Salsa
Located in 2 routes
The umbrella dance music of the Latino Caribbean diaspora, built on the Cuban son and guaguancó clave (usually the 2-3 or 3-2 son clave) and driven by a percussion battery of congas, bongó with cowbell, timbales, güiro and claves. Piano montunos and a syncopated tumbao bass lock into stabbing brass — trumpets, trombones and saxes — while a lead sonero trades improvised soneos with a coro in call-and-response, typically at a hot 180–200 bpm feel. The mood ranges from barrio street grit to romantic sweep, and arrangements move from a sung verse into an open montuno where the band and singer improvise and the mambo horn section explodes. It is Afro-Cuban rhythm re-imagined through the energy and hustle of urban New York and San Juan.
History
Salsa crystallized in late-1960s New York when Cuban, Puerto Rican and Nuyorican musicians recast the son, mambo and guaracha for a new generation, catalyzed by Jerry Masucci and Johnny Pacheco's Fania Records and its Fania All-Stars, whose 1971 Cheetah club dates and the 1972 film 'Our Latin Thing' broke the sound worldwide. Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe fused trombone-heavy arrangements with jíbaro and barrio themes, Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto pushed a harder jazz-tinged attack, and Celia Cruz became its queen after joining Pacheco; Rubén Blades brought literary, socially conscious storytelling on 1978's landmark 'Siembra.' The music spread to Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and beyond, splintering in the 1980s into the softer salsa romántica and later a salsa dura revival, and remains a living tradition through Marc Anthony, Gilberto Santa Rosa and Víctor Manuelle.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- César Miguel Rondón, The Book of Salsa (2008)
- John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tinge (1979)
- Ed Morales, The Latin Beat (2003)