New York Salsa
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The original, defining strain of salsa born in the barrios of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx, marrying Cuban son, guaracha and mambo to the swing, attitude and hustle of New York's Puerto Rican and Nuyorican communities. Trombone- and trumpet-driven horn sections snap over piano montunos, tumbao bass and a full percussion battery, and soneros improvise sharp, streetwise verses in Spanish and Spanglish. Arrangements favor hard swing, tight coros and combustible live energy, with themes of barrio life, migration and identity. It is salsa's fountainhead — the sound the whole genre grew out of.
History
New York salsa took shape in the mid-1960s as Nuyorican and Cuban musicians reworked Afro-Cuban dance music for a new urban audience, and it was industrialized by Jerry Masucci and Johnny Pacheco's Fania Records, founded in 1964. The Fania All-Stars' 1971 Cheetah concerts, the film 'Our Latin Thing' and a run of classic albums by Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz and Rubén Blades made the city the genre's world capital through the 1970s. As the scene aged and diversified into romántica and revival strains, New York remained salsa's spiritual home, its clubs, orchestras and heritage still anchoring the international salsa world.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- César Miguel Rondón, The Book of Salsa (2008)
- Vernon Boggs, Salsiology (1992)
- Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000)