From Willie Coln and Hector Lavoe to Celia Cruz and La Lupe, all deferred to Catalino Curet Alonso, the man — known to all as Tite (pronounced “TEE-tay”) — who seemed to be able to write hits for them at will.
Estate of Tite Curet, Catalino Curet Alonso, known as Tite, who died in 2003. A new two- CD collection of his work has been released.
“Tite was El Maestro, the essence of what we call salsa or Antillean or Caribbean music,” said the singer Cheo Feliciano, whose career was revived when his association with Mr. Curet began in 1970 and who went on to record 45 of Mr. Curet’s songs. “He didn’t play piano and only knew a couple of chords on the guitar. But he was a wellspring of expression who knew how to write songs that were made to measure for your style, the way a tailor makes a suit.”
A little over five years after Mr. Curet’s death at age 77, there has been a revival of interest in his music, on a pair of fronts. When Fania Records late last month released “Alma de Poeta” (“A Poet’s Soul”), a two-CD compilation of the original versions of 31 of his most popular compositions, it entered Billboard’s Latin music chart at No. 5 and immediately became the top-selling recording in Puerto Rico.
Also in January, a settlement was announced in a complicated legal dispute over performance rights that since the mid-1990s had not only prevented hundreds of Mr. Curet’s best-known songs from being played by radio stations but also discouraged salsa artists from recording his compositions, or even playing them in concert. As a result, Curet-written standards like “Anacaona” and “Peridico de Ayer” (“Yesterday’s Paper”) are now back on the air and once again animating Caribbean dance floors.
“He is the most prolific and, in a sense, the most important writer of tropical music, so we felt he deserved a package like this, especially since there has been such an absence of his music,” said Giora Breil, the chief executive of Fania, who helped organize the disc. “It’s like trying to imagine the U.K. without the music of the Beatles for 14 years.”
In its heyday, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, Fania Records, based in New York, was often called “the Motown of Salsa.” If that comparison is justified, as many historians and critics of Latin music think it is, then Mr. Curet was surely Fania’s Holland-Dozier- Holland, working in virtual anonymity but providing the hits that made international stars of the label’s singers.
