WKCR announces a 24-hour birthday celebration for Celia Cruz, broadcast on FM and HD radio and online all day on Saturday, October 21. This special broadcast will preempt regularly scheduled programming, running from what would normally be Som do Brazil to Saturday Night at the Opera.
Cuban at heart, Celia Cruz is nevertheless considered among the royal parthenon of New York musical luminaries. Born in 1925, in Havana, Celia grew up steeped in popular Cuban music and later embraced the American East Coast’s robust latin scene of the sixties. Harboring both identities, her voice comfortably soars alongside the careful fusion of Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, Johnny Pacheco, among other familiar giants. Later, she would prove her musical generosity in exploring rumba, reggaeton, employing production techniques that escaped from traditional live instrumentation. Though her prestige is nearly immaculate, hearing Cruz’s trademark ¡azucar! reverberating among the Neoyorquino streets is testament to her centrality.
Grand a figure she is, Cruz’s story nevertheless harbors the definitive emotional and geographical largesse of our own beloved city-dwellers. Growing up in Havana, amongst her extended family, she saw the grit of everyday labor, its attendant hardship, along with the sublime music and celebration of the popular class. From her adolescence, her study of literature and native lyricism rendered her a formidable intellectual. Her brief involvement with socialist groups also illustrates her complex interrogation, and later abandonment, of Cuba’s incendiary politics of the mid-20th century. Nevertheless, she has remained a consistent storyteller of the African diaspora, urban class experience, and feminist struggle. As an immigrant, she continues to embody a North Star for other Latin Americans landing on the steep road to prosperity in New York City, and America at large.
This broadcast will survey works ranging Celia Cruz’s greatest hits, deep cuts, side projects, and vast repertoire of collaborations—surely to satisfy the most demanding of Cruz’s fans. Follow WKCR on Instagram (@wkcr) and Twitter (@WKCRFM) for further updates. Online listening is available 24/7 at wkcr.org via our web stream!
