Pachanga and Early 1960s New York

In early-1960s New York, pachanga was a partner dance and the musical style it moved to, the centerpiece of a charanga craze that filled the city's Latin dance halls. To this day a durable confusion separates charanga — the ensemble line-up of flute and violins over a piano-and-bass rhythm section, rounded out by timbales, congas, güiro, and singers — from pachanga, the contested style and dance it accompanied, a conflation that traces directly to these years.^[6] The tangle is compounded by the so-called charanga feel, variously called a 'style' or a ritmo, which has been mistaken for a genre in its own right rather than a manner of playing; accounts of the pachanga dance itself diverge, and its specifically New York origins remain under examination.^[7] The stakes ran deeper than vocabulary: around 1960, with pachanga's surge and the jam-session manner of the Alegre All-Stars, a generation of New York–raised Puerto Ricans found what one history calls its 'first native musical expression.'^[1]

That breakthrough rested on a longer arc. Latin music in New York reached back into the early twentieth century, and the decades from roughly 1930 to 1960 had been shaped first by the mambo and then by an early phase of Latin jazz.^[1] Heard against that lineage, the early 1960s marked less a clean break with the Cuban-rooted past than the moment a locally formed sensibility began to assert itself.^[1]

Beneath pachanga lay Cuban dance music — itself the centuries-long creative fusion of Spanish and African sources — carried to New York and remade by the city's charangas. A close study of Cuban flute playing opens in 1960s New York precisely to recover those ensembles, active amid the early-sixties vogue for the chachachá and the pachanga.^[3] That stretch is routinely lost in popular accounts, which jump from the 1950s mambo straight to the bugalú of the later 1960s — the style that reached a mass audience once the pachanga craze had faded and before salsa's rise — passing over the mid-century reach of the chachachá and the pachanga.^[3] The same scholarship sets the Cuban flute style within its transformation in the United States after the revolution of 1959, when players such as José Fajardo, Johnny Pacheco, Eddy Zervigón, and George Castro commanded the Palladium ballroom and other Latin venues.^[4]

Those New York charangas carried freighted questions of race, class, and identity, which later scholarship has weighed alongside the audible differences between prerevolution Cuban charangas and their 1960s New York successors.^[5] Out of that meeting of traditions writers locate a distinctive sabor, anchored at once in Cuban dance-music forms and in the performance culture of Latin New York.^[5]

The stylistic innovations set loose in these years ran on through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, gathering at last under the label 'salsa' around 1973 — a term that names both a generational sensibility and the commercial apparatus that marketed it.^[2] Seen from there, pachanga holds a transitional place: a craze of the early sixties that scholarship treats as one seedbed of the New York Latin music later diffused worldwide as a globally practiced partner dance.^[2]