Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa, dead at 79

Latin music legend Celia Cruz, the 'Queen of Salsa,' dies after battle with cancer

By David C·zares
Sun-Sentinel

After a reign of more than half a century as the undisputed Queen of Latin Music, Celia Cruz has stepped off the world's stage. Ms. Cruz, the Cuban singer who began performing in the 1949 with La Sonora Matancera in Cuba and later became an internationally known salsa star and symbol of Cuban culture, died today at her home in New Jersey with her husband of 42 years, Pedro Knight, at her side.

She was the latest in a series of legendary Latin performers to succumb in recent years, following master percussionist Tito Puente, band leader and composer Chico O'Farrill and percussionist RamÛn "Mongo" Santamaria. With them and others, she helped define Latin music for decades and influenced countless performers of various genres from around the world.

Ms. Cruz, who left Cuba in 1961, was best known as one of the leading performers of Afro-Cuban son, the danceable genre that reflects the joy and pain of everyday life and is the root of modern salsa. She had a commanding voice that summoned listeners to the dance floor, and an infectious style that kept them there, particularly when she infused numbers with her trademark phrase °Az?car! (Sugar!).

"She's one of the greatest figures in Latin music history, not just salsa," said acclaimed producer Sergio George, who collaborated with Cruz on her soon-to-be released album, Regalo del Alma (Gift From The Soul) on Sony Music. "I would say she's a icon in the music of the world as we know it in the last 100 years. She's up there in my opinion with some of the top music people in the world."

A native of Havana, Ms. Cruz studied musical theory, voice and piano at the National Music Conservatory. She later became one of the leading figures during the golden age of Afro-Cuban music of the 1940s and 1950s, and helped La Sonora Matancera become the island's most popular ensemble. While in the group she met her husband, then one of the band's two trumpeters.

Her publicist, Blanca Lasalle, described the singer as an inspiration for women who proved that a queen could rule in a business dominated by men.

"She opened so many doors for so many other people," said Lasalle, who pointed out that many in the music industry marveled at Ms. Cruz's international stature.

"There's been famous pop artists who probably have never been to the places this woman has performed in -- Helskinki and Japan," Lasalle said. "You see Japanese people singing her songs even though they don't know the language. She is very responsible for Cuban music getting the kind of attention and the recognition that Cuban music deserves. There was no one like her."

Ms. Cruz, who has recorded nearly 80 albums, suffered a stroke in December and later told People en EspaÒol in an exclusive interview that she had a brain tumor. After surgery to remove it at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, she spent most of the last few months recovering at home, but found the time and energy to record her final CD, due to be released in August.

The upcoming 12-track album, which was produced by George and Isidro Infante, is expected to include numbers from Panamanian rapper El General, Spanish singer Lolita Flores and Ashe Bahia, a Brazilian vocal and dance troupe based in Chile. A single, Rie y Llora [Laugh and Cry] already has been released.

In Miami, home of the largest Cuban community outside of Cuba, the singer's death was met with shock and dismay.

"There's going to be an emptiness for a long time when we realize that there's no more Celia Cruz," said salsa singer Willy Chirino. "She occupied such a privileged space in this industry and was such a strong figure. She will be greatly missed."

But Ms. Cruz, long a larger-than-life figure in the Cuban exile community, will be remembered for more than her music. For years, she was also known for her staunch opposition to Fidel Castro's government.

"Without question Celia Cruz was a living symbol of Cuban culture, someone who was famous before she left for freedom and someone who was famous afterwards for making Cuban music, even though she was barred from singing in her own country," said Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation. "She was the antithesis in many respects of everything that the revolution is -- from the get-go."

Ms. Cruz will be remembered, Garcia said, for "the very fact that she was black, that she left from the beginning, that that she never compromised. She kept a steady course and projected herself almost continuously with the cause for Cuban freedom."

The singer was not without her fans in Cuba, where even young fans carry copies of her latest CDs.

Ms. Cruz loved her homeland and dedicated her career to Cuba, which continued to inspire her late in life. Though she abhorred the island's Communist government, she was proud of its longstanding ability to produce world-class musicians.

"Cuba has given the world very good artists and it continues to do that," Ms. Cruz said in an interview a year and a half ago. "You can't ignore that."

Ms. Cruz never had children. She was preceded in death by a brother, B·rbaro, who remained in Cuba. Besides her husband, she is survived by two sisters, Dolores, in Cuba; and Gladys in New Jersey; and two nieces, both daughters of Gladys.

Last year, her husband and Omer Pardillo, her manager, helped her fulfill a longtime dream by creating the Celia Cruz Foundation, which plans to award scholarships to five students in New York this fall.

The singer also treasured her role as an elder stateswoman for Latin music, a role she was appointed to years ago when Puente dubbed her its queen.

Ms. Cruz, who came to the United States in 1962, was already a big star when she arrived in New York. But it was her collaboration with the late Puente, a master timbalero, which helped her achieve international fame.

"When I stopped singing he would applaud as if he were part of the audience," she said, recalling that the Puerto Rican bandleader, like other Latin Americans in the United States, helped keep Cuban music alive during a time when Cuba's musicians were isolated from American audiences.

Cuban Pete, a Puerto Rican dancer named Pedro Aguilar who was known as the King of the Latin Beat in New York then and in Miami now, said Ms. Cruz was a hit from the moment she arrived -- both for her rich, strong voice and for her ability to inspire couples on the dance floor.

"The dancers accepted her right away," he said. "She had a great voice. As soon as she hit a note, you knew it was her."

From her work with Fania Records in the salsa heyday of the 1970s, her recordings in the 1990s with RMM Records, her recent recordings and countless international tours, Cruz long served as a standard bearer for Latin music -- and an inspiration to younger performers. She also has lent her voice to the songs of Latin American composers.

For a while, however, Ms. Cruz grew disenchanted with the direction that salsa music was taking, particularly a decade or so ago, when so-called "romantic" singers infused the music with risquÈ lyrics that she dubbed "salsa porno."

"There were some daring lyrics," she said. " I didn't like them because they were anti-women. How can a man put down women? He was born of a woman. Those songs were too strong."

But as the music changed, so did Ms. Cruz. In recent years, the singer won three Latin Grammy awards for recordings that infused traditional salsa with modern touches, such as rap. She also recorded with a number of artists from other genres, among them Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso and Wyclef Jean, who included a version of the classic Cuban song Guantanamera on a recent album. She has also performed with rock groups such as Fabulosos Cadillacs and Jarabe de Palo.

"There's so few musicians that achieve the kind of status and place that she did," said Yale Evelev, president of Luaka Bop, a New York City-based record label that specializes in cutting-edge world music. "In jazz, there was Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In Latin, there's Celia Cruz."

Cruz was "head and shoulders above every other singer, rhythmically and melodically," said Evelev. "When she performed, it was like divine intervention."

Evelev's partner at Luaka Bop, musician David Byrne, was drawn to Cruz when he began exploring Latin music after he left the influential band Talking Heads, and would eventually record with her. The Byrne-Cruz duet Loco de Amor played over the opening credits of Jonathan Demme's 1986 romantic caper, Something Wild. Cruz also sang on Byrne's Latin-styling 1989 solo album, Rei Momo.

Her last two albums were largely collaborations with the 41-year-old George, who said he became hooked on the singer's music in the early 1970s.

"When I first heard her I thought who is that," George said. "The heart and soul that she put into the songs at that time was amazing."

Pop Music Writer Sean Piccoli contributed to this report.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/sfl-0716celiacruz,0,4277392.story?coll=nyc-manheadlines-manhattan

Latin music icon Celia Cruz dies

By Rose Arce
CNN
Wednesday, July 16, 2003 Posted: 6:40 PM EDT (2240 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Latin music icon Celia Cruz, the "Queen of Salsa," died Wednesday afternoon after battling cancer, her manager said.

She was believed to be 79 years old.

Friends and her manager, Omar Portillo, said she passed away quietly at 5:15 p.m.

"I am in a state of complete shock and sadness. This is the end of an era," said Aurora Flores, a former writer for Billboard magazine who studies the Latino music industry.

Known as "The Queen of Salsa," Cruz's influence went well beyond the dance floor and music studio, as her style, creativity and success established her not only as an innovative entertainer but also as an ambassador of Latino culture.

She helped reinvent the sound of modern Latin music, with its tropical background and drumbeats that set-off swift, hip-shaking, swirling and whirling dance moves for more than half a century.

While she always refused to give her age, close friends estimated Cruz was about 79 at the time of her last performance, a private gathering in March in New York, according to her publicist Blanca LaSalle.

She had often told reporters she would die on stage, screaming her trademark catcall "Azucar!" -- sugar, in Spanish -- to a loving audience. But she spent her final days at her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, trying to recover from a December surgery to remove a brain tumor.

In more than five decades of performing, during which she released more than 70 albums and appeared in 10 movies, Cruz scooped up many of music's highest accolades, including five Grammys and two Latin Grammys.

She also enjoyed major and frequent tributes from outside the music industry, including honorary doctorates from Yale University, Florida International University and Miami University; a National Medal of Arts, the United States' highest honor for an artist; and a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Streets in New York, Mexico, Costa Rica and Miami, Florida, bear her name.

Clearly, Cruz came a long way from her childhood in Havana, Cuba, when she began her musical career singing traditional Cuban music on city street corners.

On July 14, 1942, she married trumpeter, Pedro Knight, who would become a central figure in her music, inspiring numerous songs about the wonders of a happy marriage. By 1949, now a member of the band Sonora Matancera with Knight, she had become one of Cuba's brightest stars.

When Fidel Castro tightened his grip on Cuba in 1960, Cruz fled to the United States and refused to return to her homeland as long as the Communist leader remained in power.

She joined forces stateside with legendary drummer Tito Puente. Together they helped popularize Latin music for U.S. and European audiences and contributed significantly to the creation of the Latin music boom known as "salsa."

Besides her work with Puente, Cruz's collaborations with Johnny Pacheco, Willie Colon, Pete Conde, Ray Barretto, Sonora Poncena and Fania All Stars are considered Latin music classics.

Cruz remained in the spotlight until late in her life, releasing a high volume of albums and filling out a frenetic schedule of concerts, large and small. In her later years, she became a darling of radio disc jockeys at a time when Spanish-language radio stations in many major cities began beating their English-language counterparts in ratings.

And Cruz's fame cross cultural boundaries when she began teaming up with popular American talents such as Patti Labelle, David Byrne and Dionne Warwick.

In a 2002 interview, Cruz told reporters: "My life is singing. I don't plan on retiring. I plan to die on a stage. I can have a headache but when it's time to sing and I step on that stage there is no more headache."

http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/16/cruz.obit/

Posted on Wed, Jul. 16, 2003
Cuban music legend Celia Cruz dies at age 77
BY LYDIA MARTIN
lmartin@herald.com

Celia Cruz, the grande dame of Cuban music, the woman whose unmistakable voice resonated of the rhythm-rich island itself, died at 5 p.m. Wednesday in her Fort Lee, N.J., home after a battle with brain cancer.

She was 77.

To Cubans on this side of the Florida Straits, her death is much more than the silencing of one of their homeland's greatest musical figures.

Celia was the very embodiment of a fabled, nostalgia-hued Cuba, an icon in nine-inch heels and sky-high wigs whose heart always beat to the sway of those long-lost palm trees. Her death represents the shattered hopes of every abuelo and abuela who prayed they'd live long enough to see the end of Fidel Castro.

''Students often ask me what I think will happen when Castro dies,'' said Gustavo Perez-Firmat, professor of literature at Columbia University and author of several books on Cuban-American culture. ``I say that whatever happens, it will have happened too late, thinking of my father and my grandfather and the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who have died in exile. Celia Cruz is part of that generation that you sometimes see the remnants of, walking like lost souls up and down Calle Ocho.''

Celia may have stood for that steadfast Cuban exile who can't wrench the pain of a lost homeland from their heart, but she was much bigger than just Cuba.

She was one of the Latin world's truest living legends, an international star who demanded the spotlight's fickle attention for six decades, through changing epochs, vacillating musical trends -- even the reinvention of her beloved Cuban son, one of the oldest Cuban genres that is the roots of most Afro-Latin dance beats, including mambo and salsa.

A hit maker to the end, she broke all the barriers of sex-kitten-obsessed Latin pop, making it onto Top 5 radio playlists just last year with La Negra Tiene Tumbao, a sizzling tune that blends traditional tropical with hip-hop.

To watch her move on stage, arms pumping, hips swinging, shoulders shaking, doing that skippity-skippity-hop of hers -- was to fall under her spell. She transmitted the joy of conga-pounding Cuban music like nobody else. The grandparents who remembered her from way-back-when were just as stirred as the kids who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees.

''There can never be another Celia Cruz,'' said good friend Israel ''Cachao'' López, credited with creating the mambo. ``Nobody has her grace, her style, her voice. Like Beny Moré, she was born to be a legend.''

Cachao had known Celia since she first started going with her family to neighborhood dances featuring his orchestra at age 14. ``She was just a girl, with no thought of being a performer. But she loved the music. It was always in her.''

Celia grew up poor, in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suarez. She would sing her younger brothers and sisters to sleep, but when neighbors started coming around to listen to that powerful contralto, she'd shyly shut the door.

When she was a teenager, a cousin talked her into entering a radio contest. She won, and from that point on, began doing the radio circuit in Havana. But not because she was dreaming of stardom -- she was studying to be a schoolteacher.

''I really loved to sing,'' Celia told The Herald in 2000. ``But I also did it because if you won, you would get a cake, or a bag with chocolate, condensed milk, ham. We were very poor. And all of that came in very handy at home.''

As she was graduating, one of her teachers made her rethink her plan. ''You just keep singing. One day, you're going to make more money in a day than I do in a month,'' she told Celia.

In 1950, La Sonora Matancera, one of Cuba's hottest bands, lost its lead singer Mirtha Silva, who unexpectedly quit to return to her native Puerto Rico. La Sonora gave Celia a shot. But for Silva fans, the young Celia was a hard sell.

''Nobody wanted me. They would scream at me to get me offstage,'' Celia said. ``My voice was very high in those days. Mirtha had this pasty voice, very different from mine. She would come out in Bohemia magazine wrapped in just a towel. I was very serious. But La Sonora took me all over Cuba and after some time people got used to me.''

Alfredo ''Chocolate'' Armenteros, who played trumpet with La Sonora in the early 1950s and appears on one of Celia's earliest recorded hits, Burundanga, calls that a major understatement.

''She went on to be the voice of Cuba,'' Armenteros, who was also musical director of his cousin Beny Moré's band, said from his home in New York. ``Cuba has given a lot of big musical talents. But for there to be another Celia, a lot of years are going to have to pass.''

When Celia left Cuba in 1960 with La Sonora, she was one of the island's leading voices and dearest stars. La Guarachera de Cuba, she was called for popularizing a downhome Afro-Cuban genre, guaracha, all over Latin America. But once outside her homeland, she was granted a bigger title: Queen of Salsa.

With the late Tito Puente, the Puerto Rican percussionist who ushered her into New York's Latin jazz world of the 1960s, she helped establish the modern Latin sound. Celia accepted the throne with grace even though she never saw salsa as anything but a tweaked version of the son.

''Tito always said that salsa was something that you ate with chips,'' Celia said. ``To me, it's Cuban music. Except maybe the arrangements were more modern, there were a few more electronic instruments. But it's the same music that has moved me from the beginning.''

After Puente, she worked with the other salsa greats, from Johnny Pacheco to Willy Colon.

''As a musician, she had a calculator in her head. Her timing, her rhythm, her phrasing were always impeccable,'' said Pacheco, a founder of the salsa label Fania. Their 1974 collaboration, Celia Y Johnny, which featured Químbara, one of her biggest hits, quickly shot to gold.

''I remember when we were recording Eternos [1978], we had almost finished the record when an engineer stopped us and said we had to start again because the microphone was backwards,'' Pacheco said. ``But then we heard it and kept it. Even with the microphone pointing in the wrong direction, she sounded great.''

The Queen of Salsa title reflected her expanding kingdom. Puerto Ricans claimed her, Dominicans claimed her, Mexicans claimed her. Into her late 70s, she was packing houses all over Latin America and in places like Germany, Sweden, Japan, England and Morocco.

And she managed to keep her throne by sheer force of voice and an indefatigable passion for the stage. Until December, when she was forced to cancel dates to undergo surgery to remove a brain tumor, she was tirelessly touring, spending more than 11 months of the year on an airplane.

Husband Pedro Knight, a dapper, throwback gentleman who never goes anywhere without a suit coat, was always at her side. She and her cabezita de algodon, her little cottonhead, were so inseparable he even accompanied her to manicures when they were home in Fort Lee, N.J., but they never had kids.

The two met when he played trumpet and she sang for La Sonora. On July 14, they celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary. Celia was the rare celebrity who didn't throw diva tantrums, didn't whine about the work and didn't trade on anything but her talent. Old School to the end, there was an unwavering dignity to the way she lived her private life. It remained just that -- private.

So much that recently, when talk-show star Cristina Saralegui hooked up with Whoopi Goldberg to plan a film project about Celia's life, some in the film industry scratched their heads. The collective question: How do you write a compelling screenplay about somebody whose life had no apparent Tina Turner tragedy, no Behind the Music crash and burn, no tabloid-worthy scandal?

''It's a story about a rags-to-riches talent that could not be denied,'' said Marcos Avila, Saralegui's husband and a co-producer, who has written a first draft. ``She wasn't necessarily beaten or raped, but it's an amazing story of a Latin woman, a black Latin woman, who achieved greatness through a lot of hardships that she always kept to herself.''

If Celia had down days, she never let on. Those who met her were treated to a warm, joyous magic that never seemed to falter. She was, after all, the woman who spread that trademark ''Azuuuca!'' -- sugar -- throughout the world.

She may have been called queen, but she was famous for her down-to-earth charm. If you met her two or three times, you likely wound up on her greeting card list. No matter how busy her schedule, Celia took the time to write a hello from Madrid, or a Feliz Navidad from Fort Lee. It was always in her own hand. She didn't have people or computers for that.

''We would ask her to appear in concerts featuring a constellation of Latin stars,'' said Eduardo González Rubio, a longtime Cuban radio personality on WQBA. 'She arguably was the biggest star, but she was always very simple. Everybody else would fight about the lineup, `Put me first, put me last.' But Celia always said, 'Put me where ever you want.' ''

Fidel Castro was the only topic that seemed to ruffle her gentle demeanor. On April 7, 1962, her mother died in Cuba. But Celia wasn't allowed to return for the burial. The government, which saw her as a traitor, did everything in its power to erase her from the collective memory. Celia Cruz records were considered contraband. They circulated anyway, and her freshest hits were beamed from Miami radio to the island's still-fervent fans, but she was always piqued by the fact she wasn't mentioned in music books published in Cuba after the revolution.

She made more than 76 records, won two Grammys and three Latin Grammys, appeared in several films (including The Mambo Kings and The Perez Family), collected honorary degrees from Yale, the University of Miami and Florida International University, scored a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and was immortalized in wax.

But she was most proud of taking Cuban music to every corner of the world. Her biggest dream was to go back home, even if just for a last glimpse. But she refused to do it with Castro in power.

``If I wasn't allowed into Cuba to visit my mother's grave, why would I go now? I adore my country. I miss it terribly. But New Jersey is home now. It may not look like Santos Suarez. but then, Santos Suarez doesn't look like Santos Suarez. It's turned to dirt.''

The closest she ever came was a trip to the Guantanamo Naval Base in 1990, where she performed in a celebration that honored Cubans who worked on the base.

''She was crying the whole time,'' said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who traveled with her. ``She walked over to the fence that separates the base from the rest of Cuba and reached through to take soil from the Cuban side. Then something eerie happened. She was performing on this very hot, still day. But all of a sudden, the Cuban flag starts to ripple. There was no wind, and the base's flag that was a few feet away didn't move. But the Cuban flag was waving. We were all astounded.''

Celia never lived in Miami, but she treated the city like a second hometown. For more than 20 years, she was the singing, pleading force behind the annual telethon put on by the La Liga Contra El Cancer, which benefits local Hispanic cancer patients.

In the 1970s, as Cuban Miami surged, her voice echoed through el exilio. ''Yo llevo a Cuba la voz, desde esta playa lejana,'' [I send to Cuba my voice, from this distant beach] she sang in a catchy jingle for WQBA, then called La Cubanisima.

''I called her señora twice over,'' said Candido Camero a conga great who played with everybody from Arsenio Rodriguez and Machito's Afro-Cubans to Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie.

''Because she was a señora on the stage and she was a señora in life,'' Camero, 82, said from his home in New York.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/6318044.htm

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