Lo Mato (1973) – Willie Colón & Héctor Lavoe

Lo Mato (Si No Compra Este LP) is a salsa album recorded by the New York duo of trombonist Willie Colón and vocalist Héctor Lavoe and released in 1973 by Fania Records. Built for the dance floor, it sets Colón's blunt, confrontational trombone against Lavoe's rapid, improvisatory phrasing — the friction that defined the pair's sound and the broader New York salsa they helped carry to international audiences. The eighth studio album credited jointly to the two, it became their fourth recording to be certified gold^[1], confirming their place among the acts that drove salsa's commercial breakthrough.

The Colón–Lavoe partnership

Colón and Lavoe formed their Puerto Rican salsa duo in New York in 1966 — Colón on trombone and backing vocals, Lavoe on lead voice and maracas — and were among the first to bring the New York Latin and salsa sound to a global audience^[3]. Colón cultivated a deliberately rebellious, aggressive approach that broke with the era's tidier arrangements, while Lavoe answered with long, quick vocal lines delivered with an unforced naturalness, originality, and sly mischief. That contrast — heavy, almost combative brass beneath agile, talkative singing — is the engine of the music, handing dancers crisp horn accents to break on and a restless vocal line that keeps the rhythm pressing forward. Across the late 1960s and 1970s the partnership helped cement salsa's popularity, and hits such as "Che Che Colé" and "La murga" carried their sound across Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States.

A place in the gold-record run

Lo Mato extended an unbroken streak of certified successes. Cosa Nuestra (1970) was the first Colón–Lavoe album to reach gold, followed by La Gran Fuga (1971) and El Juicio (1972) before Lo Mato became the fourth^[4]. That lineage carried lasting prestige: Cosa Nuestra was later named one of the fifty greatest salsa albums of all time by Rolling Stone in October 2024, a marker of the company Lo Mato keeps^[2].

Cover art and title

Lo Mato is nearly as well known for its packaging as for its grooves. Both the title — Lo Mato (Si No Compra Este LP), or "I'll Kill Him (If You Don't Buy this LP)" — and the sleeve extend the duo's appetite for provocation. The cover reworks the January 1973 issue of National Lampoon, whose own cover had threatened, "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog." Here the figure held at gunpoint is José R. Padrón; the reverse sleeve flips the scene, putting Colón on the floor instead^[1].

The 2022 reissue

In 2022 the album was fully remastered and recut to vinyl from its original master tapes by engineer Kevin Gray, then reissued by Craft Latino — the reissue arm of Concord Music, which now holds the Fania catalog^[1]. Cutting from the original tapes preserved the recording's fidelity while returning Lo Mato to vinyl for a new generation of listeners and collectors, underscoring its standing as a touchstone of 1970s New York salsa.