When I became a mom, my working mom friend Lynda strongly recommended to have an Amazon Prime membership. I don’t enjoy spending extra time and energy to hop multiple stores to find a “bright color T-shirt with no graphics” for my kid’s preschool activities, just to give you an example.
Anyway, Amazon Video comes with your Prime Membership and finally I decided to dig in some latin music documentaries. Well, they do remind me that Amazon Video is included in the Prime Membership, but they don’t recommend the films I would be interested. I would have watched something earlier if they would.
Yo Soy La Salsa (2014)
I picked Yo Soy La Salsa (2014) as my first film on Amazon Video because Marc Anthony is listed as a supporting actor. As his fan I had to watch this.
Pacheco created salsa music in NYC, and it spread out to the Latin world
The film was on Johnny Pacheco, the founder of Fania Records and the musician who create the genre of salsa music in New York. Marc Anthony was on this movie because Pacheco encouraged and supported him when he just started to perform salsa music. (Marc was originally doing other types of music like house music)
Johnny Pacheco’s achievement is many, but the main thing would be that he created salsa music as a genre of music in NYC, and salsa music spread throughout the latin countries and all the globe. He gathered all the talented latino musicians and performed new latin music that has tastes of jazz and other types of music. (a.k.a Fania All Stars)
Great salsa producer and director
Another achievement of his is that he directed and produced lots of great musicians including the queen of salsa Celia Cruz, Oscar D’Leon, Gilberto Santa Rosa and Marc Anthony. Also it was Pacheco who suggested Willie Colon and Hector Lavoe to collaborate, which brought them to the stardom back then.
Roots of salsa music
After the success in NY, Pacheco and his people held concerts all over the world, not only in Latin American countries but also in Japan, Europe and even in Africa. It was interesting to know about their concert in Zaire where the musicians witnessed that the roots of their music was indeed from Africa. Even the percussions they use in their music is from Africa. They clearly saw the origin of salsa music in Africa. “Don’t try to impress them”. “There is only water that separates us (Latinos and Africans)
God of Salsa: Johnny Pacheco
At his 80 years old birthday, they held a musical gathering in Santo Domingo in Dominican Republic, which is where Pacheco is from. It was cool to see how salsa stars like Santa Rosa and D’Leon love him and respect him.
He is a composer of the song Mi Gente and many more that we know, and his song will be sung by his people forever. He directed and produced 130 artists, and sold 250 albums.
This is another good film to understand how salsa music was born in the US, and it got popular in latin world and the world.
Sometime the original video was so old that the film quality wasn’t good as wished but it does show what we need to know. And this film and Latin Music USA by PBS shared some of the same old concert films, and Latin Music USA did an amazing job to make the film resolution better. Since they both share the same history of salsa music, I would love to watch the PBS documentary once again. If you are a salsa fan I would recommend to watch it especially if you have Amazon Prime 😉