Willie Colon cause of death: What happened to 'El Malo'?

Willie Colón, a trombonist, singer, bandleader, composer and producer whose driving musical energy and mischievous bad-boy image -- he was long promoted as "El Malo" -- helped made him a luminary of New York salsa music, and whose 1978 collaboration with Rubén Blades, "Siembra," became one of the top-selling salsa albums of all time, died Saturday. He was 75-year-old. His family announced the death on Facebook but did not provide further details.

Raised in the South Bronx by his Puerto Rican grandmother, who encouraged his early interest in music, Colón showed virtuosic ability on the trombone and was working professionally by his early teens. He arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, at the vanguard of rapidly changing musical tastes among the young in a politically charged era.

The big band-influenced sounds and cha-cha rhythms of the 1940s and '50s that had defined a great deal of Latin music was coming under the influence of American pop, funk and rock. That blend, which included elements of R&B and jazz as well as Caribbean dance rhythms, became synonymous with the emerging salsa sound.


"It was rebellious music," Colón told The Miami Herald in 2006. "We were watching Martin Luther King walking into Selma and the dogs and water cannons. The music wasn't explicitly political yet, but the music was a magnet that would bring people together."

His first album, "El Malo" (1967), recorded when he was 17, featured him in tandem with the glistening vocal power of Puerto Rican-born singer Héctor Lavoe, and propelled a career spanning nearly six decades. Often depicted on album covers as menacing, with a glower and in dark clothes, he embraced the bad-boy image with a swaggering playfulness.

The relationship with Lavoe, who developed a drug addiction, deteriorated, and Colón found other fruitful musical partnerships, including with his mentor, singer Mon Rivera, on such irresistible dance songs as "Tinguilikitín," and, most especially, with Blades, a Panamanian-born singer and songwriter.

Their release, "Siembra" (which can mean sowing or planting), was widely considered a genre landmark, with a frisson of barrio-centric political consciousness. Wildly ambitious thematically and lyrically, it even paid homage to German expressionist-era cabaret like "The Threepenny Opera" with "Pedro Navaja." That song, modeled on "Mack the Knife," detailed the unraveling of an East Harlem criminal after he commits a murder.

Colón, who also recorded with Celia Cruz and Tito Puente, among others, received the Latin Recording Academy's award for lifetime achievement in 2004. In 2015, Billboard magazine named him one of the 30 most influential Latin artists of all time, and younger musicians such as Rauw Alejandro and Daddy Yankee expressed their admiration for him.

William Anthony Colón Román was born April 28, 1950, in the South Bronx. He said his grandmother, who worked in a sweatshop, raised him because his father was repeatedly in jail and his mother was 16.

Colón's foray into music began when his grandmother, who introduced him to the music of her homeland, bought him a trumpet for his 11th birthday. A neighbor and professional musician taught him to play the instrument and to read music. "I would practice all day, which would drive everybody crazy," he told the Herald.

Long interested in politics, he unsuccessfully challenged a Democratic incumbent for state senator in the Bronx and lower Westchester County in 1994. A decade later, he worked for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a liaison to the city's Latin Media and Entertainment Commission.

In 1991, he married Julia Craig, and they had children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.