Bobby Valentin

No album better represents Bobby Valentin than this brilliant 1972 release, which is widely hailed as a progressive landmark in the salsa landscape and which spawned Puerto Rico's unofficial national anthem, "Soy Boricua." Marvin Santiago sings, and Valentin leads the group (which includes, unusually, saxophones) through a swinging series of songs that have one foot in Cuban son and the other in New York jazz. The result frees itself from the uniformity that would plague salsa in later years. Anything could happen in these sessions, and it frequently does.