Deriving harmony from Salsa music and disparate dance movement: Mambo - Modern - Afro Cuban - Latin Jazz - Hip Hop - Tango - Ballroom - Ballet - Swing - Jazz
"Salsa is more than just a good time, wiggling your butt and working up a sweat. It is all that but it is also much more. To many displaced young Latinos all over the world, salsa is a validation - it is home, a flag, and grandma. Kids who are constantly told that they are different because they are Latinos, despite being first-, second-, or even third-generation US or whatever born, will cling to this music for answers. It is a cultural place where they can belong, a socio-political movement, a platform to tell our stories and communicate across the broad expanses that we inhabit.
Salsa continues the ancient traditions of aural learning, of cleansing your sorrows in dance as your body is carried away by the beat. It is the reconciliation of the three roots that make up our Latino culture: the African, European, and native Caribbean roots.
Salsa is a social, musical, cultural, hybrid force that has embraced jazz, folklore, pop and everything else that is relevant or could stand in its evolutionary path. It is the basis for rap/hiphop, house and dance (disco). It is the groundwork that made Gloria Estefan and Antonio Banderas palatable to the world...."
--Willie Colon 1
'Salsa is what you eat; mambo is what you dance' is Tito Puente's pained response to the word salsa. Unfortunately for him, the term is here to stay. Like "jazz" and "blues" it is one of those musical catch-alls - totally confusing and thoroughly useful. And for record stores, a godsend. Tell someone you're going to a salsa club and you reveal the language, the geography, the high-heeled dress code, and the fact that you're about to have an energetic, endorphin-loaded night out.
Using the language of the kitchen for music is already well established in jazz in expletives like "cooking!" and "tasty!", and there are as many theories about the origin of the word "salsa" as there are styles of music included in the category. The top Cuban son group in the 1930's, Sexteto Habanero, recoreded a song still performed today called "Echale salsita!" - literally, "Put the sauce on it!" - and the Cuban superstar Beny More signed off his explosive shows in the forties and fifties with a sparky catchphrase, "Hola, salsa!", which translates limply as "Hey, sauce!"
The first self-conscious use of "salsa" to describe modernized Cuban dance music came in 1966, when a Venezuelan radio DJ, Danilo Phidiad Escalona, launched a show called 'La hora del sabor, la salsa y el bembe', an untranslatable phrase, but literally 'The hour of flavor, spiciness and liturgy' - music for body and soul. By the end of the 1970's, the word was synonymous with the sound of Latin New York, as created by Fania Records. One of Fania's trademarks was its use of distinctive and brilliantly graphic album covers, designed by a cocky young Puerto Rican New Yorker called Izzy Sanabria who also doubled up as MC to the legendary Fania All Stars supergroup. All through their shows he would bark 'Salsa!', first to introduce soloists and then to drive them on. Throughout the seventies, in his pioneering magazine "Latin NY" Sanabria used the word 'salsa' to describe the music he covered: Latin New York's take on Cuban dance music, played mostly by Puerto Rican New York musicians. Fania's salsa set the standards for the rest of Latin America.
Today the term 'salsa' covers most kinds of Latin dance music, not just its immediate Cuban ancestors (son, guaracha, mambo, guajira). Even the very different Dominican merengues and Colombian cumbias are included in its embrace, for the convenience of record shops and review pages. The unsexy term 'Latin Music' is an alternative, but is confusing because it also includes the myriad different styles coming out of Brazin and the explosion of Latin pop and rock being produced in South America, particularly in Argentina.
Like much in the world, the origins of salsa begin in Africa. Slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1873 and Puerto Rico in 1898, ending a three hundred year span of servitude to Spanish settlers by peoples from Mozambique, the Congo, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Cameroun.
Once in Cuba, the slaves were originally divided into mixed tribal groups, but this created such debility and depression and, more importantly for their owners, the loss of labor, that the system was rearranged along ethnic lines, enabling the slaves to preserve some of their traditional music and religions.
The survival in Cuba of African religions - santeria, abakua and palo - is largely due to the fact that slaves were able to retain the languages of the sacred drums concealed in their religious ceremonies. The drum music and singing associated with each of these cults has trickled into popular music and forms a significant strand in salsa history.
Until the early part of the twentieth century, these sacred religious ceremonies were a close secret in the African community. But gradually the island's great percussionists and singers emerged from the neighborhoods with the strongest santeria and abakua traditions, and brought their musical skills with them. Gradually, even the most sacred instruments found their way into the dancehalls. This began a union of many musical styles in Cuba (such as 'son') that helped develop what we know today as salsa.
The music of salsa is directly descended from the tradition of 'son', born and nurtured on the Eastern end of Cuba during the period of its liberation from Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Son is the first truly homegrown, Afro-Cuban style, a rolling syncopated song and dance music, a collision of African rhythms brought by slaves with the poetry and guitars of Spain. 'Salsa is son' is a mantra repeated all over the salsa world.
Of all the non-religious dances and music performed in Cuba today, rumba (not to be confused with rhumba) is the closest to the slaves' legacy. The rumba's dance steps, rhythms and instruments are the secular relics of the slave's religious rituals. Rumba is music played on a set of tuned wooden boxes or conga drums, accompanied by hand percussion (guiros, claves), and singers led by the akpwon, the lead singer. The dancers moves affect the rhythms, and vice versa. Many African rhythms formed the repertoire, but today it has been distilled down to three - guaguanco, yambu and columbia - each with its own music and choreography.
The story of the transformation of Cuban music from the salon to the street follows several routes, one of the most defined being from the contradanza and danzon to the mambo and cha-cha-cha. The contradanza derives from the French contredanse. The latter arrived in 1791, when Saint Domingue (now Haiti/Santo Domingo) erupted in revolution, and French noble families, together with their servants, fled to the south east coast of Cuba. The contredanse, the favorite music and dance of the French, had begun in the English courts but had been souped up with African flavors in Saint Domingue. The Cubans renamed it 'contradanza cubana', then simply contradanza. From the contradanza emerged the danza, one of the first Creole forms - faster and more tuneful, with niftier steps and a tendency for couples to dance by themselves.
Cuban musical styles eventually met, mixed and grew in the early 1900's in Havana. Clarinet and brass solos were added to danza and called danzon. Brass was removed and violins added and called charanga francesa. Vocals were added later with bass making mambo and cha-cha-cha. As soon as Cubans and Puerto Ricans began immigrating to New York, the stage was set for the grand mixing of musical traditions: salsa.
The significant difference between Puerto Rico and Cuba is the extent of American involvement.. In 1898 the US government assisted Puerto Rico's war of independence from the Spanish and then occupied the island. The 1917 Jones Act decreed that Puerto Ricans were US citizens, free to come and go from the mainland, obliged to serve in the US forces and speak English, but unable to vote. That moment marked the conception fo "El Barrio' and Spanish Harlem in New York, the start of the mass exodus from the island.
The traditional musics of Puerto Rico include danza, created in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan from an infusion of the French contredanse with the flavors of the Caribbean, bomba and plena, and musica jibara. A modern Puerto Rican sound began to develop within the first decades of the century, when contact with American musicians began.
The bomba and the plena are tied to the history of the island's black population. Their ancestral homes are in the two areas most densely populated by slaves: the norther coastal town of Loiza Aldea and the southern port of Ponce. During the years of slavery, Loiza attracted workers from the countryside on Christian holidays for riotous bomba sessions. Traditionally, the bomba drummers sit in a line, each playing a different sized instrument, criss-crossing with patterns from smaller drums, maraca and wooden sticks. The rhythm is strong and propulsive, with a syncopated African lurch. The singers chant onomatopoeic fragments of African words and improvise in imitation of the drum. The dancers move in a circle in front of the drummers and as the music builds one emerges and glides toward the musicians for a solo. At that point, the dancer's movements dictate the drummer's patterns.
Plenas first appeared in Ponce at the end of the nineteenth century when a pair of English-speaking singers called John Clarke and Catherine George - 'Los Ingleses' - arrived from Barbados or St. Kitts and settled in Ponce's black ghetto - known, ironically, as 'La Joya del Castillo' (Jewel of the Castle). The couple busked in the streets with their daughter Carolina, who played the pandereta (tambourine with no bells). They played guitar and tambourine, and composed songs to local music, poignant and humorous commentaries on the daily life of the black working-class people. The songs were knows as plenas, possibly a Spanish version of 'Play now!' Like calypso and son, plena serves as a musical newspaper and scandal sheet.
The jibaros ('those who escape civilization') occupy a romantic and mythic place in Puerto Rican culture. With their wildly upturned straw hats and 5-stringed cuatro guitars, they represent an idealized rustic lifestyle which has not existed for centuries. The original jibaros were communities of Spanish peasant farmers and escaped African slaves, who lived in farming villages in the mountains. The jibaro songs (the equivalent of Cuban's guajira music) are accompanied by the locally invented cuatro guitar (played with a plectrum), a guiro and sometimes a bongo drum. Contemporary jibaros have carried the atmosphere of the Caribbean countryside into many New York salsa hits, particularly those by Willie Colon.
A great cultural melting pot was the only stage for which the mixing of such various musics could blend to create what we know today as salsa. That stage was New York.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans streamed off the boats and onto the streets at Battery Point, south Manhattan. The foundations were laid for America's largest immigrant community, which would provide New York with a Latin music scene in which Puerto Ricans were the main players. Many Cubans left to New York to escape the civil war against the dictator General Machado, but although the Cubans set the trends, most musicians were Puerto Rican.
Then, in 1931, Don Azpiazu's full-scale Cuban Orchestra unleashed "El Manicero" (The Peanut Vendor) from the stage of the prestigious Palace Theater on Broadway and launched a world craze for Latin music- for rhumbas, congas, and boleros - which has waxed and waned in different guises ever since.
Eventually Latin musicians would introduce to the mix the mambo, cha-cha-cha, bomba, plena, son, and charanga. They found their way to Hollywood, to the great jazz bands of the Swing Era (creating Latin Jazz), to the classiest clubs in New York, and along with them brought the roots of their national musicology and dance.
The 1950's saw Cubans immigrating to New York and Miami in mass numbers bringing new rhythms and styles. This was also the period of rock and roll and Latin bands shifted their material to keep up with the new trend. The 1960's saw the introduction of Fania Records, a label that would become the most influential in Latin music's history and that would remold Cuban music into a sound more appropriate to Latin New York, the sound they called 'Salsa'. By this time, Latin music was being popularized throughout the world.
The foundations of salsa are unarguably in Cuba and the capital of modern salsa is New York, with Miami as its satellite town. But from there, salsa has spread throughout the world. You'll find rich salsa scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Montreal, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, throughout Africa, Korea, Japan, China, Australia, and back.2
History Links:
salsa origins
history videos
more perspective
uk article
history of club salsa
izzy sanabria speaks
world of salsa info
more history
new york latin jazz history
martin morales speaks
latin pop and salsa
great history links
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