Che Che Colé

This is salsa at its most percussive and communal, a song that seems to have been invented in the moment it's being played rather than composed beforehand. Willie Colón builds the arrangement around a children's street chant — a call-and-response pattern so ancient and simple it bypasses the conscious mind entirely and goes straight to the body. The trombones are thick and brassy, stacked in that signature Colón darkness that made the Fania sound so distinctly street-level and New York. There is almost no space wasted — the rhythm is relentless, locked together like gears, the clave buried in the bones of everything. The vocals function more as percussion than melody, the lead voice taunting and playing against the chorus in the way that children argue and laugh at the same time. The piano tumbles through its montuno with a slightly mischievous feel, as if the pianist is also in on a joke the rest of the room hasn't heard yet. Culturally this is Latin New York of the late 1960s and early 70s — the South Bronx and El Barrio, the barrio reclaiming African diasporic traditions and refusing to let the American mainstream sand them down. You put this on when a party has stalled, when people are standing at the edges of the room and need something to pull them into the center. It is impossible to receive passively.