Havana Nights by Celia Cruz

Record industry vet, John Matarazzo first met Celia Cruz in 1994 at a recording session at Nola Studios high above 57th Street in New York.
By then she was a highly regarded singer, Grammy Award winner and probably the best-known Salsa singer in the world. Celia was collaborating with Tito Puente that night on a new album project to be released on the Tropical Buddha record label.

Tito and John started talking about some of the great, ground-breaking recordings that had come out of the Salsa genre. Celia Cruz was a leader in that movement; inspiring and guiding younger artist coming into the genre, like Marc Anthony, La India and so many others.
Tito and Celia were concerned that many of these great recordings, especially some of the earlier works originally done by Celia in Venezuela and Mexico, with Sonora Matancera, many of which represented a merging of early West African Yoruba influences and the Santeria chants of the Caribbean which were the basis for the sound which became Salsa.

John mentioned to both Celia and Tito that he’d be very interested in making these recordings available again. So, they put John in touch with a number of people, including Henry Montalvo; a producer, who owned many of these recordings. John discussed reissuing some of these early recordings as well as some live concert recordings, which John found very exciting. They began reissuing the remastered recordings on compact discs from 1999 to 2003. The result was an immediate and intense demand for these recordings. And the rest is history.

Celia Cruz, was a American citizens singer and one of the most popular Latin artists of the 20th century. Cruz rose to fame in Cuba during the 1950s as a singer of guarachas, earning the nickname "La Guarachera de Cuba". In the following decades, she became known internationally as the "Queen of Salsa" or "The Queen of Latin Music" due to her contributions to Latin music in the United States.