Willie Colón dies at 75

Willie Colón, the Bronx-born trombonist, bandleader, producer and label-builder who helped turn New York’s Puerto Rican street music into the export product now marketed as “salsa,” has died at 75, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Colón’s career shows that “genre” is usually an after-the-fact filing system imposed by record companies and later by streaming platforms. In the late 1960s and 1970s, what existed was a set of musicians, clubs, radio shows, and hustlers connecting Puerto Rican and broader Caribbean sounds with New York’s immigrant neighborhoods. Colón was one of the few who could do all the jobs at once: arrange, play, lead a band, recruit singers, and make the business machinery run.

According to the LA Times, Colón broke out as a teenager on Fania Records, the independent label that effectively industrialized the scene. His early albums fused hard-edged trombone lines with percussion-heavy arrangements that leaned into barrio realism rather than polite “Latin” exotica. That edge was amplified through his partnership with singer Héctor Lavoe, whose voice and chaotic charisma became inseparable from Colón’s brassy, streetwise sound.

Colón also demonstrated that artistic control is a form of entrepreneurship. The Times notes that he expanded beyond performing into producing and developing other artists, including collaborations that pushed salsa into political storytelling and cross-market ambition—most famously with Rubén Blades. In an era before artists could upload tracks and pretend distribution was solved, Colón and his peers had to build distribution: radio relationships, touring circuits, and label leverage.

Today’s “democratized” music economy often strips out the very independence Colón fought for. Streaming services reduce recordings to metadata and playlists, while rights and revenue concentrate in platforms and intermediaries that make Fania-era record men look quaintly local. Colón’s generation had fewer tools, but they also had more room to create institutions that weren’t yet owned by a handful of global gatekeepers.

Colón’s legacy is not just a catalog of hits; it is a template for how immigrant culture becomes a durable industry when stubborn individuals treat art as both craft and infrastructure. Salsa didn’t arrive as a corporate product. It was assembled—note by note, gig by gig, contract by contract—by people like Colón who understood that a scene without ownership is just raw material for someone else’s brand.