Fania All-Stars, New York City 1971: salsa swaggers into the mainstream

It’s the evening of 26 August 1971, and on the cramped stage of the Cheetah – a glitzy discotheque on Broadway and 53rd in Manhattan decorated in aluminium, black velvet and thousands of multicoloured lightbulbs – gather some of the finest Latin musicians of their era. Included among them are trombonist Willie Colón, conga-player Ray Barretto, pianist Larry Harlow and a murderers’ row of vocalists, featuring Cheo Feliciano, Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Miranda, Bobby Cruz, Adalberto Santiago and Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez. These are the artists who have helped coin salsa, that seamy fusion of Afro-Caribbean and South American sounds forged within the barrios of New York, with a name aficionados detest but grooves no living soul can resist.

Two years from now, these Fania All-Stars will headline a sold-out show at Yankee Stadium before more than 45,000 fans. Tonight, they have to settle for merely packing this 2,000-capacity club. But the evening will become an important triumph for Johnny Pacheco and his business partner Jerry Masucci, who conceived this festival of Latin luminaries as a showcase for their record label, Fania Records, and hired photographer Leon Gast to film the show for a documentary about the scene the label was a part of.

A flautist who’d moved to New York from the Dominican Republic as a child in the 1940s, Pacheco founded Fania in response to the boogaloo craze of the early 60s. A hybrid of Hispanic mambo and African-American R&B, boogaloo had risen from the black and Latin clubs of New York, and scored huge crossover hits in the likes of Joe Cuba’s Bang Bang and I Like It Like That by Rodríguez. But Pacheco hungered for a Latin pop more in tune with its traditions: heavier on the brass and the percussion, and drawing more deeply upon its Afro-Caribbean and Puerto Rican roots – upon son montuna, guaracha, bomba and la plena – than the unabashedly Americanised booglaoo.

Fania Records began modestly in 1964, with Pacheco and Masucci distributing vinyl to shops from the back of their car. As well as being a fine bandleader in his own right, Pacheco had a killer ear for talent, assembling a roster of New York and Puerto Rican artists who embodied his vision of a pan-Latin pop. The label was also canny at marketing, playing up the street roots of its stars (check the sleeve to Colón/Lavoe compilation Crime Pays, a Latino spin on blaxploitation chic that anticipates gangsta rap two decades early) and packaging them together for label showcases. And while the idea of filming this 1971 shindig came from Gast and Harlow, it was Pacheco and Masucci who envisioned it as a “Latin Woodstock” and saw dollar signs.

Like Wattstax – the film of the all-star 1972 soul showcase released a year later – Gast’s movie, Our Latin Thing, was heavy on local atmosphere. Depicting a rundown New York thick with grime, its latterday gentrification unimaginable, Gast communicated that salsa was the music of the people via scenes of Miranda singing with Orquesta Harlow at a bustling impromptu block-party, Barretto serving cones of freshly shaved ice to kids, and a bloody, stomach-turning cockfight down a back alley.

But nothing in the movie is as vivid as the performances Gast captured of salsa that night – or the concertgoers losing themselves to the music. All polyester, pointed collars and peacocking, packed in so tightly there’s barely room to dance, the punters had queued round the block all day to get in. Their efforts were richly rewarded. “The audience couldn’t believe it, seeing all their heroes on stage at the same time,” Harlow told the New York Times in 2011.

The most electrifying moment of Our Latin Thing is the epic Quítate Tú, with the Fania All-Stars vying to best each other. Over this simmering 17-minute salsa jam, the finest vocalists the genre ever knew take turns to improvise their verses, as was tradition, celebrating their Fania brethren, their Puerto Rican birthplaces and their ritmo moruno, competing like brothers. The music is equally remarkable, given to furious timbale, conga and bongo breakdowns, fusillades of trumpet and trombone and, on Quítate Tú, a breathtaking cuatro guitar solo by Yomo Toro that segues from near-metallic cascades of notes into a giddily ecstatic reading of Cuban folk standard Guantanamera.

Filmed on a shoe-string budget over a breakneck three days, Gast’s movie of this transcendent night spread word of Fania beyond the barrio. The All-Stars became crossover heroes, headlining stadiums, as salsa went on to conquer the globe, withstanding the insurgent forces of disco and its own filmic totem, Saturday Night Fever, which seemed to steal inspiration from Our Latin Thing’s sweaty dancefloor glamour.

Still, for all their subsequent achievements, that night at the Cheetah remains an inarguable pinnacle in the Fania story, and for salsa itself. As Larry Harlow later said: “We never played like that again.”