label, and hired photographer Leon Gast to film the show for a documentary about the scene the label was a part of.
The most electrifying moment of Our Latin Thing is the epic Quítate Tú, with the Fania All-Stars vying to best each other. Over this simmering 17-minute salsa jam, the finest vocalists the genre ever knew took turns to improvise their verses, celebrating their Fania brethren, their Puerto Rican birthplaces and their ritmo moruno, competing like brothers.
The music was remarkable; and Johnny Pacheco at the centre of it all.
Two years later, in 1973, Pacheco organised what was to go down in history as Salsa’s most iconic moments, with a volcanic sold-out show at Yankee Stadium, where the Fania All Stars brought 45,000 fans to a musical frenzy, led by Pacheco, his rhinestone-encrusted white shirt soaked in sweat. The concert cemented the band’s (and his) legendary status. The Live album, released two years later, earned the Fania All Stars their first Grammy nomination for best Latin recording.
In 1974, the Fania All-Stars performed in Zaire, Africa, at the 80,000-seat Stade du 20 mai in Kinshasa, held in conjunction with famous “The Rumble In The Jungle” fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali (spot Johnny here below in the checkered shirt).
Moments like these helped Latin music became homegrown American music, as much a part of it’s indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop.
Over the years, Pacheco produced for several artists and performed all over the world, and he contributed to movie soundtracks, including one for “The Mambo Kings,” a 1992 film based on based on Oscar Hijuelos’s novel “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” For the Jonathan Demme movie “Something Wild,” he teamed up with David Byrne, leader of the Talking Heads, one of his many eclectic partnerships.
Winner of numerous awards and honours both in the Dominican Republic and the United States, Pacheco was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1998. He wrote more than 150 songs, many of them now classics.
