Derrick Bryson Taylor and Adam Bernstein (The New York Times) report on the death of legendary musician Willie Colón, who passed away today (February 21, 2026). Read the full article at The New York Times. Also see Ed Morales’s tribute through music: “Willie Colón: 14 Essential Songs and Albums.”
Willie Colón, a trombonist, singer, bandleader, composer and producer whose driving musical energy and mischievous bad-boy image — he was long promoted as “El Malo” — helped make him a luminary of New York salsa music, and whose 1978 collaboration with Rubén Blades, “Siembra,” became one of the top-selling salsa albums of all time, died on Saturday. He was 75. [. . .]
Raised in the South Bronx by his Puerto Rican grandmother, who encouraged his early interest in music, Mr. Colón showed virtuosic ability on the trombone and was working professionally by his early teens. He arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, at the vanguard of rapidly changing musical tastes among the young in a politically charged era.
The big band-influenced sounds and cha-cha rhythms of the 1940s and 1950s that had defined a great deal of Latin music were coming under the influence of American pop, funk and rock. That blend, which included elements of R&B and jazz as well as Caribbean dance rhythms, became synonymous with the emerging salsa sound.
[. . .] His first album, “El Malo” (1967), recorded when he was 17, featured him in tandem with the glistening vocal power of the Puerto Rican-born singer Héctor Lavoe, and propelled a career spanning nearly six decades. [. . .]
The music itself was a glorious hodgepodge of sound and story, featuring characters like “Vicente el carterista” (Vicente the purse snatcher), as Mr. Lavoe showed off a dazzling improvisational skill on tongue-twisting lyrics, and Mr. Colón brought a thrilling brassy pulse with his trombone-heavy arrangements.
The relationship with Mr. Lavoe, who developed a drug addiction, deteriorated, and Mr. Colón found other fruitful musical partnerships, including with his mentor, the singer Mon Rivera, on such irresistible dance songs as “Tinguilikitín,” and, most especially, with Blades, the Panamanian-born singer and songwriter.
Their release, “Siembra” (which can mean sowing or planting), was widely considered a genre landmark, with a frisson of barrio-centric political consciousness. Wildly ambitious thematically and lyrically, it even paid homage to German expressionist-era cabaret like “The Threepenny Opera” with “Pedro Navaja.” That song, modeled on “Mack the Knife,” detailed the unraveling of a East Harlem criminal after he commits a murder.
Mr. Colón, who also recorded with Celia Cruz and Tito Puente, among others, received the Latin Recording Academy’s award for lifetime achievement in 2004. In 2015, Billboard magazine named him one of the 30 most influential Latin artists of all time, and younger musicians such as Rauw Alejandro and Daddy Yankee expressed their admiration for him.
William Anthony Colón Román was born on April 28, 1950, in the South Bronx. He said his grandmother, who worked in a sweatshop, raised him because his father was repeatedly in jail and his mother was 16.
Mr. Colón’s foray into music began when his grandmother, who introduced him to the music of her homeland, bought him a trumpet for his 11th birthday. A neighbor and professional musician taught him to play the instrument and to read music. “I would practice all day, which would drive everybody crazy,” he told The Herald.
Three years later, he had swapped his trumpet for a valve trombone — he loved its “roar,” he said — and began playing weddings and other events with his own bands. At 16, he started shadowing Mon Rivera in nightclubs.
[. . .] After “Siembra,” Mr. Colón and Mr. Blades partnered on acclaimed albums like “Canciones del Solar de los Aburridos” (1981) — which featured the hit singles “Tiburon” and “Ligia Elena” — but they fell into an acrimonious dispute over money that lasted years and severed the relationship. [. . .]
In later years, Mr. Colón embraced reggaeton for its streetwise bluster and energy, and he dismissed peers who criticized its violent and vulgar lyrics. Reggaeton, he told The Herald in 2006, “came in under the radar because it came from the streets,” adding, “I identify a lot with it.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/arts/music/willie-colon-dead.html
Also see Ed Morales’s “Willie Colón: 14 Essential Songs and Albums” at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/arts/music/willie-colon-songs.html and Leila Cobo’s “Willie Colón, Towering Giant of Salsa, Dead at 75” athttps://www.billboard.com/music/latin/willie-colon-dead-salsa-1236184449/
[Photo above by Chad Batka for The New York Times: Willie Colón onstage in 2009. The songwriter and bandleader, who died at 75, was a giant on Fania Records and beyond.]
Derrick Bryson Taylor and Adam Bernstein (The New York Times) report on the death of legendary musician Willie Colón, who passed away today (February 21, 2026). Read the full article at The New York Times. Also see Ed Morales’s tribute through music: “Willie Colón: 14 Essential Songs and Albums.” Willie Colón, a trombonist, singer, bandleader, composer