Pachanga & Boogaloo

PACHANGA

The Pachanga is a combination of merengue, montuno and mambo, with a fast, syncopated rhythm played by small musical ensembles called charangas. The expression vamos a pachangar means “let’s go party”. Arsenio Rodriguez, who brought the son montuno from the Playa de Marianao in Havana to New York in 1927, maintained that the pachanga was born in Santiago de Cuba, in a place called “El Pilòn”, and that at the beginning it was called Chivo (goat) and was a mix of son montuno and Cuban zapatèo, a folkloric dance based on the beating of the feet (which recalls flamenco and las chancletas). In Puerto Rico it was the “seis chorreao”, the fast dance of the Puerto Rican campesinos. In any case it is certain that, both as music and as a dance, it exploded in the Latin neighborhoods of New York in the early sixties before being replaced by the boogaloo.

BOOGALOO

Boogaloo: a popular New York and metropolitan dance, launched in the early ’60s by Pete Rodriguez, the author of the very famous “Micaela”. In 1967 Joe Cuba’s single “Bang Bang” managed to sell a million copies in the USA, meeting the taste of the new generations of young Americans and Latinos born in the States. Ray Barreto mixed the boogaloo and the charanga with a pleasant style. Musicians and singers of great artistic value came close to this hybrid genre with Latin roots and metropolitan arrangements at the time, giving rise to a strand characterized by a well-defined rhythmic and melodic structure. Some of today’s salseros have devoted themselves to its revival, presenting “old” and new pieces with more brilliant arrangements, especially in the horns and the keyboards, to make them more danceable in a salsa key as well.