Salsoul Records

Founded1974

LocationNew York City

Key years1975–1983

Founders

Joseph Cayre and his brothers Kenneth and Stanley

LinksRYM

In May 1976 a record label did something no label had done: it put a DJ’s version of its own single on sale. Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent,” stretched by Walter Gibbons from the single’s four minutes to nine minutes forty-five, went into stores as a twelve-inch at $2.98, in a four-color jacket with a window cut to show the label — the first commercially available twelve-inch single, front-page news in the trades.¹ Ken Cayre, the label man who had watched Gibbons double the record in a booth, kept the story plain: “I asked Walter Gibbons to come in and remix it, and that was the first 12” we ever sold.”² Salsoul spent the next eight years running on that idea: it bought Philadelphia’s orchestra outright and sold the dancers’ versions of its records back to the dancers — a label built from the floor up.

Pantyhose to the mother label

The Cayre brothers arrived at disco from everywhere except music. Joseph, Kenneth, and Stanley had run a plastic-injection-molding factory and a Florida pantyhose operation before paying a million-dollar advance for the US rights to Spanish-language eight-track cassettes. The distribution firm they built on that license, Caytronics, made them the country’s Latin-music middlemen, and by the early seventies they were recording their own acts on a label called Mericana.³ The word that named the next label came from one of those acts. Joe Bataan, the Afro-Filipino king of Latin soul, conceived “Salsoul” — street language for the urban Latino culture that ran salsa and soul together — and carried the first releases himself.⁴ The label proper started in business in 1974, run from New York by the three brothers, with Ken, the youngest, on the music.⁵

The Philadelphia raid

The sound was bought wholesale from Philadelphia. Ken Cayre went to the source and met Vince Montana Jr., the vibraphonist of MFSB: “I met Vince Montana, who was the vibes player, and he introduced me to the rhythm section and we recorded three songs. One of the songs I called the ‘Salsoul Hustle’; I called the band the Salsoul Orchestra on the Salsoul label.” The hustle record became the label’s first hit in 1975.⁶ The players came willingly, because Philadelphia’s system underpaid its engine room; the guitarist TJ Tindall put the grievance in one line: “[I] made more money doin’ Wranglers commercials than I did on [MFSB sessions].”⁷ The defectors Cayre lured included the Baker-Harris-Young rhythm core, the string arranger Don Renaldo, and Bunny Sigler, and by October 1975 the first Salsoul Orchestra album was in stores a month ahead of the O’Jays’ Family Reunion — Gamble and Huff’s own orchestra, in effect, recording for New York money.⁸ Montana came with a founder’s pedigree; he had helped Joe Tarsia set up Sigma Sound itself.⁹

The booth on the payroll

The commercial twelve-inch made the remix a product, and Salsoul turned remixing into a staff position: Gibbons first, and after him Larry Levan, who finished the “I Got My Mind Made Up” mix Gibbons walked away from and rode Instant Funk’s record to No. 1 on the R&B and dance charts.¹⁰ Levan kept remixing for the label into the eighties — Loleatta Holloway, First Choice, Skyy, Inner Life — and Shep Pettibone’s early-eighties mixes carried the catalog into the next genre’s hands: his 1983 rework of First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder” became a founding document of the house floor.¹¹ The label’s remix ledger reads now like a succession chart of the DJ booth itself.

The roster

• Double Exposure — the Philadelphia vocal group whose “Ten Percent” carried the format into stores
• First Choice — on Gold Mind, Norman Harris’s Salsoul-distributed imprint: “Doctor Love” (1977) and the eternally recut “Let No Man Put Asunder”
• Loleatta Holloway — the label’s great voice and its unluckiest: “I couldn’t get a major hit single on her,” Cayre admitted¹²
• Instant Funk — Bunny Sigler’s funk unit, the label’s R&B chart-topper
• The Salsoul Orchestra — the house band as marquee act, strings by the section
• Skyy — Randy Muller’s Brooklyn group, whose “Call Me” (1981) took the label into the boogie era
• Inner Life — Jocelyn Brown’s group, a Levan remix staple
• Cándido — the conga master whose 1979 Salsoul sides became after-hours canon

The close and the long echo

The founders left the business faster than the records did. The Cayres wound recorded music down in 1984 for a home-video venture, and the label went defunct in 1985 after issuing some 300 singles.¹³ The catalog then out-earned the company. Holloway’s “Love Sensation” (1980), written and produced by Dan Hartman, mixed by Tom Moulton, a dance No. 1 in its own year, became the raw material of two later hits: Black Box’s “Ride On Time” (1989) took her vocal to No. 1 in Britain without crediting her, and paid her a settlement; “Good Vibrations” (1991) credited her and handed her the only US pop No. 1 of her life.¹⁴ The family relaunched the imprint in 1992 and licensed the catalog to Verse Music Group in 2010. In June 2015 BMG bought Verse whole — Salsoul and West End among some 40,000 songs and recordings — and the masters keep returning in remastered and re-edited editions.¹⁵ A label that lasted eleven years has now spent four decades as source material.

Key records

• “Salsoul Hustle” (1975, the Salsoul Orchestra) — the three-song Philadelphia session that named the label’s band
• “Ten Percent” (Walter Gibbons 12” Mix) (1976, Double Exposure) — the first twelve-inch single sold to the public
• “Doctor Love” (1977, First Choice) — Gold Mind’s disco peak
• “I Got My Mind Made Up (You Can Get It Girl)” (Larry Levan version) (1978, Instant Funk) — the remix chair passing from Gibbons to Levan
• “Love Sensation” (1980, Loleatta Holloway) — the raw material of two later No. 1s
• “Let No Man Put Asunder” (Shep Pettibone 12” Mix) (1983, First Choice) — the catalog crossing into house

See also

• Paradise Garage — Levan’s room: the floor his Salsoul mixes were built for
• Sampling — the authorship argument the label’s twelve-inch started, and the economy its catalog ended up feeding

Footnotes

1. “Ten Percent,” Wikipedia (accessed August 20, 2026) — released May 1976, written by Allan Felder and T.G. Conway, produced by Norman Harris; “Gibbons’s remix of ‘Ten Percent’ was the first commercially available 12-inch single,” citing Billboard, May 15, 1976; the $2.98 price, the four-color jacket with center window, and the stretch “from a ‘four-minute song into a nine-minute-forty-five-second-cut-and-paste roller coaster.‘” The charts: R&B No. 63, Hot 100 No. 54, Dance No. 2. Promotional-only twelve-inches had circulated to DJs for about a year before it; the format’s accidental invention is told at Disco. ↩

2. Ken Cayre’s Red Bull Music Academy interview, January 2019 (accessed August 20, 2026), quoted verbatim; the fuller booth scene, with Cayre watching Gibbons work two promotional copies at Galaxy 21, is told at Walter Gibbons. ↩

3. The same RBMA interview (accessed August 20, 2026) — the plastic-injection-molding machines, the “one million dollar advance to get the US license” for Spanish eight-tracks, Caytronics as the distribution arm, and Mericana: “We started recording our own Latin music on the Mericana label.” ↩

4. Salsoul Records, Wikipedia (accessed August 20, 2026) — “Salsoul was street lingo for the musical culture of urban Latinos who were listening to soul music and combining it with salsa music”; the name “conceived by artist Joe Bataan,” whose “The Bottle” single and Afro-Filipino album opened the label. ↩

5. Salsoul Records, Wikipedia — “founded by three brothers, Joseph, Kenneth, and Stanley Cayre,” started in business 1974; Ken as “the youngest of the three brothers” per the RBMA interview (both accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

6. The RBMA interview (accessed August 20, 2026), all three sentences quoted verbatim; “Salsoul Hustle” as the label’s first hit, written, arranged, and produced by Montana in 1975, per Salsoul Records, Wikipedia. ↩

7. Red Bull Music Academy Daily’s Sound of Philadelphia feature, January 2015 (accessed August 20, 2026), quoted verbatim, brackets as carried. ↩

8. The same RBMA feature (accessed August 20, 2026) — Cayre “lure[d] Montana and other MFSB members — including the Baker-Harris-Young core, string arranger Don Renaldo, and the talented but underpromoted Philly legend Bunny Sigler”; “By October 1975, the first self-titled Salsoul Orchestra record hit shelves, just a month before the release of The O’Jays’ Family Reunion.” ↩

9. The same feature (accessed August 20, 2026) — Montana “had a hand in helping recording engineer Joseph Tarsia set up the original Sigma Sound Studios location in Philadelphia.” ↩

10. The Gibbons walk-away and the Levan hand-off are told at Walter Gibbons; the “#1 R&B and dance hit” per the RBMA Philadelphia feature (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

11. Levan’s Salsoul remix run across Holloway, the Salsoul Orchestra, First Choice, Aurra, Instant Funk, Skyy, and Inner Life per the compilation Larry Levan — The Definitive Salsoul Mixes 1978–1983; the Pettibone mixes of “Let No Man Put Asunder” (1983, with a Frankie Knuckles remix on the flip) per the single’s Discogs record; Knuckles riding the First Choice record at the Warehouse is told at Walter Gibbons. ↩

12. The RBMA Cayre interview (accessed August 20, 2026), quoted verbatim. ↩

13. Salsoul Records, Wikipedia (accessed August 20, 2026) — “went defunct in 1985 and was relaunched in 1992”; “about 300 singles”; the Cayres’ 1984 pivot to the GoodTimes home-video business per the company’s standard record. ↩

14. “Love Sensation,” Wikipedia (accessed August 20, 2026) — written and produced by Dan Hartman, mixed by Tom Moulton, No. 1 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart in September 1980; the “Ride On Time” sampling, the litigation, and the “Good Vibrations” credit giving Holloway her highest US pop placement. The fuller “Ride On Time” account, with Holloway’s side of the money, is told at Disco. ↩

15. BMG’s acquisition announcement, June 29, 2015 (accessed August 20, 2026) — Verse Music Group’s catalogs, Salsoul and West End Records among them, “rights to around 40,000 songs and recordings”; the 2010 Verse license per Salsoul Records, Wikipedia. ↩