# Celia Cruz: The voice of experience: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/09/19/celia-cruz-the-voice-of-experience-videos-photos/
- Published: 2019-09-19T22:49:22+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The last time I saw Celia Cruz perform was in Central Park in 2002, one of her
final shows, when SummerStage was less managed and thus more exciting. Cruz would
often save her signature “Bemba Colora” as the encore an audience had to deserve.**

Over time it became a relied-upon catharsis for her public to recognize their ancient
past and to air their damaged present. On that late afternoon descended an out-of-
nowhere, fire-and-brimstone summer thunderstorm. The mighty Celia, at 76 years old
and not feeling at all well, refused to waver. She battled out hail, wiring, metallic
stagecraft and every possible scenario considered dangerous, and kept singing. It
was celestial conjure. The weather wanted to meet her, match her, counterpoint her
song. We remained because she remained. We kept dancing while she threw lightning
bolts back at the sky.

There is an official recording of the performance where we can’t hear all these 
elements. How wonderful to imagine — or better yet, _assume _— that on any recording
there is all kinds of stormy material that might escape the ear. To write about 
women musicians is to dive into the recorded surface while fighting the demand to
reveal everything about them in the time and space allotted. Celia Cruz, famously
private, has left behind all the biographical data she wanted to tell. Books and
essays have been written. Inaccuracies abound. Given the difficult geopolitical 
contours to her history, many have made an impossible mission to get her record 
straight. Her dance between the various positions she chose and was forced to embody
are made too big a distraction from her hard work in the studio, cabaret, stadium.
The work now and going forward is to listen hard to what Celia Cruz didn’t, or couldn’t
tell us outright, but had been singing all along. What was there and what remains
all contribute to the truism that it is impossible to write about Cruz without some
recourse to the divine.

I have a kaleidoscopic memory, formed over many years, of all those times and places
I got to be at the foot of some stage and very close to the hem of Celia Cruz’s 
garments. It was at her feet that so many of us began and begin again to hear her.
Her iconic accessories were instructive props, as dazzling as they were comforting.
There are worlds of learning in the curved plastic heels of her platform shoes, 
and her sequined seams held so much life in every performance. Cruz made radiance
move in all directions, oftentimes in perfect opposition: brimming upwards while
getting down. Celia the rumbera, shifting the soil of the earth, who used the smile
and nod as cues for her band and for us, showed what it was like to make difficult
aesthetic choices while giving the order, “¡pa’ gozar!” Gozar is to enjoy something
in a deep-down way, to have a meaty kind of fun, and was one of Cruz’s great keywords.
Now more than ever, Cruz reminds that we must keep gozar in rotation to interrupt
the contemporary ubiquity of menear, which suggests a dancing woman as vacant, wiggling
accessory rather than central musical function.

For the sheer magnitude and span of her career, Celia Cruz is an active lesson in
the long view. For many girls, to be able to grow up with Cruz is much more than
celebrating a singular case of a woman who made it. In life and afterlife Celia 
tells them that they can get old, and that with the getting old there’s a getting
better. Her heroic discipline for staying around, active, prescient, meant all manner
of experiences were lived while listening to her, with her, as her. For the girls-
at-heart made to take up the matriarchal helm too early, the memory of Celia and
her music are both examples and symbols that the elders remain fast and strong.

And yet for all her beautiful extension, part of the bungled narrative of Cruz’s
career is the great cleave that tragically divides her Cuba work from her U.S.-based
work. The year is given as 1960 when she left the island. The division for Cruz 
and so many others was tragic but not a terminus. Writings about Celia can’t seem
to handle these two halves, or use some version of “spatial constraints,” to deaden
the complexity of a fragmented life. The unfair overlay of her musical career with
oppressive wet blankets of Cold War positions has too often left her exquisite musicianship
underexamined and untheorized. (And anyways, her choice to reside in New Jersey,
and not Miami or New York, has always been a kind of tell.) Nor can any of this 
narrative traffic ever quite handle how Cuba has long resided, especially musically,
inside the U.S., continually and regardless. A musician’s clock should not and cannot
be reset upon their arrival to the U.S. To the larger record of women who impact
American music, it is not solely a matter of inclusion of the elsewhere born, but
to render the U.S. as a middle, or even penultimate stop, to a full musical itinerary.

Let’s go to the Cruzian school, to “la vieja guardia” (the old guard) as she used
to say right before tucking a classic Cuban recording into her live sets. I turn,
on her cue, to the old guard because there is too quick a jump made to Celia, without
antecedent, Queen of Salsa. The definition of Salsa — whether made in beloved and/
or hostile company — can shift depending on time, location, who’s around. It is 
nevertheless, at its historic core, an entrepreneurial plot that did much to erase
the generic complexity of Latinate musics in New York and elsewhere. It instituted
a very select personnel of whom Cruz was virtually the only woman let in by its 
young producers. With a selection from her vieja guardia, we get to hear what she
brought with her — and other stormy material that no one could make up or anticipate—
to make the ’70s salsa heyday swing like it did. But perhaps more importantly and
most vitally, we get to listen closely and to spend time with an earlier song over
a plentiful repertoire that reminds us that performers _come from somewhere_, and
this affirmation of engaging the past enlivens our present. I invite some homework
with one of her recordings made with the bountiful creative laboratory that trained
so many great Latina vocalists, the supergroup La Sonora Matancera. Listen to Cruz’s
take on the Dominican composer Bienvenido Fabián’s “Tuya Más Que Tuya” (Yours more
than yours), a bolero cha chá recorded in Cuba, and heavily distributed in the United
States in 1956.

YOUTUBE

She sings the following 10 lines, twice:

> Ya yo no quiero saber en la vida
>  de otras caricias que no sean las tuyas yo te
> idolatro, vida de mi vida todas las noches sueño que me arrullas cuando despierto
> me siento más tuya y te bendigo, bien de mi vida
> Qué bien se vive cuando se ama mucho
>  también se sufre, se gime y se llora pero
> no importa si hay mucho cariño cuando se tiene algún ser que se adora
> _(English translation)
>  
> I don’t want to know anything more in life
>  of caresses
> that are not yours I idolize you, life of my life Every night I dream that you
> lull me to sleep And when I wake I feel even more yours And I bless you, light
> of my life
> How good it is to live when loving so much
>  It is also to suffer, moan and weep
> But it doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of affection When you have someone that
> you adore

I’m yours, and what’s more, I’m _yours_. We are swiftly introduced to some Cuban
dexterity with the hyperbolic. The first “yours” doesn’t quite get at it. Title 
and feeling requires a double-down second “yours” to fully mark self for other. 
Being yours is made expansive, immeasurable — _and yet it all occurs in a song that
is 2 minutes and 50 seconds long_. This song reveals Cruz’s magisterial work with
the short form. The old kind of short form that held an entire world rather than
the current chop and meme. The song is shorter than some voicemails. It showcases
Cruz’s characteristic vocal determination. It is everything but tentative yet it
retains a dulcet secret.

Bolero is the exact thing needed to explain everything publicly but is meant to 
keep the voracious toggle of amorous intensity and hurt between you and you. There’s
nowhere for it to go and Cruz knows it. She compresses it all inside the song, even
in the real time of recording it for a vast public. The unashamed overamplification
of love, of giving possession of the body over to the song’s intended, and without
the voice bearing any signs of falling apart, announce the grit and guts of Cruz’s
interpretation. Listen to Cruz’s ability to stretch and bend words so that they 
make otherworldly time inside an imposed time. The upturned last vowels, her gorgeous“
r”s, the cascade downwards when talking about life’s only true worthwhile activity
in a bolero set in a danceable cha chá gives rise to midcentury after-hours as made
in Havana and Mexico City and New York. Imagine all that activity for those who 
were at the clubs, and even more importantly, for those who for various reasons 
had to stay at home.

Inside the song, it is as if Cruz, though completely unapologetic about it, knows
that the whole affair begins to be too much. And so, in a nanosecond decision, the
kind of decision that betrays hours of rehearsal, she gives over to Ezequiel “Lino”
Frías’s piano solo. Voice meets piano in perfect conversant union. And to his eternal
credit, Frías meets her there, and incidentally, he may have been one of the few
to musically _meet her there_. In Cruz we hear a preparedness and a pleasure and
an overall do-what-you-can in the cramped space that you’ve got or been given. But
for goodness sake (she always seemed to demand) make it tight and right while there!
This isn’t a voyeuristic thrill in listening, but a respect of how people make-do
in music, and a reveal into how — as Gema Corredera [once sang it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glJrO5ANSgw)—
a bolero can save your life. When the song is over, I hope you can feel (as many
of us do), that you have just had a complete experience. The twofold question that
lingers on many minds within Cruz’s audiences: How does she do it? And what ride
do we all agree to take when we listen to her?

This is just one song inside Cruz’s complete repertoire, a basket of pearls, one
pearl where we may find her complete repertoire. In “Tuya Más Que Tuya” we can hear
her preparedness for everything else to come. It is a song that reminds us that 
Celia Cruz was one person with robust histories, and through her adopted capital
locations, in New York and otherwise, she produced new sounds for and with others,
rain and shine.

Alexandra T. Vazquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies
at New York University. She is the author of _Listening in Detail: Performances 
of Cuban Music _(Duke University Press 2013, winner of the American Studies Association’s
Lora Romero Book Prize). Vazquez’s work has been featured in the journals _American
Quarterly, small axe, Social Text, women and performance, _the _Journal of Popular
Music Studies_ and in the edited volumes _Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas,
Reggaeton _and _Pop When the World Falls Apart_. She is a graduate of the New World
School of the Arts in Miami, Florida. Vazquez is currently working on two book projects:
_The Florida Room _and_ Music and Migrancy: Miami Experiments with Performance (
1965-1995)._

By the time I saw Celia Cruz in concert, she had already released more than 40 albums
over the course of a career that spanned nearly half a century and had long established
herself as the reigning Queen of Salsa. It was the spring of 1995 at the Aragon 
Ballroom in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, and the city was just beginning 
its muddy thaw.

She was 69; I was 24. One of us managed to sing and dance until the early morning
hours without a break.

I was joined that night by a handful of other 20-something-year-old friends, fellow
graduate students who hailed from far-flung points on the diasporic map. Some of
us had grown up listening to our parents play Cruz records, while others of us had
only recently come to recognize her voice as we sang along to her iconic version
of “Guantanamera” (first recorded in 1968) on the 1991 _Mambo Kings_ soundtrack.

During our time in Chicago, we’d all forged a bond through the rituals of intellectual
debate, frequent huddling on blustery elevated train platforms and, above all, regular
salsa dancing. One of us was a Puerto Rican raised in California and shaped by years
of Jesuit education who’d traveled to Cuba to cut cane during the Special Period;
another was a Chilean _conguero _whose family was forced to leave Santiago after
Pinochet’s coup in 1973 and who grew up in Indiana. One of us was a Hampton-educated
black American military brat born on Guantanamo Bay Naval Base when her father was
stationed there in the early ’70s; and then there was me, a Tejana with flimsy Spanish
who’d learned how to gallop along to a Mexican _cumbia _long before I’d ever learned
to catch the Caribbean clave beat.

Salsa, a musical genre that has long defied classification and a singular origin
story, is generally understood to have developed in the 1960s and 1970s in New York
City during a period marked by the generative contact among growing numbers of Latinx
immigrants from throughout Latin America and most especially from across the Caribbean.
Nationalist sentiments inform the longstanding debates about salsa’s origins. There
are some (like Cruz herself) who claim that salsa emerged primarily from Cuban musical
styles like _son, guaracha_ and _rumba_. Others trace its roots to the confluence
of Latin American styles like Puerto Rican _bomba_ and Colombian _cumbias _as well
as Cuban traditions. Some of us agree with all of the above; salsa scholar Frances
Aparicio defines salsa as “a conjunction of Afro-Cuban music (_el son_) and rhythms
of Puerto Rican _bombas_ and _plenas_, and of African American jazz instrumentation
and structures.”

Salsa’s Afro-diasporic rhythms keep your center of gravity low as you move across
space and its Spanish-language lyrics keep your mind moving from romantic love to
commentaries about the social and political conditions of Latinx life. Rhythmically,
lyrically and kinesthetically, salsa carries in it and urges us to move within the
traditions of survival and innovation among communities historically subjected to
plantation slavery and the forces of migration across the Americas. In other words,
salsa is quintessentially American music.

Cruz’s voice is synonymous with salsa. It is earth and star, the iron heated until
it glows and struck until it curves, a warm and deep contralto that melts the boundaries
of gender. Rich as molasses but agile as the hand wielding the knife that cuts the
cane. A voice whose sonorous tones and dexterous enunciations capture both the toils
and virtuosity of black Cuban labor and the delight in the fruit it bears.

It’s hard to overemphasize the significance of Cruz’s presence as a black woman,
of the sound of her voice resounding within and hovering above the overwhelmingly(
and indeed, at that time, exclusively) male-dominated and hyper-masculinist realm
of salsa. Sure, there was Cruz’s contemporary, La Lupe, a woefully underappreciated
and ultimately ostracized female vocalist, but the salsa industry only made room
for one woman in that era and that woman was Celia Cruz. Luckily for me, her voice
carried past that moment in time, carried within it lessons in presence and stamina.

Salsa experienced a resurgence in popularity during the 1990s due, for better or
worse, to the widespread commercialization of the genre. But even as salsa and countless
other “Latin” products were discovered and marketed as part of a larger cultural“
Latin Boom,” many of us continued to mark out a hallowed space for ourselves on 
the rapidly commodifying dancefloor. For Aparicio and for those of us who spent 
the better part of the 1990s dancing to its rhythms, salsa was in many ways “the
quintessential musical marker of _latinidad _[Latinx identification] in the United
States and in Latin America.” The salsa from this period, generally referred to 
as _salsa romántica_, is often derided for its lack of musical sophistication or
lyrical gravitas that marked salsa music of the golden era in the 1960s and 1970s.
And while this claim is not entirely wrong, it fails to account for the feminist
interventions in the genre made by salsa artists of the 1990s like La India and 
for the enduring presence and contributions of Cruz herself.

By the time my friends and I arrived at the Aragon Ballroom, we’d endured winter
by making the rounds to several of the thriving local salsa clubs or to each other’s
living rooms where we’d clear the furniture to make space for dancing. In regular
rotation that year were songs like the title track from Cruz’s 1993 album _Azucar
Negra_ and La India’s 1994 feminist salsa anthem, “Ese Hombre.” In Cruz’s song we
could hear the pronouncement of black diasporic blood memory — “mi sangre es azucar
negra” (“my blood is black sugar”) — and an insistence that salsa would carry us
through the everyday and the holy days — “soy calle y soy carnaval” (“I am the street
and the carnival”). Her song reminded us that the rhythms to which we moved were
drawn from both the source of our people’s long laboring and were, as well, its 
exalted product — “soy la caña y el café” (“I am the cane and the coffee”).

For us, Cruz’s longevity created a space for the arrival of La India, a Puerto Rican-
born, Bronx-bred _salsera _from our generation who got her start in the Latin freestyle
music scene in the mid-1980s. In La India’s song (frequently played on repeat at
home and always requested of the club’s DJ), we rejoiced in her rueful subversion
of the _romántica _trope and structure of _salsa romántica_. Her lyrics begin, “
Ese hombre que tu ves ahi / que parace tan galante” (“That man that you see over
there / who seems so gallant”), and then just as the horns blare and your body launches
into its first sequence of moves, she turns generic convention on its head with 
the chorus, “Es un gran necio / un payaso vanidoso” (“Is a great fool / a vain clown”).

Both Cruz’s and La India’s songs played on the same dance mixes that we made or 
DJ set lists that spun at the clubs during that time. For us, Cruz was not just 
an emblem of salsa’s grand past but a relevant and vibrant force that continued 
to charge its present and shape its future. She continually reinvented herself over
time while maintaining an immutable sense of her signature divinity like a classic
diva. So, sure, we flocked to her concert that spring because we wanted to be in
the presence of a living legend, to bow (and turn and glide and shuffle and spin)
before the Queen. But, mostly, as 20-something-year-olds, we came because we wanted
to dance to rhythms that resonated with our current lives. We understood that as
a true diva, Cruz was of her time and capable of transcending it. We came because
we had faith in her power to transport us along with her across this continuum.

By the time Cruz took to the Aragon Ballroom stage in her custom-made, gravity-defying
shoes and called out to us with her signature shout _— ¡Azucar! — _it was 1 a.m.
By then, I’d already broken a sweat warming up to the opening acts and had even 
taken a brief disco nap on the bench of a booth while the ice melted in my cocktail.
Cruz opened her mouth, the band lifted their horns and we came together on the dancefloor.

Some of us danced “on the 1” (_step-step-step-pause_); others “on the 2” (_pause-
step-step-step_). To those who were perhaps more sophisticated (or maybe just more
rigid) than we were at the time, what you danced on or where you took the pause 
in salsa was often regarded as a defining measure of authenticity. The pause, as
dance scholar Cindy Garcia observes, “is the most crucial component of the dance—
potentially sensual and volatile.” Maybe because we were naïve or maybe because 
we knew we’d never measure up or maybe because of our developing feminist consciousness,
we just took turns taking the lead. Whether on the one or on the two, for us, it
all added up to a sum greater than our individual parts. To learn how to salsa was
to learn about your relationship to time, about how to measure it and move to it
and dwell in its pauses.

That night at the Aragon, Cruz sang out, “La rumba me esta llamando” (“The rumba
is calling me”), the opening lyrics of her signature 1974 hit “Quimbara,” and we
answered the call. I danced to the song with my girlfriends, sharing the lead, feeling
for the pause and trying to keep up with Cruz’s vocal gymnastics and the tempo’s
wild acceleration. Salsa dancing was how we were coming to know who we were in relation
to one another as fellow black and brown women. And dancing to “Quimbara,” with 
its impossibly fast rhythms and tumbling lyrics, not only offered us a source of
deeply embodied pleasure but trained us to outmaneuver and outspeak and outrun any
foes who sought to hunt us down.

The year after her concert at the Aragon, Cruz recorded a duet with La India called“
La Voz de la Experiencia.” The song, written by La India, is at once an homage to
Cruz as _La Reina de La Salsa_ and an enactment of the crowning of La India, _La
Princesa de La Salsa_, as the successor to the throne.

![](https://i0.wp.com/mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/shared/npr/styles/placed_wide/
nprshared/201909/762288676.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

The duet moves from _batá _drumming to high brass, from secular _salsa romántica_
arrangements to invocations of the Yoruba deity, Yemaya. Throughout, the women take
turns admiring one another, and their declarations act as well as an acknowledgement
of the larger cultural and national influences each woman brings to the genre as
an Afro-Cuban and a New York City-raised Puerto Rican. Thus, both musically and 
lyrically, as Frances Aparicio has written, the song acknowledges and embodies the
diasporic range of salsa’s traditions rather than succumbing to the nationalist 
tendencies that have framed the debates about salsa’s origins. It’s no surprise 
to me that it took two women singing together in a predominantly masculine genre
for this to happen.

On the surface, the duet is framed as a lesson in diva mentorship with La India 
seeking counsel and Cruz, as the anointed “voice of experience,” imparting her wisdom
about how to make it as a woman in the business: “Con profesionalismo, creyendo 
en uno mismo / Se siempre original, nunca vayas a cambiar / Tienes que estar en 
control / Ten control control”(“With professionalism, believing in yourself / Always
be original, never change / You’ve got to be in control / Have control, control”).
Admittedly, the advice is, at best, aphoristic. But for me, that’s not where the
song’s power lies. What continues to inspire me even after all these years is the
sound of two women unabashedly worshiping one another in a highly exclusionary space
that would otherwise have them competing for the one token “girl” spotlight.

It’s a song they sang together live on a number of occasions, most notably, perhaps,
during Cruz’s televised concert for PBS, _Celia Cruz and Friends: A Night of Salsa_,
that took place in Hartford, Conn. on May 12, 1999. By the time La India joins Cruz
onstage that night for their duet, the audience is already dancing in the crowded
aisles and Cruz has changed her costume from a rumba-style ruffled polka-dotted 
dress to a dazzlingly sequined floor-length outfit (with matching headpiece, of 
course) composed of multi-colored, diamond-shaped geometric prints.

Watching the footage of it now, exactly twice the age I was when I first saw Cruz
at the Aragon, what I find moving is how the duet showcases two women of some experience—
neither of whom what anyone would call thin or young or fair-skinned — publicly 
performing their mutual adoration and encouraging each other’s virtuosic capacities,
their voices barreling across time and space, their bodies catching the clave as
they dance _cucaracha_ side steps in sync with one another. Knowing who they are
in relation to one another as fellow black and brown women.

By the time I write this, it’s the last days of a summer marred by the targeted 
massacre of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in El Paso, migrant refugees dying in
detention along the border, continued governmental disregard of recovery efforts
in Puerto Rico and ICE raids targeting undocumented workers in the Midwest, and 
I’m not much in the mood to talk about singing and dancing. But then, hasn’t salsa
always ever been in some ways about the struggles embedded in and transformed through
its lyrics and rhythms? Isn’t Cruz’s voice made of the soil on which we’ve toiled,
the earth and the harvest our people have culled from it? ¡Azucar!

At the end of the performance of their duet in 1999, La India falls to her knees
at Cruz’s feet in a grand diva successor act of worship. Cruz immediately responds
matter-of-factly with the command, “¡Levantate! ¡Levantate!” Get up, she instructs.
It’s time to get to our feet. Time to rise. There’s work to be done. New movements
to learn and to join. _Tienes que estar en control. Ten control control._

Deborah Paredez is a poet and performance scholar and the author of _Selenidad: 
Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory_. She is co-founder of CantoMundo,
a national organization for Latinx poets, and a professor of creative writing and
ethnic studies at Columbia University. She’s currently at work on a book about divas.

![Celia Cruz performs in New York in 1995. That same year, Deborah Paredez saw her
at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom. "Cruz opened her mouth, the band lifted their horns
and we came together on the dancefloor," she says.](https://i0.wp.com/mediad.publicbroadcasting.
net/p/shared/npr/styles/placed_wide/nprshared/201909/761243477.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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