Shake Your Body

By Michael Walsh

It's the middle of the night. While most of Miami is sleeping, Casanovas, the area's most electric disco, has just received its wake-up call. Attractive young women teeter across the dance floor in vertiginous high heels, their hourglass figures accentuated by off-the-shoulder Lycra tops and tight leather micromini-skirts. Handsome, heavily cologned men in open-neck shirts keep the ladies under close observation, hoping to spot the sideways glance and quick nod that signify a turn on the floor.

Visual signals are everything: hard-pounding loudspeakers woof and tweet to the strains of Tito Puente, Hansel y Raul and Willie Colon. The songs are mostly rhythmically irresistible salsa songs that combine the heady call-and- response of African music with the electronic surge of rock 'n' roll and the glitzy brass of a Big Band. The dancers move to the beat like a snake to the charmer's call: the hotter the tune, the cooler the step as the men expertly guide the women through the twists and curves of the mambo, the cha- cha-cha, the merengue and the rumba.

On this evening, though, the crowd has come for something special. Like middle-class Italian kids flocking to see Sinatra at Carnegie Hall, the young Cuban Americans have gathered to see the reigning Reina de la Salsa, Celia Cruz, who was entertaining their parents and their parents' parents in the smoky dens and fancy nightclubs of pre-Castro Cuba long before they were born.

With 70 albums and 40 years in the business behind her, Cruz, seventyish, handsome, dark-skinned and wearing a snug, sequined fuchsia gown, gyrates for 90 minutes to the insistent beat of her razor-sharp backup band. At the refrain of her old favorite Canto a la Habana (Song to Havana) -- "Cuba que lindos son tus paisajes" (Cuba, what beautiful vistas you have) -- the bilingual crowd goes wild, even though most of those present have never seen Cuba and have little prospect of ever doing so. "We've never had to attract these kids. They come by themselves," says Cruz. "Rock is a strong influence on them, but they still want to know about their roots. The Cuban rhythms are so contagious that they end up making room for both kinds of music in their lives."

Weaned on Anglophonic rock 'n' roll, Americans have long been resistant to foreign pop-musical imports whose accents are other than English. ABBA, the Europop megagroup of the '70s, sang in English, not Swedish; Japan's Pink Lady was a bomb in any language. But the Latin sound could be different.

The Miami Sound Machine and its spitfire lead singer, Gloria Estefan, sold 1.25 million albums containing their saucy 1985 hit, Conga, which combined American pop with salsa rhythms and established the hybrid "Miami Sound." ("C'mon-shake-your-body-baby-do-the-co nga, I-know-you- can't-control-yourself-any-longer.") The song hit the Latin, black, pop and dance charts and made a crossover star of the Cuban-born, Miami-raised Estefan, 30. "Salsa is not so ingrained in me that I can't do a legitimate pop tune or vice versa," says Estefan, who numbers both Cruz and Barbra Streisand among her influences.

Los Lobos, a hard-charging band with roots in East Los Angeles, has broken out of the barrio with gritty albums such as By the Light of the Moon, as well as the popular sound track to the hit movie La Bamba, the story of '50s Latin Teen Idol Ritchie Valens. The driving melodies and hypnotic rhythms of hip-hop -- call it lateeno-pop -- crowd the airwaves and the club scenes as one of the country's hottest new types of dance music. The movie Salsa has raked in $8.7 million in domestic box-office receipts since its May release. Record sales of Latin music are up, although the buyers remain predominantly Latino. Still, audiences for such crossover artists as Ruben Blades and Temptress Sa-Fire are increasingly mixed.

Never heard of Lisa Lisa, Linda Caballero? Of Willy Chirino or Carlos Oliva? Then boogie on down Crossover Street: Cruz's timeless appeal is spanning generations; younger artists like Chirino and Oliva are fusing classic salsa with rock and American pop; and raven-haired hip-hop sirens have replaced Menudo in the affections of some Latin teens. What the Motown girl groups were to the '60s, Brenda K. Starr, Sweet Sensation and the Cover Girls are to the Nuyoricans of the '80s.

Out West, Los Lobos is welding rock 'n' roll to traditional Mexican forms, jump blues and country-and-western sounds to limn the Mexican immigrant experience in America. Ben Tavera King, 35, a San Antonio guitarist, has fashioned a fresh style that blends Latin inflections, good ole boy strummings and the hypno-rhythms of New Age. The pleasures of Latino pop are not only musical but also social: "The music affirms their identity," says Maria Cordero-Aranda, 32, a Los Angeles psychiatric social worker of Puerto Rican descent. "It tells them who they are and where they came from."

Mainstream performers, meanwhile, have fallen for the spicy sound. Linda Ronstadt, who has some Mexican ancestry, has had an unexpected hit with Canciones de Mi Padre, a collection of Mexican folk songs. "I feel completely enchanted by the music, and I feel very connected to what I am," says Ronstadt, who is backed on her record by the crack Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitan band. Paul Simon has been flying down to Rio to work on a new album with Brazilian musicians, much as he employed Ladysmith Black Mambazo on Graceland, and both Manhattan Transfer and Songstress Sarah Vaughan have been exploring Brazilian sounds and rhythms.

Indeed, Latin music may finally be breaking out of its old image of a lounge lizard in a frilly shirt pounding a conga drum. "As our numbers and economic power increase, so does the acceptance of our music," says Chirino, whose rock-influenced style is typical of the sophistication and range of the Miami Sound. Observes Cuban Jazz Saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, whose electrifying flights of improvisatorial fancy rank as one of music's most thrilling high- wire acts. "The black-bean invasion has arrived."

Just as the term Hispanics embraces everyone from Cuba and Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, so Latino music comprises many different styles. Deep in the Times Square subway station, hard by the rumbling uptown trains and across the way from a hot-dog stand, is the Record Mart, one of Manhattan's leading Hispanic specialty shops. Customers come from all over in search of music from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru and the Caribbean. "What is Latin music? That's like asking 'What is American music?' " says Owner Jesse Moskowitz. "Is it Frank Sinatra, Madonna, bluegrass, Joni Mitchell? Spanish music is exactly the same way."

Despite its sometimes bewildering variety of names and guises, hot Latino pop comes in three basic varieties. First there are the aggressive boy-meets- girl banalities of hip-hop, which dresses up the hard beats of rap music with a glitzy attire of synthesizers, Latin percussion and '70s disco tunes. Then there is the so-called Miami Sound, whose appeal is frankly bicultural. "We blend our roots and music with American rock and jazz, put a little Brazilian samba in and some island sounds, and there you have it," says Oliva, who fronts a band called Los Sobrinos del Juez (the Judge's Nephews). And there is real salsa, old-country music preserved in the persons of Cruz and Puente, known as "El Rey," who have a combined total of more than 80 years in the business.

If hip-hop is Hispanic bubblegum-flavored rap-rock, salsa is a catchall term that became current in the early '70s. Although many national strains have gone into salsa, it is fundamentally based in 18th century Cuba, where African slaves were brought to work the island's sugar plantations and their music was wedded to the dominant Spanish culture. Instrumentation features piano, brass, percussion (like the congas or the timbales), and sometimes even flutes and violins, as well as a lead singer. The rhythm is often complex and layered, but at root there is a steady beat -- played apretado, or "tight" -- and a two-bar structure that makes it pre-eminently danceable. If the mood is right, a salsa song can run on for half an hour. "We Cubans dance at the drop of a hat," notes Estefan. "Our music is a good mix of Latin rhythms and dance music from everywhere."

Big cities with large Hispanic populations such as New York, Miami and Los , Angeles have long boasted night spots that cater to a mostly Latin crowd. What's different is that now mixed crowds are gathering at chic bicoastal watering holes, like Manhattan's newly revivified Copacabana, or Los Angeles' ornate, chandeliered Cache, where the dressed-to-kill crowd is sometimes one- fifth Anglo. "Whenever I play, I see that it's not just a completely Latin crowd anymore," says Pete Escovedo, the Mexican-American jazz percussionist and father of Pop Star Sheila E. "It used to be that if you played Latin music, that's all you drew: Latinos."

Whether Hispanic sounds will ever compete on the charts with pop is questionable. "I don't see Latin music ever being mainstream," says Frank Flores, general manager of the Latino station WJIT in New York City. "Our influence will seep into the mainstream, but it's still going to be Spanish music." Some Latin musicians are worried that every step toward Anglo society is a step away from their culture's roots; one player's progressivism is another's sellout. "The Latin market is our bread and butter, and we can't ignore them," says Raul Alfonso of Hansel y Raul, a straight-ahead salsa band that is trying to broaden its appeal with an upcoming record in English. But pop music has always been an indiscriminate buccaneer, hijacking European, American and African treasure alike, mutating it and selling it around the world. Now it may be the Hispanics' turn. In the global village called the U.S., Latin pop's opportunity is as equal as anybody's.

With reporting by Cristina Garcia/Miami, with other bureaus