Black Music Sunday: Let's celebrate Justice Sotomayor's birthday with some New York City salsa

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To close out Black Music Month—which is also Caribbean American Heritage Month—let us not forget that a Caribbean-American Justice sits on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Joe Biden mentioned the justice in his 2021 Caribbean American Heritage Month proclamation: “Today, path breakers like Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor continue advancing our work toward a more perfect Union.”

Sunday is Justice Sotomayor’s birthday: She was born on June 25, 1954, in The Bronx, New York City. It’s a city which is also home to a wide array of Afro Latin music and musicians. I’ve followed her career for years, read her biography, and know that she is a jazz fan. But she also dances salsa!

With that in mind, let’s listen (and dance) to some of the music she grew up with, and to a piece of music created in her honor!

RELATED STORY: Put on those dancing shoes and celebrate the Afro-Boricua soul of salsa

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music. With over 160 stories (and counting) covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack, I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

Journalist and author Paula Edelstein introduces Arturo O’Farrill—who wrote “A Wise Latina” for and about Justice Sotomayor—in her biography of him at All Music:

Arturo O'Farrill was born in Cuba in 1960 and raised in New York City. The son of big-band leader Chico O'Farrill, he was educated at the Manhattan School of Music and the Brooklyn College Conservatory. From 1979 to 1984, he played piano with the Carla Bley Big Band. Arturo then went on to develop his skills as a solo performer with a wide spectrum of artists, including Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Turre, Papo Vazquez, the Fort Apache Band, Lester Bowie, and Harry Belafonte.

In 1995, he agreed to direct Chico O'Farrill's Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra in residence at New York City's Birdland nightclub; the band also performed throughout the world. Arturo was a special guest soloist at three landmark Jazz at the Lincoln Center concerts: Afro-Cuban Jazz: Chico O'Farrill's Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra (November 1995), Con Alma: The Latin Tinge in Big Band Jazz (September 1998), and Jazz at the Lincoln Center Gala: The Spirit of Tito Puente (November 2001) just months after Chico's death.

Several years after his father’s death, O’Farrill launched the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance; the Alliance’s official website offers this background:

The Afro Latin Jazz Alliance (ALJA) was founded in 2007 by GRAMMY®-award winning, pianist and composer Arturo O’Farrill. In early 2007, O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra (ALJO) left Jazz at Lincoln Center to pursue the twin goals of developing new audiences for big band Latin jazz and creating a robust educational program for young performers. With the support of a group of prominent leaders from the worlds of jazz and Latin culture, O’Farrill launched ALJA to serve as a non-profit organization that could advance both the performance and educational aspects of this uniquely Pan-American art form.

ALJA’s programs span the five New York City boroughs, with performances in venues throughout the city and with education programs serving school children throughout New York. In the last eight years ALJA has produced over 45 concerts as part of its annual New York Season showcasing the full range of Afro Latin jazz from all over the world.

O’Farrill shared his process inn composing his tribute to Sotomayor in a 2011 interview with Chip Boaz at All That Jazz.

How do you set in music the purely legal process of installing a judge? There's actually a lot of artistry and imagery that I saw in that. I was moved to tears when she was nominated, and even more emotional when she was confirmed. It was very meaningful to me. I started to write the piece, and the commission came afterwards. After I had started composing, I happened to mention to one of my board members that I was writing the piece because I was so moved by the experience. They were responsible for helping someone come up with some money so that I could continue! The piece wrote itself. I remember looking at my sketchpad—one minute it was blank and then literally an hour later it was filled with ideas.

There's a very distinct quality to the beginning of the piece, which to me, heralds the idea of justice. Justice is a very abstract concept; it's supposedly a universal idea. There's some inalienable rights that we all talk about universally, but the realities point to another worldliness. There's an abstract idea called justice that human beings didn't even make up. This first opening section has these juxtaposing, large, existential figures that kind of go and point to a larger idea. Then the second section is the simple rise of a young Puerto Rican girl living in the Bronx, which technically means that she should have ended up as a maid instead of appointed to the highest court in the nation. You see her rise in the music—it's a very simple melodic statement that the trumpet makes as she rises. Then that scene gets repeated over and over again as it gets cast in different settings. It is a constant legal sounding melody that is supposedly legal discourse. It gets more confusing and more confusing, yet the Latina keeps rising and rising. Eventually it opens to an improvisational section, which is really my idea of this ascendancy being complete. At the end, there's a large and open celebratory section; but it's over some pretty dark sounding chords.

It's a piece that really wrote itself because I felt like the ideas were big—life it always more poignant than art and literature. We just need to look. I could not have foreseen the day when we would have a black president or a Latin Supreme Court justice; I could not have made that up. I would have bet against it twenty years ago.

Give it a listen; this performance is from its November 2009 world premiere.

YouTube Video


O’Farrell also teamed up with spoken word artist Christopher “Chilo” Cajigas for “They Came”: a powerful story of migration from Puerto Rico to New York.

YouTube Video


From O’Farrill’s YouTube notes:

"They Came" is what may be the first collaboration of an Afro Latin Jazz Big Band with spoken word poetry and Hip Hop, and is the kaleidoscopic story of Puerto Rican pride. A profound commentary of achievement and possibility in America, it begins with bomba rhythms, mixes in hip hop and reggaeton with DJ Logic working the turntables, and settles into a canyon deep salsa groove. Before we enter the land of milk and honey, we must endure the terrain of struggle that Chilo describes.The video features Graffiti from Tatu of the Xmentalist BK Graf crew

As noted above, Sotomayor dances salsa. I was smiling from ear to ear when I found this 2009 clip.

Vimeo Video


From Washington Life Monthly’s Vimeo notes:

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor does the Mambo with actor Esai Morales at The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts (NHFA) annual gala celebrating Noche Musicál at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC

Her skills are not surprising, because salsa music is part of the lifeblood of New York City. A 1971 documentary from French filmmaker Yves Billon, “Salsa Opus 1...Nueva York,” not only takes the viewer behind the scene with salsa musicians—it also depicts salsa as a part of life in the streets and barrios of New York’s boroughs.

YouTube Video


From the video’s YouTube notes:

During The 60s and 70s "El Barrio" in New York City was the quarter of thousands of Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other Latin americans emigrants. The blend of nationalities brought with them their rhythms and dreams, rhythms that they seasoned with all the Caribbean spices and colors. The result was a flavorful sound called SALSA... and Salsa became popular to the world. This film states that Sabor is the qualification when speaking of Salsa that has had an unprecedented success when confronted with the all powerful North American pop Music.

featuring; Jose Alberto "El Canario", Henry Fiol, Manny Oquendo's Orq. Libre, Cheo Feliciano, La Sonora Ponceña and many more.

Before most people in the U.S. first heard of then-Judge Sotomayor, I learned about her because of a 1994 ruling she levied against the New York State Department of Correctional Services in Campos v. Coughlin, which gave inmates the right to wear their elekes (also known as collares): the consecrated religious beads worn by adherents of the African-diasporic religions of Lucumi and Candomblé, commonly known as “Santeria.”

I wrote about the decision back in 2018:

Sotomayor wrote in her decision:

Santeria is a religious belief system with a long and rich history in the Caribbean and Latin America. It is an expression of what experts term a "syncretion," or fusion, My My of African religion and Roman Catholicism. Saints are fundamental figures in Santeria. They play the role of guide and patron to Santeria devotees. The saints in the Santeria religion, however, are different in character and status from the saints recognized and venerated in Catholicism. The Saints, or Orishas as they are known in Santeria, have distinct personalities and temperaments and Santeria practitioners have specific patron Orishas with whom they have a spiritually intimate affiliation. The saints and spirits, and the adherent's devotion to the Orishas, are central aspects of Santeria beliefs. See Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, ___ U.S. at ___, 113 S.Ct. at 2222.

Devotion to the Orishas and commitment to Santeria is expressed, in part, by the follower's wearing of a necklace of colored beads, the practice at issue in this action. The beads are not mere symbols of some greater entity or a tool for veneration. According to plaintiffs' expert, the beads are "a focus of spiritual presence, as protection against misfortune, and as markers of spiritual identity." Affidavit of Joseph M. Murphy, ¶ 9 ("Murphy Affidavit"). Significantly, Santeria adherents believe that if the practitioner wears these beads faithfully the beads ensure the practitioner's closeness to the Orishas, as well as protection from negative forces and events. Even a simple transgression from this practice, such as a temporary removal of the beads for some reason other than those recognized by adherents, or the blemishing of the beads as a result of their handling by someone other than the wearer, may lead to negative consequences for the practitioner.

The colors of the beads, and color combinations of bead strands, also carry great significance in the Santeria religion because different color beads correspond to particular Orishas and particular days of the week. When a practitioner recognizes a patron Orisha, that individual then wears that patron's colors on a bead necklace. In addition, the follower also wears the beads which correspond to the Orisha recognized on that particular day of the week. Consequently, a practitioner of Santeria may wear several strands of beads, in various colors, some worn daily and others worn on different days of the week.

She pointed out that inmates of other “traditional religions” were not deprived of their crosses and went on to point out that:

The beads are not, as defendants would have me recognize, an optional devotional item. Rather, they are a hallmark of plaintiffs' beliefs. Unlike the choice of, or prohibition against, wearing rosary or Dhikr beads, or crucifixes and crosses, only in the case of Santeria beads does the failure to wear them, according to plaintiffs' beliefs, result in negative, and possibly irreversible life consequences for the practitioner.

DOCS personnel, despite their history in the prison system with Santeria adherents, and despite their own expert's evidence and the significant available literature on the subject, appear, at best, ill-informed and indifferent.[14]

Why am I bringing this case up? Simply because it illustrates that Sotomayor’s very life experience in a community that practices several variants of African diasporic faiths gave her insights that informed how she ruled in this case. Many judges would have simply listened to DOCS' labeling of bead wearers as “gang members.”

This case called for a “wise Latina,” and thankfully for the inmates, they got one.

Salsa musicians frequently play music that is Santeria related, often referencing the Orishas; many of them are also initiates of the faith.

RELATED STORY: Afro-Latinas sing to the santos, the ancestors, and the culture

Puerto Rican percussionist and bandleader Ray Barretto’s “El Hijo de Obatala (The son of Obatala)” is sung to honor the Orisha who, in Yoruba theology, “created humans.”

YouTube Video


Puerto Rican Hector Lavoe, one of the most famous salsa singers, was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and moved to New York in 1963. Here he sings to both Yemaya and Ochun.

YouTube Video


Milton Cardona was not only a salsa musician, he was also initiated as a priest in the religion. Here he plays a mix of salsa tunes with José Mangual Jr.

YouTube Video


And here, Cardona plays sacred music—on the consecrated bata drums—to the Orisha Changó:

YouTube Video


I’ve been up and dancing around the room in celebration while I write this. I hope you’ll join me in wishing our Wise Latina, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a very happy birthday!

The joy on her face!

Meet me in the comments for even more salsa music—and please share your favorites!