Preface
My husband, to whom this book is dedicated, likes to recount an anecdote about the Brazilian crooner Miltinho, who gave a concert in Cali in 1983. The singer was much loved by local audiences for his three albums of boleros (love ballads) in Spanish, produced in the 1960s. Long retired from music and with faded, patchy memories of the boleros and scores of other tunes he recorded in his lifetime, Miltinho valiantly tried to remember the lyrics to his old hits as he sang before his expectant Caleño (Cali-based) fans. Each time he began a song, however, memory failed him, and he could not complete the tune. To his surprise, the audience—who had memorized his songs by heart from the recordings—took up where he left off and finished each song in chorus from the rafters. The old man, stunned and overwhelmed by the loving tribute of his fans, wept openly onstage.
I love this story, because it—along with many others that unfold on the pages of this book—embodies the powerful ties between musical memory and recordings in Cali. While conducting field research in this Colombian city, I often heard it said that Cali was “the city of musical memory,” and nearly everything I encountered in my study of local popular culture drew me back to this point. More familiar is Cali’s vociferous claim to be “the world capital of salsa.” Colombians are also familiar with Cali’s slogan as “heaven’s outpost”—a pleasure hub of fantasy and alegría (happiness). The first saying, however, is the most potent. To anyone fascinated by sound recordings and their capacity to generate links to new, imagined spaces—past or present—the Caleño obsession with records offers a particularly potent vein for ethnomusicological study. For instance, many Caleños assert that they are “Caribbean” despite their geographic distance from its sparkling blue waters. This cultural identification has emerged by virtue of their having embraced salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots, and Caleños proudly acknowledge the role that recordings have played in first introducing and then maintaining these sounds in local popular culture. This is an imagined space built from technological links. Having myself tumbled into an Alice’s Wonderland of sonically induced imaginary landscapes when I discovered Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall recording at the public library when I was twelve—with ensuing metamorphoses via exposure to records of different musical styles ever since—I could easily relate to such a claim. These are worlds Walter Benjamin scarcely dreamed of when describing the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936). Far from being alienated, Caleños have formed a rich and vivid musical culture based on recordings and the memories pulled out of their vinyl grooves.
In the following chapters, I explore the theoretical ramifications of the music-memory link and its conjuncture through sound recordings, unfolding my study through an ethnographic analysis of this process in one Latin American city. I was initially drawn to Cali because of stories I had heard about its being the supposed “world capital of salsa.” During pilot field-work conducted in Caracas in 1992, musicians urged me to visit Cali, especially since the Venezuelan scene had diminished greatly since the mid-1980s. “Cali is the place to be!” they exclaimed—a salsa paradise with dozens of bars and nightclubs specializing in salsa, all-salsa radio stations, and many local bands. Later, I decided to relocate my research to Cali, using Caracas as a point of comparison for my Colombian research.
I conducted fieldwork for this book from November 1994 through June 1996, with follow-up trips in January 1997, December 2000–January 2001, and September 2001. During this time I resided and worked primarily in Cali, but I also made regular trips to towns near the city and out to the Pacific coast port of Buenaventura. I traveled to the Atlantic Coast region on various occasions and had the chance to observe Barranquilla’s Carnival and Cartagena’s Festival de Música del Caribe. I also made regular visits to the capital city of Bogotá and traveled to Medellín, Quibdó, Pasto, and other towns throughout Colombia in order to round out my sense of the country and its diverse geographic, cultural, and musical landscapes. Field trips to Cuba and Ecuador provided important perspectives for considering the projection and reception of salsa in other Latin American cities, under highly diverse historical conditions. The visits to Cuba, in particular, were important for my work in Cali, since Colombians have a strong sense of Cuba as the motherland of salsa music. Colombians who had been able to save money and travel to Cuba often spoke to me with pride about their trips and about the musical wonders they had seen on these pilgrimages.
My research in Cali and other parts of Colombia included intensive documentation of musical venues and salsa performances, as well as interviews with musicians, aficionados, collectors, radio disc jockeys, record producers, dancers, club owners and journalists. I myself needed to learn much about salsa history and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots, which I compiled through investigation of books, newspapers, magazines, television archives, and conversations with writers and record collectors. I archived local newspaper and magazine articles and collected books written by Colombian