Heat Wave

Heat Wave Inside Miamis sizzling, boundary-blurring Latin music scene.

April 13, 2026

By

Ricardo Herrera Bandrich

Image by Stella Levi

Down there: Thats Miami.

Mayami, mijo, a Cuban lady says.

The 305, reads a guy's cap.

Out the window we see waves lapping against white sands.

Then, further west, massive street murals. South of that, the Freedom Tower, where my grandparents, my mother, and countless other exiled Cubans first received help when they arrived in this country. Directly across is the Kaseya Center. Rub n Blades '06H was there in May, cantando con alma de barrio, chatting about his Gabriel Garc a M rquez-inspired album and how he'd tried convincing Gabo to cowrite it.

Oh look: gators sunbathing on a golf course.

Our plane lands. And there's clapping!

Join in. It's music.

Before Grammy winner Tommy Torres BM '93 was releasing chart-topping hits as a solo artist and producing for the likes of Ricky Martin, Jesse & Joy, and Alejandro Sanz '13H, he was an assistant engineer for Sony in New York, watching sessions with Michael Jackson and Nirvana. But he hadn't been promoted in years, so he started making demos in those same studios at night and sending them everywhere.

One day, demo in hand, he snuck into the office of fabled A&R VP Tom s Mu oz, who was on the phone saying that Ricky Martin shouldn't thank his grandmother in his album Vuelve because it went against the international, seductive man they were portraying. Basically, James Bond would never do that, laughs Torres. Mu oz kept his demo and said, No more intrusions. Some time later, he said it was clear that music was Torres's calling and he'd have a career in it. But why are you here? Mu oz said. I'm the only one working in Spanish and I'm retiring. Move to Miami.

Two months later, Torres was driving a U-Haul with his girlfriend. He says: The guy couldn't have been more right.

Palm trees swaying in front of the Miami skyline

Image by Michael Russell

Miami-Dade is the country's only county where most residents are immigrants. Spanish is king and an ear for accents is queen. Un cubano is a sandwich, a coffee, and a Cuban man. The nightlife's intense but not all flash and velvet ropes. Wildlife abounds; tourists, too. Home for many locals is still beyond the sea. Even so, for singer-songwriter Nicolle Horbath BM '22, Miami feels very close to Barranquilla, and feeling rooted helps inspire me. In 2024, her Latin Grammy nomination for Best New Artist was announced here by fellow Colombian Juanes.

Miami's less a US city, more a tropical meeting place for Latin America. And for decades it's been a prominent global hub for Latin music, though partly thanks to digital media, artists no longer feel obligated to record their breakout album here. Many whose music is produced and managed in Miami live abroad, working here occasionally, if at all. Still, the city's home to numerous studios, labels, producers, songwriters, artists, and icons (like Gloria and Emilio Estefan '07H). And, in recent years, Berklee alumni have become increasingly vital to that mix. EDM, hip-hop, jazz, and others are smaller yet notable parts of the industry (160,000 attended last year's Ultra Music Festival, and the city's a magnet for DJs worldwide).

It's tough to pin down Miami. But at its core, it's a vibrant concoction as porous as its limestone foundation, absorbing all the saz n, sounds, and stories touching its shores.

Explosion, fever, craze! You'll often hear those words describing Latin music's popularity, as if it's a sudden, singular phenomenon. But the category covers a sweeping range of music from many countries, so different time periods mean different mainstream sounds. And Latin music's global popularity has ebbed and flowed for over a century, starting with tango in Europe, then rumba and other Cuban styles creating hits featured in Hollywood's early sound films.

Fast-forward through various swells of salsa, Latin pop, regional Mexican, rock en espa ol, and many others, and you reach this century's first global wave. Actually, it really kicked off in 1998, with Ricky Martin's thrilling La Copa de la Vida performance at the World Cup Final in France-over a billion watched-followed by another rendition at the '99 Grammys, the elaborate production getting a standing ovation.

Torres arrived in Miami in 1999, and it wasn't long before he was producing multi-platinum artist Ednita Nazario, who recommended him to Martin. His career boomed afterward, earning multiple accolades, including a Berklee Alumni Achievement Award in 2023. Two decades on, Torres says that if, in the afterlife, he could show his work to John Lennon and other artists . . . I'd choose some of my own music, though it'd be easier to share what I did for Ricky -especially the MTV Unplugged album. The 2006 record was hard to mess up given Martin's amazing repertoire, Torres explains. But his arrangements helped show a Ricky we hadn't seen on stage: spontaneous, relaxed, with no choreography or intricate production. And in a pioneering concept, Torres suggested featuring native Puerto Rican instruments and music, especially in Tu Recuerdo and P gate, new songs he produced and cowrote. Now when he hears the cuatro playing around the world and people singing those songs, he proudly feels he fulfilled the musical and the cultural, patriotic part of being an artist.

Cuban salsa dancers in Little Havana, Miami.

Image by John Coletti

Several years after Gasolina was released, I was in a club in Shanghai when suddenly the song's revving intro took over, and everyone was dancing to what my friends and I'd been partying to for years back home in Puerto Rico: reggaet

LINK:	https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-now/news/miami-latin-music-industry...
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