Salsa music hasn’t been the same since

When Cuban singer Celia Cruz died three years ago, it seemed salsa music died along with her.

Not that her death caused the demise. But in retrospect, it’s almost poetic how her life paralleled the ebb and flow of the music itself: Cruz’s career saw its own ups and downs over half a century. Yet she always found herself at the epicenter of salsa’s most exciting moments.

Those moments and more are the focus of a new exhibit titled “¡Azucar! The Life and Music of Celia Cruz,” which opened last week at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park. The show, developed by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., captures some of the energy, talent and glamour that made Cruz an unrivaled figure throughout her career.

And it helps explain why the Queen of Latin Music left such a void.

“I think the reason she lasted so long is that she gave as much energy as she received from the public,” said the Smithsonian’s Marvette Perez, who curated the exhibit. “She created this incredible connection with people. When you saw her live, it was almost like this mutual concert.”

This is the second time in as many years that the African American Museum has teamed with the Smithsonian to focus on Latin music, a grossly under-documented art form. Like last year’s exhibit on Latin jazz, the current show makes a significant cultural contribution to L.A., a city where Cruz often appeared.

For fans, the exhibit will be a heartwarming stroll down memory lane, though it may not add much to what is commonly known about this beloved singer. To the uninitiated, the show will make an excellent introduction to one of the great performers of the 20th century.

The retrospective looks at Cruz’s life and times through a display of rare photos and personal items, including her colorful gowns, outlandish wigs and custom shoes with gravity-defying high heels. Visitors can also view a brief documentary and video clips of live performances, starting with her early career in pre-Castro Cuba.

Michael Lewis, owner of a soul-music website who attended an opening reception Friday night, was especially drawn to a re-creation of a dressing room that displayed a collection of small Afro-Cuban saints that Cruz always traveled with.

“Oh, man, this is great,” said Lewis of Los Angeles. “It makes me feel a part of her.”

Toward the end of her long life, it was easy to take Cruz for granted. She was a sure-fire performer, always in top form no matter what the concert conditions. Her concert closer was as predictable as the sunset: “Bemba Colora,” a signature song that showcased her talent for improvising melody and rhythmic pacing. It always guaranteed a thunderous sing-along with the audience.

But even cynics who tired of this act will be yearning for an encore when they watch the exhibit’s video of Cruz performing that song with the Fania All Stars, the ensemble of salsa greats from the 1970s. The camera catches her up close as she walks on stage, opens her arms to the crowd and starts singing with a backup band of luminaries, including bandleaders Johnny Pacheco and Willie Colon and superstar singers Hector Lavoe and Cheo Feliciano.

On stage, she eclipsed them all.

“The men would shrink,” said Perez, the national museum’s curator of Latino history and culture. “She was like this strength, this force coming at you. Salsa was a man’s world at this time, but she would not be denied her place. It was very sexy.”

“Sexy” is not a word normally associated with Cruz. She was more like a Queen Mother, someone to be respected and admired. Yet the photos of the singer as a young woman reveal a mysterious and beguiling beauty: the exotic eyes, curvaceous figure and small waist.

“I don’t know why people say she wasn’t attractive,” Perez said. “To me she was stunning. She didn’t look like anybody else.”

And she didn’t sing like anybody else. Her voice was a phenomenon. No other female singer in the genre has ever come close.

The voice of Ursula Hilaria Celia Caridad Cruz Alfonso was noticed from an early age in her native Havana. She won a cake in an amateur contest on a radio show with her rendition of the tango “Nostalgia.” Before long, she was touring Latin America as lead singer with Las Mulatas del Fuego, a Cuban dance group.

In 1950, she joined La Sonora Matancera, a dance band with which she scored early hits, such as “El Yerberito Moderno.”

The defining moment in the singer’s life came a decade later. She left Cuba with the band and never returned. Fidel Castro had taken power the year before, and she would later curse the regime for not allowing her to return for the burial of her mother.

The exhibition marks this moment as a passage, with an arch and door dividing one side of the gallery from another, as her life was divided by exile.

The second half of the exhibit focuses on the New York years, when she recorded with a succession of top bandleaders, including Colon and Tito Puente. The display of album covers is like a map of salsa milestones, especially the classic first album with Pacheco, musical director of the Fania All Stars.

Few people are aware that the Queen had been all but forgotten after her stint with Puente in the 1960s. She was living in Mexico at the start of the ‘70s salsa boom.

That’s when bandleader and pianist Larry Harlow offered the singer a role in his ambitious Latin opera “Hommy.” Cruz became a star all over again.

The final exhibit features film of her funeral in 2003. From the pulpit of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, young vocalist Victor Manuelle can be seen singing an a cappella rendition of one of Cruz’s final hits, “La Vida Es Un Carnaval” (Life Is a Carnival).

Cruz had requested the song herself before she died, reflecting her deep belief in the power of this music to heal.