ARROYO

Joe Arroyo is the champion of "son caribeño.” As a singer, composer, bandleader, producer, and arranger, he is a Colombian musical superstar. Although primarily a salsa musician, he has transcended and combined disparate Latin and Caribbean genres to fuse an eclectic 1980s hybrid of sounds, creating what is sometimes known as “Latin fusion,” or son caribeño.

Alvaro José Arroyo González was born on November 1, 1955, in Cartagena de las Indias, Colombia. “Joe” started singing in the school choir at the age of eight, and his professional career began at the age of 12, singing at a local brothel. An encounter there with his maths teacher resulted in immediate expulsion from school—but he was reinstated within a week because his outstanding voice was needed for the choir’s performance for a visiting bishop.

TEAMING UP WITH FRUKO

Throughout his teens, Arroyo continued as a vocalist in several bands, including the popular folk group Los Corraleros de Majagual. But when two Latin musicians from New York, pianist Ricardo “Richie” Ray and vocalist Bobby Cruz, performed their own brand of salsa in Colombia, Arroyo’s singing style was changed forever. His recording career as a salsa singer began in 1970, at the age of 15, with Orquesta La Protesta, and the following year Arroyo moved to Medellin joining the musical director, arranger, and bassist, Julio Ernesto Estrada (best known as “Fruko”) and his group Fruko y sus Tesos. This was the beginning of a long-standing and significant musical partnership between Arroyo and Fruko, and with Fruko y sus Tesos, Arroyo began his international career, touring major cities in Ecuador, Peru, and the U.S. In the mid-1970s, he also performed and recorded with Fruko’s other band, the salsa-and-tropical group known as the Latin Brothers, as well as with another band, Los Líderes.

In 1981, Arroyo formed his own successful band, La Verdad. “I called it La Verdad (The Truth),” he explained, “because I'd been talking about it for so long that people started saying that the orchestra was ‘la mentira’ (the lie).” La Verdad made its first album, Arroyando, in 1981, and over the next ten years, the group recorded ten LPs, with hit albums such as Rebellion, La guerra de los callados, and Fuego en mi mente. In addition, the group released another hit album En accion (1990), which Arroyo composed but credited to his mother, Angela González, so that she would receive all the royalties.

FUSING JOE’s RHYTHM WITH SON’s SOUND

These albums documented the rise of a Caribbean musical synthesis that fused traditional Latin rhythms, such as salsa, son, and Arroyo’s native cumbia, with Caribbean sounds including compas, merengue, and reggae. The new sound was son caribeño, but Arroyo dubbed his own way of playing it, “Joeson” (Joe Arroyo’s style of playing son).

In 1983, Arroyo nearly died from a drug overdose but then, after a brief respite from performing, released a joint recording with the modern salsa group Los Titanes in 1985.

By 1991, the immensely popular Arroyo had won the Congo de Oro—the Barranquilla Carnival’s top prize—13 times, prompting the judges to create the special “Super Congo” just for him in order to give other artists a chance at winning the Congo de Oro.

The 1990s saw an invasion of New York “romantic salsa,” with its simpler lyrics and arrangements, cutting into the trend toward synthesis initiated by Arroyo. Still a popular salsero and son caribeño musician, his golden era may have passed—the 1980s were the age of grandeur for his brand of Joeson—but Arroyo’s contributions to Latin music remain.

Brett Allan King