Timba
Located in 2 routes
Aggressive, harmonically dense Cuban dance music that supercharges salsa with funk, jazz, rumba, batá and hip-hop, built on a hyperactive bass, layered piano tumbaos and a battery of congas, timbales and drum kit driving abrupt gear-changes. Arrangements pile up long, escalating montunos with breakdowns, tension-and-release 'bombas,' rapid coro fireworks and virtuosic horn and keyboard writing, at high energy and often blistering tempos. Vocals mix streetwise slang, humor, sexual bravado and social commentary in rapid-fire soneos. It is the raw, athletic, distinctly Cuban answer to New York salsa, made for hardcore dancers.
History
Timba coalesced in Havana at the end of the 1980s as conservatory-trained musicians fused the songo of Los Van Van with jazz-funk and Afro-Cuban folklore; flutist José Luis Cortés and his band NG La Banda are widely credited with crystallizing the style around 1988–1990 with a brash horn 'metales de terror' and streetwise anthems. Through the 1990s La Charanga Habanera, Manolín 'El Médico de la Salsa,' Issac Delgado, Paulito FG, Bamboleo and Klimax made it the sound of Cuba's special-period dancefloors, powered by the tourist-era boom. Though largely walled off from the US market by the embargo, timba built a devoted international following and remains the beating heart of contemporary Cuban popular dance music.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Vincenzo Perna, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (2005)
- Robin Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (2006)
- Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music (2004)