Abelardo Barroso
Abelardo Barroso started out driving the Sexteto Habanero to gigs around Havana; by July 1925 he was standing in front of it as lead singer, and within months he was on some of the first commercial son records ever pressed in Cuba. Two years later, singing for bassist-composer Ignacio Piñeiro's brand-new Septeto Nacional, he sharpened into the voice critics would later call sonero mayor — described by musicologist Helio Orovio as nasal, "gangoso," what popular language calls voz aguardentosa, and well suited to son, guaracha, and easy improvisation. By the early 1950s that voice had gone quiet: Barroso was painting houses and working the Havana docks, singing old hits for tips outside clubs he used to headline. He was nearly fifty when Orquesta Sensación's Rolando Valdés talked him into re-cutting "En Guantánamo"; it went gold in 1957, turning a half-forgotten sonero into one of Cuban music's most durable comeback stories.
Barroso joined bassist-composer Ignacio Piñeiro's brand-new Septeto Nacional in 1927, and its trumpeter, Lázaro Herrera, later gave Piñeiro direct credit for what happened to Barroso's singing there: "era un cantante muy bueno, pero quiero señalar que fue Ignacio quien lo enseñó a inspirar en los montunos, porque, antes, él no tenía ese conocimiento" — he was already a good singer, Herrera said, but it was Ignacio who taught him to ad-lib through the montuno; before that, he simply didn't have it.
listen forOn "Échale Salsita," Piñeiro's septeto drops nearly everything out from under the chorus so a single voice can toss out phrase after phrase over the same repeating line — the montuno Herrera meant. Decades later, now the featured voice of Rolando Valdés's Orquesta Sensación, Barroso runs that same trick across a whole record on "El Panquelero": he lets the chorus hold its line steady while he keeps finding new, half-improvised phrases to hang against it, the pregón seller's cry turned into an extended solo.