Five El Gran Combo Songs You Need to Hear
If you had to pick one group as the greatest salsa group of all time, it might be El Gran Combo. It's hard to think of a group that's more famous, that has more hits, that has had a bigger impact than this group. If you were stuck on a desert island and you could only have one catalog for the rest of your life, you could do a lot worse than picking El Gran Combo.
They have everything.
That's why picking five songs from this group is so incredibly difficult. I love songs at different times for different reasons. When I'm happy I like certain songs, when I'm sad, I like other ones. Something I've noticed about myself is I tend to like the darker or more passionate songs over the purely happy ones. That's why I didn't include legendary tracks like Brujería in this list.
I have no criteria other than the way these songs make me feel and how much I enjoy dancing to them.
So the reason that you don't see these songs below on the list is not because I don't love them or they aren't great. It's because the five songs that I pick stir something inside me more than these all-time classics. But this would hardly be a list if I didn't at least mention some of these songs. So if you're new to El Gran Combo, you should definitely check these out.
- Brujería. Charlie Aponte, 1979. A cover of a 1963 Cuban song by Jorge Borrego called "Tú me echaste brujería." The biggest song they ever recorded on Spotify.
- El Menú. Jerry Rivas, 1981. Written by Perín Vázquez. The Puerto Rican food song.
- Me Liberé. Jerry Rivas, 2001. Written by Julio Castro. Three weeks at number one, their longest run ever.
- Ojos Chinos. Andy Montañez, 1964. Written by Kito Vélez.
- Julia. Andy Montañez, 1972. Written by a Panamanian named Carrizo, and there are three different versions of his first name on the records.
- Las Hojas Blancas. Andy Montañez, 1973. Roberto Angleró.
- Y No Hago Más Na'. Jerry Rivas, 1983. Chiquitín García.
- Timbalero. Charlie Aponte, 1981. This one Ithier actually wrote.
- No Hay Cama Pa' Tanta Gente. Charlie Aponte, 1985. Your Christmas is not complete without it.
- Falsaria. Pellín Rodríguez, 1968. Credited on the label to María Teresa Vera. Cuban scholars say Manuel Corona wrote it and lost the credit through a 1948 Mexican movie. Told you. Read the fine print.
Now, about the band.
It's the 1950s and Cortijo y Su Combo is putting Puerto Rican bomba y plena on the map. Their lead vocalist is known by many as the greatest salsa singer of all time, Ismael Rivera, El Sonero Mayor. Their bongocero is one of my personal top three favorite artists, Roberto Roena. And their pianist is none other than Rafael Ithier.
Everything's going great until 1962 when Ismael Rivera gets arrested in a drug bust on his way back from Venezuela through Panama. He gets five years and does nearly four of them, and the band falls apart. So in the middle of that chaos, Ithier takes most of the musicians and starts his own thing.
El Gran Combo.
He ran it as a cooperative.
Everybody was a partner, everybody got a share, and everyone followed the rules: show up on time, play tight, don't get too big for the band. And the formula worked. Musicians came and went over the years. Singers like Pellín Rodríguez. Andy Montañez. Charlie Aponte, who sang lead for forty-one years. Jerry Rivas. Papo Rosario. The band outlived all of them.
It even outlived Ithier himself. He died on December 6, 2025, at ninety-nine.
A Colombian broadcaster named Ley Martin nicknamed them La Universidad de la Salsa, the University of Salsa, and it stuck because it's true. Half the great singers in the genre passed through this band or learned from it.
Ithier once said that he didn't think about Beethoven when he arranged. He thought about Chuíto and Ramito, the jíbaro singers. Simple arrangements, everyday themes, a good rhythm section and a lot of clave. That's the formula. It worked for sixty years and is still working to this day.
So with that said, here's my five favorite songs by El Gran Combo.
1Se Nos Perdió el Amor (2001)
→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog
Nuevo Milenio: El Mismo Sabor, Combo Records RSCD2134. Vocal: Charlie Aponte. Written by Rafi Monclova.
I love it when a song tells a story, but I love it even more when a song takes you on a journey. And if it is a journey you can relate to personally, it's that much more powerful.
There are certain things that have the ring of truth, but you can only recognize them if you've experienced it yourself. For example, sometimes when I'm watching movies, I'll look at my wife and say, this writer doesn't have kids. And the reason I say that is because they'll have the characters do something stupid that no parent would ever do. But the writer has no way of knowing this because they aren't a parent and they haven't experienced it yet.
To speak to it, you have to go through it.
Well, whoever wrote this song definitely went through some heartache. Because you can feel it in the music.
The opening trumpets start with just a hint of underlying panic, and that sense of desperation and loss builds throughout the song as it leads inexorably towards the chorus where it explodes.
This song is a cathartic emotional rollercoaster and I love it.
Some trivia.
This song came out in 2001 on the same album as Me Liberé, which was an immediate hit. Se Nos Perdió el Amor was track two. Nobody pushed it.
Then it started getting play in Colombia. One thing that I've noticed doing these articles and learning about salsa is a lot of times Colombia is the place that will keep sleeper hits alive until they finally have the time to shine. They did it for Lo Atará La Arache, and they did it for this song.
Charlie Aponte tells the story.
The song writer, Rafi Monclova, called him up and said he was getting royalty checks from Colombia but had no idea why.
It turns out, the band had played the song in Cali and it blew up. By the time they figured it out, it was on every radio station in the country. In June of 2003, two years after the album came out, it hit number one on Billboard's Tropical Airplay chart. The next year it won the Billboard Latin Music Award for tropical airplay track of the year. The band found out it was nominated when they landed in Colombia for a show.
Like the song itself, the track's popularity was a slow burn.
More trivia.
Rafi Monclova was a ballad singer from Bayamón in the sixties and seventies. He won composer of the year in 1975 writing boleros, then quit performing and taught voice for twenty years.
In his late fifties he came back and started writing salsa for Gilberto Santa Rosa, Tito Nieves, Víctor Manuelle, and El Gran Combo. He wrote this song at fifty-nine. Years later, in his mid-sixties, he was turned away by almost every label, and one producer even tried to take fifty percent of his publishing for a record. He refused.
Charlie kept this one when he left the band in 2014. His solo version from Medellín has almost fourteen million views, more than any recording of the song except the band's own. And the band still plays it to this day.
2Un Verano en Nueva York (1975)
→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog
7, EGC Records LPS 011. Vocal: Andy Montañez. Written by Justi Barreto. Arranged by Rafael Ithier.
This is one of my favorite songs by El Gran Combo, but I almost didn't include it on this list because of how overplayed NUEVAYoL is. I'm glad Bad Bunny used his platform to introduce people to salsa. But every time I hear NUEVAYoL, I'm secretly disappointed that it's not the original.
To me, the original is infinitely better.
Let's talk about the song.
Justi Barreto was born in Havana in 1923, in Jesús María, the rumba barrio. He wrote his first guaracha at twenty and soon was being recorded by artists such as Benny Moré, Celia Cruz, Machito, Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, Cortijo, Ismael Rivera, Joe Cuba, Arsenio Rodríguez and more.
Over three hundred songs.
He went to Mexico in 1948 and worked in the rumbera movies with Pérez Prado, then moved to New York in the early fifties, to try to get Peer International to pay him his royalties.
He never got them.
According to Rosa Marquetti, the Cuban music historian who wrote the definitive piece on him, the labels rarely sent checks, and when they did the advances never went over a hundred dollars. He lived off gigs at the Palladium and died in New York on January 11, 2015 at ninety-one, broke.
Ten years later Bad Bunny's sample of his song hit number one on the Latin chart and top five on the Hot 100.
Somehow, it all seems unjust.
The song is a tour of all the things that make New York great.
Justi had lived in New York for twenty years by the time he wrote it and he put the whole Latino summer into three verses.
Bear Mountain. The boat ride. Orchard Beach, which he pronounces "Ochanbrillo." The Fiesta del Mamoncillo, a July dance thrown by an Afro-Cuban social club at a beer garden in Astoria that ran for forty years. Central Park, the Fourth of July, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, the San Juan fiesta.
"Si te quieres divertir, con encanto y con primor, sólo tienes que vivir un verano en Nueva York."
If you want a good time, with charm and with style, all you have to do is live one summer in New York.
It's nostalgic, positive, hopeful, and captures all of the great things about living in New York all in one refrain.
He even signed it. Listen for Andy saying "Justi Barreto me dijo." Justi Barreto told me. The writer put his own name in the lyric, which turned out to be a smart move, because the Peruvian 45 credits the song to "D.R." Derechos reservados. Rights reserved. Meaning nobody. The classic trick labels used to steal music and avoid royalties. Another Peruvian pressing calls him "Julio Barreto."
3El Matrimonio (2004)
→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog
Aquí Estamos y... ¡De Verdad!, Sony Discos TRK 95481. Vocal: Charlie Aponte. Written by Ramón "Ramoncito" Rodríguez. Arranged by Rafael Ithier.
This is what I call a trapdoor song. It's a nice song that takes you along quietly until suddenly BOOM the ground disappears and the whole vibe changes.
That applies to songs as well as to relationships, which is appropriate since the topic of this song is marriage.
That's what this song does. It's almost perfectly symmetrical. The first half, it's nice and calm and steady. And the second half, it's percussive and combative. Just like the relationship it's describing.
And once this song drops, it's just straight fire.
The coro, PAM PUM PIM, PIM PUM PAM, is the soundtrack of fighting, the sound of throwing hands. And the intensity of the music backs it up.
I remember the first time I heard this song, I thought, oh, this is okay. And then the coro dropped, my ears perked up, and it's been one of my favorites ever since.
About the song.
It was written by Ramón Rodríguez, from Orocovis, in the mountains. He went to Vietnam, came back, moved to New York, and started writing songs. In 1979 he founded Conjunto Clásico with Tito Nieves on vocals and wrote every song on their first several albums. He says he wrote over ninety songs for Tito Nieves alone. He also says he fired Tito from the band over drugs, and that Tito got clean afterwards. He's written somewhere between a hundred and thirty and four hundred songs depending on who you ask.
He gave El Gran Combo nine songs over thirty years. Two of them went top five. This is one of them.
The song is marriage in two acts. Act one: "Qué lindo es el matrimonio cuando las cosas van bien." How beautiful marriage is when things are going well. Everything works, nothing bothers you, even the mother-in-law is happy in the back seat. Then the storm comes. He gives up his hobbies, stays home from the ballgame, watches the kids so she can rest. And the montuno delivers the thesis:
"Que el matrimonio es demonio si no se sabe llevar."
Marriage is a demon if you don't know how to carry it.
Rafael Ithier, asked how a band stays together for fifty years, said this in 2010: "Yo llamo al Gran Combo un matrimonio grande. Porque los matrimonios discuten y si no lo hacen, es un fracaso." I call El Gran Combo a big marriage. Because married people argue, and if they don't, it's a failure. You just have to know how to handle it.
4Se Me Fue (1982)
→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog
Nuestro Aniversario, Combo Records RCSLP-2026. Vocal: Charlie Aponte. Written by Perín Vázquez.
Another song about relationships. I don't know if that says something about me or if it says something about how well El Gran Combo captured those feelings. But this is a song that is much more complex in its interpretation because it's unresolved and swings back and forth between different moods, much like people do when they are trying to rationalize feelings they can't control.
It was written by a comedian.
Perín Vázquez was born in Caguas in 1921. He spent the forties as the second voice and guitar player in trios, including Johnny Rodríguez's, and the fifties and sixties in New York doing comedy, where he created a character called Nicasio Casaseno, a jíbaro who was charming, sharp, adventurous, and completely uneducated. That's the guy singing this song. In 1971 Perín moved home to Puerto Rico and started writing salsa, and for the next thirteen years he was El Gran Combo's best songwriter. El Menú. El Teléfono. Goyito Sabater. Se Me Fue. Azuquita Pa'l Café. Half of this album is his. Four songs out of eight.
The Puerto Rican music foundation's biography has an interesting note. It says that in his trio years he was the discreet but indispensable companion who supplied the second voice and the guitar, including on recordings by soloists "cuyos productores 'olvidaban' brindarle el correspondiente crédito." Whose producers "forgot" to give him credit. The quotation marks around forgot are theirs. Another brilliant songwriter denied credits due.
He won composer of the year in 1983, the year after this record, then died in May of 1984 at sixty-three.
5Azuquita Pa'l Café (1984)
→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog
In Alaska: Breaking the Ice, Combo Records RCSLP 2039. Vocal: Jerry Rivas. Written by Perín Vázquez.
Another track by Perín Vázquez, who died on May 12, 1984, nine days before the Peruvian single dropped on May 21. He didn't live to see the biggest success of his life.
The coro on this song is famous. Everybody knows it.
"Que qué, que qué, qué fue, qué fue. Azuquita pa'l café."
Jerry Rivas says that for over 40 years now, whenever they play this song, the crowd sings the coro back to them at every show.
The lyrics are a hymn to women. Literally. It opens with "Qué inspirado el creador cuando hizo a la mujer." How inspired the Creator was when he made woman. And thank God he told her to let herself be loved, and gave men that honey, that little bit of sugar for the coffee. It's an ode to the fairer sex, with a little wink to what that azuquita might be.
Quick trivia.
Jerry Rivas is lead on this song, not Charlie Aponte, which people get wrong constantly. The album it was on, In Alaska, received a Grammy nomination. And it has over twenty-five million streams on Spotify.
+1El Carrito (1965)
→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog
Gema 45 1511-B, then El Swing del Gran Combo, Gema LPG 3011 (1966). Vocal: Andy Montañez. Written by Tito Henríquez.
I had to include this song because not only is it a deep cut, it is a straight banger.
It was on the B-side of the 45 of Se Acabó, a merengue with Pellín singing. The label calls this one a guaracha and says Andy was singing. Behind him it's the original band: Roberto Roena on bongó, Martín Quiñones on conga, Ithier on piano, and Eddie "La Bala" Pérez doing falsetto on the coro.
This is the original band, three years in, still sounding like Cortijo, before any of them were famous.
The composer is printed right there on the 45. Tito Henríquez. Born in Santurce in 1920, sang with Cuarteto Mayarí and Cuarteto Marcano in the forties, and wrote Bello Amanecer, one of the most recorded Puerto Rican boleros ever. A bolero man. And in 1965 he handed El Gran Combo three guarachas for one album. El Chancletero is the one people remember. This is the one I do.
Two and a half minutes. Ithier's whole formula in miniature. Short, tight, jazzy horns, everyday subject, all clave. He said he thought about Chuíto and Ramito when he arranged. You can hear it here more than anywhere.
If I ever do an underrated El Gran Combo list, this will come back as number one.
This song is FIRE start to finish and if you haven't heard it, you should correct that right now.
§Six songs, six writers
Six songs. Six writers. Rafi Monclova, Justi Barreto, Ramón Rodríguez, Perín Vázquez twice, Tito Henríquez. A ballad singer, a Cuban rumbero, a Vietnam vet, a comedian, and a bolero composer. Not one of them was in the band. Between them they wrote most of what you think of as the El Gran Combo sound.
Ithier gets the credit, and he earned it. He picked the songs, he arranged them, he kept the band alive for sixty-three years. But when you sing along to the coro tonight, spare a thought for the guy who wrote it. There's a decent chance he never got paid.