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Ralph Mercado Impresario Dies

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Ralph Mercado, a promoter who took his passion for Latin music and built an empire around it, not only staging concerts but creating a recording and publishing label, a film and video company, and nightclubs and restaurants, died on Tuesday in Hackensack, N.J. He was 67.

Mercado promoted salsa, Latin jazz, Latin rock and merengue, and shaped musical careers. The cause was cancer, said Blanca Lasalle, a spokeswoman, who gave no other details.

Mr. Mercado managed stars like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, and discovered and helped shape the careers of others like Marc Anthony and La India. He organized concerts of salsa music that lively hybrid of Cuban rhythms, big bands and American harmonies in large halls like Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

His RMM label recorded more than 130 artists in genres including salsa, Latin jazz, Latin rock and merengue.

Artists are on the map because of his label, Eddie Palmieri the Latin jazz and salsa pianist, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. He took us to Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Mercado helped inject new energy into salsa with powerful percussion and brass lines as he took advantage of the surging population and purchasing power of Latinos. He promoted blending the music with other influences, including Brazilian and African. He expanded internationally, and even brought an 11-member native-Japanese salsa band to the United States.

Mr. Mercado was routinely called the largest promoter of salsa music. He was compared to Norman Granz or George Wein in jazz, or Berry Gordy in soul and R&B. Billboard in 1991 called him the entrepreneur who took salsa from New York to the world.

Ralph Mercado Jr. was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 29, 1941. His father was a Dominican dockworker and his mother a Puerto Rican factory worker. Mr. Mercado told The Boston Globe in 1998 that he learned to dance the merengue, which comes from the Dominican Republic, in the hallway of the familys fifth-floor walkup as soon as he could walk.

As a young teenager he went to the Palladium nightclub in Manhattan to hear his first live concert, the Machito Orchestra. He was completely blown away, he told The Globe, adding, I came out of there knowing I had to be involved in this music somehow, personally involved.

But he couldnt sing or play an instrument. Then he remembered he was good with numbers. He and some friends started a social club and began booking live music in the basements of apartment buildings for what they called waistline parties, in which a couples admission fee was based on the size of the womans waist. (The smaller, the cheaper.) The parties attracted thousands. Mr. Mercado stood at the door with a tape measure.

Sometimes going beyond salsa, he was soon putting together concerts with big acts like James Brown. But he began losing money in concert promotion and turned to managing individual performers. By the 1970s Forbes magazine said that Mr. Mercado was the nations biggest salsa manager. When the music sagged a bit in the 1980s, he lent money to money-losing club owners.

Mr. Mercado started RMM Records in 1987. He sold it to the Universal and Music and Video Distribution Corporation in 2001 after he lost a copyright-infringement suit and fell into financial straits. He then threw himself into the business of producing Latin music events around the world.

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