Cocinando!:
Fifty Years of Latin Album Cover Art
Pablo Yglesias

Driving beats, coursing rhythms, swaying skirts, and swaggering bandleaders playing deep into the sultry night: Latin music is a celebration of life and sensuality, and nowhere are these essential values better reflected than the dazzling record covers that present this music to the world.

Cocinando!: Fifty Years of Latin Album Cover Art draws together the most beautiful, sexy, colorful, innovative, and creative Latin record covers from all the various genres of Latin music: mambo, salsa, bossa nova, tropicalia, Latin jazz, and rock. Featured are covers by such legendary performers as Jo—o Gilberto, Machito, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Ray Baretto, Caetano Veloso, Santana, and countless others.

Author Pablo Yglesias provides a compelling introduction to the history of Latin popular music and the designers who have brought this music to visual life.


Pablo Yglesias is a Massachusetts-based graphic designer and DJ. Izzy Sanabria is the legendary art director of Fania Records.
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Editorial Reviews

Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education:
"Draws together the most beautiful, sexy, colorful, innovative and creative Latin record covers from various genres of Latin music." (July 30, 2007)

The Beat:
"A must for any collector." (July/August 2005)

Boston Globe:
"The book lives up to its title, serving up social history and the delights of the flesh in equal measure as it dances us past the often insultingly exotic, primitivist imagery of Desi Arnaz, Tito Puente, and Yma Sumac records of the 1940s and '50s on its way to the '60s and '70s- a period that Yglesias, who grew up in Boston's South End during those years, considers the Golden Age of Latin album cover art." (4/3/05)

Hispanic:
"When Abel Navarro, Ely Besalel, Walter Velez and Izzy Sanabria were creating salsa album covers in the 1970s they didnt know they were making design history. They were simply trying to make a connection between the music, its messages, and their own artistic sensibilities. The result was Delux, the look of salsa. Heres a gorgeous study of the evolving aesthetic of Latin music cover art that ranges from Delux and beyond." — Victor Cruz-Lugo (February, 2006)

Songlines:
"The meanings and motivations behind the images used to market Latin music are often intriguing, inspirational or divisive at turns, as Yglesias explains in uncovering the history of Latin music." (November/December 2005)

Global Rhythm:
"All of the art here is contextualized with valuable, exhaustively-researched connective text by the author and a forward by Izzy Sanabria, the legendary art director of Fania records. But the art itself, in all its funky, sexy glory, is the real star here." (August 2005)

Communication Arts:
"A hefty little book bursting with color. . . . If every music genre gets such a careful treatement, with a breakdown of both formal and conceptual aspects and placed withing the bigger picture of culture and politics, then the field of graphic design history will benefit immensely." (September 2005)

Loft Insider:
"Sexy, innovative, mythic, beautiful, Cocinando! is a celebration of life, music, and art, showcasing album covers over the decades from legends like Celia Cruz, Caetano Veloso, Orchestra Harlow, Tom Ze, and more. From a highbrow press, and featuring and introduction by the irrepressible Izzy 'Mr. Salsa' Sanabria, this book reveals as much about Latin culture as your mama's cooking." (3/2005)

Library Bookwatch:
"An artistic visual treat of the best Latin record covers from all genres of Latin music, from congo and bossa nova to salsa. Cocinando! is a simply gorgeous, rich presentation with full-page color album covers packing every page." (October 2005)

Tu Ciudad:
"A cool collection of classic Latin music album covers, from Celia Cruz to Perez Prado to Santana." (June/July 2005)

Classic Latin Albums Offer Fans Nostalgia, Extra:
"the book reprints in glorious color the best album covers of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Chicano music. From the racially patronizing album art of the 1940s and 50s mambo albums to the experimental, wild, and sexually charged album covers of Hector Lavoe, Sonora Pocena and Willie Colon in the 1970s and 80s." — Casey Sanchez (June, 2005)

The Wire:
"The visuals at the core of Yglesias's history of record packaging glow in saturated colours, well matched by his vibrant writing." (Dec 2005)

Anthem:
"From struggles in Cuba to the dark sensuality of Brazilian music, author Pablo Yglesias' supplementary text comes off as well-documented and carefully written . . . . For a fancy coffee table/catalogue-type book, Yglesias has managed to do something most writers forget in their attempts, to include the passion and heart of the culture he's capturing." (May 2005)

For the Aesthete and Sensitive Type:, Cybersocket Magazine:
"To give your more aesthetically (and musically) inclined friends real dopeness for their coffee table, try Pablo Yglesias opulent but not-at-all pricey tome (whoes title translates as cooking) on the rediculously lovely art of Latin music album covers

...perennially brilliant design." (December, 2005)

New York Post:
"Lovingly compiled by graphic designer Pablo Yglesias, this lavish book focuses mostly on the exotic art that graced records of tropical music." (5/11/05)

The Fader:
"It's not so much the reach of the project as it is the scope of the book that's awesome-some covers are rare and others you could find in the dollar bin, but when run together they go a long way in showing the polymathic experience of Latin music (a series of essays helps explain, too)." (4/2005)

A book that's 'LIke catnip for record collectors', Daily Hampshire Gazette:
""Cocinando" means cooking and this book sizzles. It is a beautiful anthology that will act like catnip for record collectors who will be running down to their local used record store in search of vinyl treasure." (3/17/05)

Fuego:
"Back in your mami and papi's heyday, salsa ruled the world, not to mention any house party in El Barrio. An album's cover art was just as enthralling as the sociopolitical tales sung by Ruben Blades, Hector Lavoe, and Willie Colon. Graphic designer/DJ Pablo Yglesias combines his passion for art and all kinds of Latin music-salsa, samba, mambo, etc.-in his new coffee table book Cocinando: Fifty Years of Latin Album Cover Art. The hand-painted imagery makes any Latin music lover yearn for the good ol' days." (Summer 2005)

Unleashed:
"Cocinando displays some very creative album covers, beginning in the 1940s . . . .Through dynamic images, author Pablo Yglesias provides a great insight into the history of Latin music." (April 2006)

Reader Comments

cocinando by p. yglesias (rating out of 5):

it's about time someone documented the incredible concepts to be found on latin music album covers. thanks princeton for publishing it. i eagerly await the book! ---andujar, journalist and world music dj

- dj andujar from east coast, USA (02/11/2004)

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