The band signed to Alegre Records, and their first album sold more than 100,000 copies in the first year, making it one of the best-selling Latin albums of the time, according to its official website. This started Pacheco’s career with the introduction of a new dance craze called pachanga. He became an international star, traveling the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Fania Records was born out of an unlikely partnership between Pacheco and Masucci, a former police officer who became a lawyer and fell in love with Latin music during a visit to Cuba.
Since her humble beginnings in Harlem and the Bronx – where releases were sold from the trunk of cars – Fania brought an urban sensibility to Latin music. In New York, the song was called “salsa” (in Spanish for sauce, as a spicy sauce), and the Fania label started using it as part of its marketing.
Guided by Pacheco, the artists built a new sound based on the traditional rhythms of the key and the Cuban genre son (or son Cubano), but faster and more aggressive. Many of the lyrics – about racism, cultural pride and the tumultuous politics of the time – were far removed from the pastoral and romantic scenes of traditional Cuban songs.
In that sense, salsa was “local American music, as much a part of the indigenous music landscape as jazz, rock or hip-hop,” wrote Jody Rosen in The New York Times in 2006 on the reissue of master Fania tapes – after spending years picking mold at a warehouse in Hudson, NY
Mr. Pacheco joined Ms. Cruz in the early 1970s. His first album, “Celia & Johnny”, was a potent mix of heavy salsa with infectious choruses and virtuous performances. She soon won gold, thanks to Cruz’s vocal prowess and Pacheco’s big band direction, and her first track, the lively “Quimbara”, helped boost Cruz’s career to the status of Queen of Salsa.