Over the last year, salsa music has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance — thanks in part to the success of Bad Bunny’s universally acclaimed album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which featured the salsa fusion hits “Baile Inolvidable” and “Nuevayol.”
The latter of those two tracks served as a nod to the original hub of the salsa genre in the mainland U.S. Debuting on May 26, a new Futuro Media podcast series titled “Our Thing: The Birth of Salsa in Nueva York,” will chronicle how the musical styling moved from the Caribbean to the Big Apple and took on a distinctive shape and sound.
The program kicks off at the rise of Fania Records — known as the Motown of salsa — in 1964 and how it turned into the music label that signed legendary artists such as Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Héctor LaVoe, Rubén Blades, Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri.
Narrated by prominent Nuyorican actor/dancer Rosie Perez, the series will also delve into the socio-cultural aspects of the genre’s surge in New York and promises rare interviews with some of the surviving initiators of the movement. Additionally, the show will connect the past to the present and show how the genre made the meteoric rise to the Super Bowl stage with Bad Bunny and dominated the charts with popular contemporary acts such as Karol G, Rauw Alejandro and Nathy Peluso.
This podcast comes five years after Futuro Studios partnered with Spotify to produce “Loud: The History of Reggaeton,” which charted the journey of the amalgamation of musical influences that came to inform reggaeton in a direct line from Jamaica to Panama to New York to Puerto Rico, where it boomed, and then to Colombia and the world. The series was narrated by reggaeton trailblazer Ivy Queen.
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