The Caleña Salsa: The City that Dances Faster than Anyone (1960–present)

What Colombia — and more specifically Cali — did with that music is one of the most fascinating cultural phenomena in Latin American musical history: they took it, dismantled it, reassembled it in their own way, and returned it to the world with a style so unique and so different from the original that today Cali is globally recognized as the World Capital of Salsa, not New York.

That did not happen by accident. It happened because Cali had exactly the necessary conditions for it to occur.

The Roots: The Caribbean Reaches the Pacific

Cali is the third largest city in Colombia and the capital of Valle del Cauca, the region south of the Coffee Axis that faces the Pacific Ocean. It is also the second city with the largest Afro-Colombian population in the country, after Cartagena. This Afro-descendant presence — with its roots in the communities of the Colombian Pacific, which have musical traditions as ancient and unique as those of the Caribbean coast — is one of the keys to understanding why salsa took root in Cali with an intensity unmatched by any other city in the world.

Since the thirties and forties, Cali was already listening to Caribbean music. Cuban son, mambo, and guaguancó records arrived at Colombian ports and traveled up the Cauca River to the Valley. The radio amplified them. The popular neighborhoods of Cali absorbed them with a voracity that chroniclers of the time described as almost religious: wherever a Cuban drum sounded, the people of Cali began to dance.

But the decisive step came in 1968, when the band of Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz — two Puerto Ricans from New York who mixed hard salsa with elements of jazz and boogaloo — visited Colombia for the first time. The concert in Cali was an event. The New York hard salsa — faster, more aggressive, more urban than the Cuban son that the people of Cali already knew — hit the popular neighborhoods with the force of something people had been waiting for without knowing it.

The people of Cali began to do something that would forever define the dance style that would distinguish them from the world: in the agüelulos — the dances for young people where no alcohol was served, organized in the popular neighborhoods of the city — they began to increase the revolutions of the records to dance them faster. They increased the speed of the Cuban son until the body had to respond with a foot speed that no other salsa school in the world developed. That seemingly simple gesture — spinning the turntable faster — was the technical origin of the Cali school: a salsa danced with the feet, not with the hips.

The Cali School: How It Is Danced Differently

The fundamental difference between Cali salsa and the salsa danced in New York, Puerto Rico, or Cuba is not musical but corporal. Cali salsa is danced with the feet. The weight of the movement is in the leg work — short, fast, syncopated steps, executed with a technical precision that requires years of practice — while the torso remains relatively still and upright. In New York salsa — which is danced on 2, with the accent on the second beat — the entire body moves, the hips mark the time, the movement is more ostentatious and more theatrical.

Speed is Cali's signature. An expert Cali dancer can execute step sequences at speeds that dancers from other schools simply cannot reach. This foot virtuosity — which in the most advanced competitions is combined with acrobatics and partner figures of impressive complexity — is what made Cali dancers the most recognized in the world and Cali the city with the most salsa dance schools per square kilometer anywhere on the planet.

Today, Cali has more than one hundred and sixty formally registered dance schools in its neighborhoods. More than eighty active orchestras. More than one hundred and fifteen salsotecas, clubs, and establishments dedicated exclusively to salsa that open every day of the week. And more than three thousand five hundred music lovers dedicated to the collection of Afro-Antillean music — probably the largest group of salsa collectors concentrated in a single city anywhere in the world.

Fruko: the architect of sound

Julio Ernesto Estrada RincónFruko — was born in Medellín in 1951. At sixteen, he was already the principal percussionist for Discos Fuentes — the most important Colombian record label of the 20th century — and at nineteen, he founded the orchestra that would bear his nickname: Fruko y sus Tesos.

Fruko was not from Cali, but he was the first Colombian musician to build an orchestra that sounded like the New York Fania but with something different: a scent of the Pacific, a way of arranging the winds that came from Colombian musical tradition and not from Cuba or Puerto Rico. His orchestra was the first school of Colombian salsa: musicians and singers who would define the genre in Colombia over the next three decades passed through it.

The most important of all was Joe Arroyo.

Joe Arroyo: the Centurion of the Night

Álvaro José Arroyo González was born in Cartagena on November 1, 1955. Since childhood, he sang in the bars of the Nariño neighborhood, at the port, with a voice that Cartagena music lovers described as something they had never heard before: a tenor timbre that seemed to contain all the rhythms of the Colombian Caribbean at the same time. By the age of eight, he was already singing in bars. At eleven, his family found him performing in an adult bar and dragged him out. He kept singing.

He arrived in Barranquilla at fourteen, sang with Sonora Juventud and with the Hermanos Ospina, and in 1971 he joined Fruko y sus Tesos — the orchestra that shaped him into a complete musician. With Fruko, he recorded the first hits that put him on the national map. "El Preso" — recorded in 1975 and still one of the three biggest songs in Colombian salsa — established his voice as the most recognizable in the genre in the country.

In 1981, he founded his own orchestra, La Verdad, and began the most creative stage of his career. In 1986, he recorded "Rebelión" — the song that made him immortal.

"Rebelión" is a unique case in the history of Colombian salsa. It is a protest song disguised as a love song: its lyrics tell the story of an African slave in colonial Cartagena in the 1600s who rebels when the Spaniard hits his wife. The chorus "No le pegue a la negra" — is at the same time a political slogan against racial and physical abuse, and an irresistible invitation to dance. Arroyo said that the song came to his head complete, all at once, like a vision. Musician Michi Sarmiento, who did the arrangements, confirms that Arroyo dictated the entire song to him in one night.

"Rebelión" is the song about slavery that half of Latin America knows by heart and dances to with joy — a paradox that says everything about the power of salsa to turn pain into movement. Joe Arroyo died in Barranquilla on July 26, 2011, at the age of fifty-five. Colombia mourned him for days.

Grupo Niche and "Cali Pachanguero": the anthem

Jairo Varela was born in Istmina, Chocó, in 1949. He was from Chocó — from the deep Colombian Pacific, not from Cali — but Cali adopted him as its own son since he founded the Grupo Niche in 1979 and gave the city the greatest gift a musician can give to a city: its anthem.

"Cali Pachanguero" — recorded in 1986 — is the song that defines Cali in the world with the same forcefulness as "New York, New York" defines New York. It is a celebration of the city, its joy, its way of living, salsa as a language and as a way of being. Music historian Petrit Baquero places it alongside "El Preso" by Fruko and "Rebelión" by Joe Arroyo as the trio of songs that form the absolute canon of Colombian salsa.

Varela had an extraordinary compositional ability and a vision of salsa that — as he himself said — did not come from the Caribbean but from the Pacific. His arrangements had a specific color, a way of treating the winds and the piano that sounded at the same time like New York salsa and like something that could only have been born in Colombia. He died in Cali on August 8, 2012, at the age of sixty-two.

The Orquesta Guayacán — also founded in the eighties by musicians who had passed through Grupo Niche — completed the trio of great Cali orchestras that defined Colombian salsa at its most creative moment.

The Cali Fair: when the whole city dances

Every year, between December 25 and 30, Cali celebrates the Cali Fair — an event that began as a bullfighting fair in 1957 and progressively became the most important salsa festival in the world. The highlight of the Fair is the Salsódromo: a parade of more than thirteen hundred dancers from the best schools in the city that goes through the historic center and gathers up to six hundred thousand people in the streets. It is the most powerful image of what Cali is: a city that, when it celebrates, dances.

In September, the World Salsa Festival is also celebrated — the most important international dance competition of the genre, where schools from Russia, Italy, Romania, the United States, and all over the world compete in the Cali style against the schools from the neighborhoods of the city that invented that style.

Andrés Caicedo: the writer who loved salsa like no one else

No story of Cali salsa is complete without mentioning Andrés Caicedo — the Cali-born writer who was born in 1951 and died at the age of twenty-five, and who in his novel ¡Que viva la música! (1977) wrote the most honest literary document about what salsa meant to the young people of Cali's popular neighborhoods in the seventies: not entertainment but identity, not fun but a reason for being. Caicedo's novel is to Cali salsa what One Hundred Years of Solitude is to vallenato: the confirmation that a music can be so great that it also needs its literature.

Caicedo committed suicide the same day he received the first copies of his novel. The phrase with which the book opens — "Listen, I'm going to tell you" — remains the best possible start for a story about salsa.

Editorial Note: The writer from Cali, Andrés Caicedo, committed suicide in 1977 at the age of twenty-five, on the same day he received the first copies of ¡Que viva la música! — his novel about salsa and the youth of Cali. It is the most honest literary document that exists about what salsa means to a city. Anyone who wants to understand why Cali is what it is musically should read that book before listening to any record.