Willie Colón, the iconic trombonist, arranger, bandleader and producer who was one of the architects of salsa, a leader of the genre and one of its most towering names, died Saturday (Feb. 21). He was 75 years old.
His death was confirmed in a Facebook post by his longtime manager, Pietro Carlos. “Willie didn’t just change salsa,” wrote Carlos. “He expanded it, politicized it, clothed it in urban chronicles and took it to stages where it hadn’t been before. His trombone was the voice of the people.”
The eulogy is not an exaggeration. A massively talented musician, Colón rose from a tough upbringing in the South Bronx to become not just a masterful performer, but a visionary musician who took the music of his Puerto Rican parents and understood precisely how to blend it with the New York jazz and funk scene. There is perhaps no other musician from the fabled Fania empire who so epitomized the salsa sound that propelled Latin music in the ’70s and who so defined it as a quadruple threat. Colón was not, by his own admission, a brilliant singer, but he wrote his songs, he arranged them, he produced them and he played his trombone like no one else in Latin music.
Signed to Fania when he was only 15 years old, his possibilities were quickly discerned by label founders Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, who put him to work producing his own albums as well as those of others.
Colón’s very long list of genre-defining hits includes his seminal “Ché Ché Colé” and “Aguanile,” recorded with Héctor Lavoe on vocals; the album Celia and Willie alongside Celia Cruz; and of course, the ground-breaking Siembra, the 1978 album he recorded with Ruben Blades, which includes the hit “Pedro Navaja” and which still is the biggest-selling salsa album of all time.
Indeed, it was Colón who introduced Blades to the world in 1977’s Metiendo Mano, an album whose cover is a photo of Colón, dressed as a boxing trainer and holding high Blades’ hand. Produced by Colón and Jerry Masucci, it was the first of five collaborative albums by Colón and Blades (the two would eventually split up and sue each other, but had recently reconciliated), and its opening song, “Pablo Pueblo,” marked the beginning of what would be known as more socially conscious salsa, whose message and intent went beyond merely dancing.
Colón’s colorful life, always anchored by his beloved New York, included often-polemic stints in politics, art and film. But to him, everything stemmed from his origins and the music.
“I came from a really tough neighborhood,” he told Billboard during an interview several years ago, explaining why so many of his album covers and titles depicted tough-guy images. “And my father spent time in jail. Almost everybody went to jail. A lot of people were getting home from the Korea war and Vietnam; there was rampant drug use in the streets. So this was kind of a way of symbolically showing the world what was going on. Since my father was arrested, my friends were arrested, there was a lot of interaction between us and the police. I was able to be a badass gangster and not do it for real. And since that was part of what was going on, it made my music relevant.”
William Anthony Colón Román was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents and gravitated to music early on after his grandmother gave him a trumpet when he was 11 years old.
“I studied music in junior high school; I didn’t go to any conservatory or anything,” he told me. “I met an African-American trumpeter in my block who heard me playing, and came and knocked and became my mentor. He taught me how to read music. I looked forward to rehearsing with him. And as soon as I learned how to play a couple of songs, I got a couple of kids together and we used to play and pass the hat around.”
By the time Colón was 15 years old, he had his own band and was playing the teen circuit, entourage and all. Eventually, he started recording on his own and shopping for a record label.
“And Herb Greenbaum — who was the engineer of most of the early Fania records — said: ‘Do you mind if I play it for Jerry Masucci?’ Jerry listened to an instrumental track called Jazzy, and I took my business representative, who was my mother — a high school graduate — and they signed us for $500.”
Johnny Pacheco, assigned to be Colón’s producer, suggested a different singer, Héctor Lavoe. “Jerry [Masucci] convinced us, and it was a great combination,” said Colón.
Colón would transcend the Fania days, recording more than 40 studio albums in his lifetime, and his music would cross generations. Rauw Alejandro’s acclaimed 2024 album Cosa Nuestra, for example, is directly inspired in concept and title by Colón’s 1970 album of the same name, whose cover shows him in gangster mode holding what could be a gun case next to a body alongside the East River, but is actually a trombone case.
A prolific performer, Colón toured literally up until his death.
“I only cared about the music,” he once told me.
Colón was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 2000, received a lifetime achievement award from The Latin Recording Academy in 2004, and was inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.
