Brooklyn Sounds, ‘Libre-Free’, and the essential defiance of Nuyorican salsa
Throughout history, so much incredible, groundbreaking art has been created through defiance and rebellion. Even the endlessly upbeat, optimistic sounds of Latin salsa music have a healthy history of defiance, particularly within the marginalised Puerto Rican community of New York City. In the wake of World War II, many Puerto Ricans travelled to the East Coast city in search of work, but their community soon became a target of prejudice and discrimination. Musical expression was among the ways in which this strong community stood against that discrimination and kept its cultural roots strong in the US mainland.
Salsa music has a long and illustrious history dating back to the traditional sounds of Cuba and Puerto Rico, blending elements of jazz, R&B, bolero, rumba, and Puerto Rican plena. Today, salsa is beloved by artists and audiences across the globe, and its distinctive rhythm regularly finds its way into mainstream and modern musical offerings. However, the origins of salsa, as we know it today, lay within the Puerto Rican community in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s – a community also referred to as the Nuyorican community.
‘Nuyorican’ was originally used as an insult, berating the Puerto Rican community in NYC. Thanks to the efforts of the community’s strong cultural scene, with artists like Miguel Algarín and the Nuyorican Poets Café leading the way, the term came to represent the vibrant beauty and artistry at the heart of New York’s Puerto Rican neighbourhoods – particularly Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This reclaiming of the Nuyorican term coincided with the rise of salsa music in the city, with groups like Brooklyn Sounds.
Formed during the 1970s, at the ground zero of New York’s rapidly developing salsa scene, Brooklyn Sounds were led by trombonist Julio Millan and featured an extensive cast of local Nuyorican musicians living in and around New York City. During their time together, the group only put out two albums and a handful of singles, but their 1972 record Libre-Free remains an essential masterpiece of salsa music.
Released by the Bronx-based Latin record label Salsa Records, the album became a definitive element of Nuyorican art and cultural expression in New York during the 1970s, even if it did not receive much attention outside of that community. As opposed to other salsa releases of the period, Brooklyn Sounds did not rely entirely on the age-old inspiration of traditional Puerto Rican music, instead perfectly blending the influences of their roots in Puerto Rico with their everyday realities of life in the ‘Big Apple’.
Because of this trailblazing blend of cultural influences, the album spoke directly to the community of second-generation Puerto Ricans in New York. These were young people who were born and raised in the city and found themselves identifying much more with the surroundings of the concrete jungle than with their parents’ homeland in Puerto Rico.
Brooklyn Sounds managed to capture the zeitgeist of this attitude, creating an almost inseparable album from New York’s streets while retaining the influence of the Caribbean island. The sounds on Libre-Free are seminal and sound unlike anything else produced at the time. Salsa might have gone on to have mainstream appeal in the following decades, but it is thanks to groundbreaking releases like that 1972 album that salsa music established itself in the first place.
Thankfully, Libre-Free has been resurrected by Vampisoul for modern audiences worldwide. The Spanish label reissued Brooklyn Sounds’ album earlier this year, reflecting its continued relevancy as a defiant moment in the history of the Nuyorican community and in the legacy of Latin music as a whole.
