The Dominican Republic-born multi-instrumentalist experimented with different Latin American music styles, although he was particularly in love with Afro-Cuban genres such as charanga and pachanga. A talented bandleader, producer and record label head, his famous Fania Records would star Celia Cruz and other salsa legends.
Pacheco, a pioneering musician who helped popularize salsa music in the US, has passed away this week, his former record label and wife, Cuqui Pacheco, have confirmed. He was 85.
The artist’s musical education began from birth. His father, Rafael, was a band leader in the Dominican Republic, and Pacheco grew up playing percussion. He developed his musical taste through shortwave radio, listened to broadcasts from Cuba and learned ‘son Cubano’ or ‘the Cuban sound’, the country’s signature genre that uses other Latin American music styles.
When he and his family moved to the Bronx in the 1940s to escape the oppressive regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo, he picked up more instruments, including the accordion, violin, flute, saxophone, and clarinet – his father’s main instrument.
Pacheco attended the Juilliard School, where he studied percussion. The breadth of his musical talent earned him guest appearances with several Latin bands in the city, until he finally led his own orchestra in the early 1960s. He named the group Pacheco Y Su Charanga, named after the Cuban ensemble, or ‘charanga’, which plays ‘danzón’, another Cuban genre inspired by European classical music.
In 1962, Pacheco hired attorney Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American former New York police officer, to handle his divorce, according to Billboard. In Masucci, a fan of the Afro-Cuban sound that helped Pacheco gain popularity in New York, he found a worthy collaborator. In 1963, the two founded a record label that would change the fact of Latin music in the US: Fania Records.
His label created salsa stars
Fania’s rise started humbly enough, with Masucci and Pacheco selling albums from their cars in Harlem, Spain, according to Billboard’s 2014 oral history of Fania Records. He aspired to talent drawn to his New York spin on Cuban and Puerto Rican genres such as merengue and mambo, and by the late 1960’s he had created a supergroup called Fania All-Stars.
Their specialty? A unique blend of Latino music styles, mostly up tempo, characterized by strong percussion and a musical ensemble that could steal the show from the singer.
The public called it ‘salsa’.
“At first we didn’t think we were anything special until everywhere we went the lines were incredible,” Pacheco told NPR in 2006. They tried to pull the shirts off our backs. It reminded me of the Beatles. “
The line-up of the Fania All-Stars has changed over time, although Cruz, beloved Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe and jazz pioneer Ray Barretto are among the best-known members. But Pacheco was his constant. He played on records with the label’s talent, produced their albums, and was their band leader at live concerts.
“I wanted to have a business that treated everyone like family, and it came true,” Pacheco told Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call in 2003. “That was my dream.”
And at the same time as Pacheco’s All Stars became mainstream, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and Latin Americans established a new identity in the US. Fania’s music inspired many Afro-Cubans and Puerto Ricans to get involved in politics, political science professor Jose Cruz told NPR in 2006.
Perhaps the best proof of the impact of salsa came in August 1973, when the Fania All-Stars performed in front of an audience of over 44,000 people at Yankee Stadium. The attendees hung Puerto Rican flags around the stadium and at one point stormed the field during a particularly compelling conga duel between Barretto and the Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria.
“Johnny Pacheco started yelling and asking people not to take the field,” said Ray Collazo, a Puerto Rican DJ who attended the historic concert, in an interview with ESPN in 2008. “But the more he said it, the more people jumped in. ‘
The concert ended shortly after the field storm, but was commemorated with a live album and a documentary.
The End of Fania Records
Fania’s success eventually waned as salsa was eclipsed by other burgeoning genres, and it stopped recording in 1979. But its success marked a shift in the American music landscape and pushed it in a more international direction.
In 1999, Pacheco and the Fania All-Stars returned to the stage, this time at Madison Square Garden. At the time, the New York Times described their style as “city music: fast, clear, and unstoppable,” punctuated by competing brass and bongos.
Pacheco was honored for his musical achievements in the 1990s, receiving the Dominican Republic’s Presidential Medal of Honor and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Governor’s Award in 1996. He was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1998.
In the early years he continued to tour with an orchestra, playing many of the same songs he wrote for his Fania performers. The “enthusiasm” drove his performances, he said.
Despite his broken relationship with Fania co-founder Masucci and early departure from the label, he told Billboard that he was still “very proud” of the work he was doing at the time.
“I put together a group that was incredible,” he told Billboard in 2014. “It’s been 50 years, and we’re still like a family.”
His Fania family remembered him on Facebook and praised Pacheco for his contributions to salsa.
“He was much more than a musician, band leader, writer, arranger and producer; he was a visionary,” the record label wrote. “His music will live on forever, and we are forever grateful that we were a part of his amazing journey.”
