Carlos Santana

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• Top 6 Latin Music Artists of All Time

  Currently #3 · score 0

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• Selena

  Selena Quintanilla, widely known simply as Selena, became the top-selling Latin artist of the 1990s and helped bring Tejano music, a regional Texan-Mexican genre blending Mexican and American musical traditions, to mainstream national attention before her career was cut short by her 1995 murder at just 23. Her album Amor Prohibido became one of the best-selling Latin albums in history, and Selena's crossover into English-language recording, including work on what would have been her first full English-language album, was underway at the time of her death, reflecting her growing ambitions beyond the Tejano and Latin music markets specifically. Selena's murder by Yolanda Saldívar, the former president of her fan club, at a Corpus Christi motel became a major national news story, and the intense public grief that followed, particularly across Latino communities in the United States, reflected the depth of her cultural significance despite her relatively brief career. Her posthumous English-language crossover album Dreaming of You, released later in 1995, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and Selena's continued cultural influence — including a 1997 biographical film starring Jennifer Lopez and a posthumous Walk of Fame star — has made her one of the most enduringly significant figures in the history of Latin American popular music.

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• Celia Cruz

  Celia Cruz, widely known as "the Queen of Salsa," became the most prominent female vocalist in the history of salsa music, recording more than 70 albums across a career spanning six decades and helping popularize the genre to international audiences well beyond its Cuban and broader Caribbean origins. Her signature vocal exclamation "¡Azúcar!" ("Sugar!"), which she used as a spontaneous performance flourish, became one of the most recognizable catchphrases in Latin music and remains closely associated with her public persona decades after she first began using it. Cruz left Cuba permanently in 1960 following Fidel Castro's rise to power, and the Cuban government's subsequent refusal to allow her to return for her parents' funerals became a significant and painful aspect of her exile, one she referenced repeatedly throughout her career as part of her broader identity as a Cuban artist in permanent exile. Her collaborations with major Latin music figures across salsa's golden era, combined with her sustained international touring and recording well into her seventies, made Cruz one of the most significant and beloved figures in the history of Afro-Cuban and broader Latin American popular music.

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• Shakira

  Shakira, born in Barranquilla, Colombia, became one of the best-selling Latin music artists in history, and her 1995 breakthrough album Pies Descalzos and subsequent releases established a distinctive style blending Colombian and broader Latin American musical traditions with rock and pop influences. Her 2001 album Laundry Service marked her deliberate crossover into English-language recording, and the singles "Whenever, Wherever" and "Underneath Your Clothes" became major international hits, establishing Shakira as one of the relatively few Latin artists to achieve major mainstream success in both Spanish and English-language markets simultaneously. Shakira's 2010 World Cup anthem "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)," recorded for the tournament held in South Africa, became one of the best-selling singles in music history and one of the most widely recognized official World Cup songs ever produced. Her combination of distinctive vocal style, incorporating Middle Eastern-influenced vocal ornamentation reflecting her Lebanese paternal heritage, along with her sustained bilingual commercial success across multiple musical eras, has made Shakira one of the most globally significant Latin American artists in popular music history.

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• Juan Gabriel

  Juan Gabriel wrote more than 1,800 songs across his career and became one of the most commercially successful and prolific songwriters in the history of Mexican popular music, with his compositions recorded by hundreds of other artists across ranchera, pop, and mariachi genres. His flamboyant stage performances and openly theatrical public persona, at a time when Mexican popular culture offered relatively little space for LGBTQ visibility, made Juan Gabriel a significant, if often indirectly discussed, figure in Mexican cultural conversations about sexuality, even though he never explicitly confirmed his own sexual orientation publicly during his lifetime. Juan Gabriel's 1990 duet album Juntos Otra Vez with singer Rocío Dúrcal, along with his decades of chart-topping solo recordings, made him one of the best-selling Mexican artists of all time, and his songs remain a foundational part of the modern ranchera and Mexican pop repertoire. His sudden death in 2016 prompted an outpouring of national grief across Mexico and the broader Latin American diaspora, and his combination of prolific songwriting, sustained commercial dominance across five decades, and his complicated but significant cultural role made him one of the most beloved figures in Mexican music history.

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• Vicente Fernández

  Vicente Fernández, widely regarded as the greatest ranchera singer in the genre's history, recorded more than 50 studio albums across a career spanning six decades and became the defining voice of traditional Mexican ranchera music for generations of listeners across Mexico and the broader Mexican diaspora. His deep, powerful vocal style and his commitment to performing in traditional charro attire — the elaborate, formal horseman's outfit associated with Mexican rural tradition — made Fernández a defining visual and musical symbol of Mexican cultural identity, particularly for Mexican communities living outside the country. Fernández's decades-long career included extensive touring across the United States, where his concerts drew some of the largest Latin music audiences ever assembled, reflecting his deep connection to Mexican American communities specifically, many of whom viewed his music as a direct connection to Mexican cultural heritage. His farewell tour, concluding with a final concert in 2016 at Guadalajara's Estadio Akron in front of a massive crowd, capped a career that established Fernández as the most significant figure in ranchera music history, and his son Alejandro Fernández and grandson Alex Fernández have continued the family's musical legacy in the genre.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.