Salsa, while it has clear and strong Cuban roots,
was developed within the Puerto Rican/Latino community of New York
City and is an example of cross-fertilization in the Latin music
experience in the United States. Furthermore, the birth of the record
label Fania in 1964 had a great impact on the emergence of Salsa
as a Latin music style. Fania organized jam sessions known as descargas
at The Red Garter in the Village, which paved the way for the emergence
of salsa in New York.
Salsa descends from the tradition of son, which was born and nurtured
in the countryside of eastern Cuba in the mid-1860s. Son has been
described by Sue Steward and Willie Colon as, “a collision
of African rhythms with the poetry and guitars of Spain,”
because the original trios combined, “the guajira guitar music
of the Spanish peasant farmers and the Afro-religious music of the
former slaves” (24). But once son reached Havana around 1920,
it absorbed the influences of American jazz and popular music. The
original trios expanded adding a bass(marímbula), bongos,
and a trumpet to the basic instruments—a nine-stringed guitar
called a tres, maracas, and claves—while evolving first into
quartets and finally into septets, as instruments were added, to
cater to more sophisticated audiences.
By 1940 New York City had evolved into a center for Puerto Rican-Nuyorican
culture as a result of a continued migration of Puerto Ricans to
the U.S. mainland fueled by poverty and unemployment in the Island.
Thus, during the 1940s and 50s, Puerto Rican musicians and audiences
dominated the city’s Latin music scene. One consequence is
that the bulk of Puerto Rican popular music in those decades was
written and recorded in New York rather than in Puerto Rico due
to the availability of recording technology and a large number of
consumers of Puerto Rican music in the Mainland. By the end of this
decade, emerging Puerto Rican bandleaders, such as Tito Puente and
Tito Rodriguez outpaced their counterparts in the Island in production
and innovation, and they achieved mainstream successes during the
mambo and cha-cha-chá craze of the 1950s.
Salsa, a highly danceable, rhythmically sophisticated, and compelling
music, developed in the late 1960s as Nuyoricans began to assert
the uniqueness of their own culture, and the influx of Cuban exiles
reached a critical mass in the U.S. in that decade. It is no surprise
that one of the early exponents of salsa is the percussionist and
bandleader Tito Puente, an innovator of the New York Latin dance
music scene during the two previous decades. Salsa bands required
a large number of percussion instruments—guiro, maracas, bongos,
timbales, conga drums, claves, and cow bells—a bass, a horn
section, a chorus, and a lead vocalist, and Puente had the experience
and resources to pull one together. Other major contributors to
the boom of salsa in the 1970s and 1980s are Eddie and Charlie Palmieri,
Cheo Feliciano, Ray Barretto, Héctor Lavoe, and Willie Colón.
To familiarize yourself with salsa and to explore its basic rhythmic
elements, visit the following web sites:
http://www.musicofpuertorico.com/en/cheo_feliciano.html
http://www.musicofpuertorico.com/en/ray_barretto.html
http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/barretto.html
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Listen to "El ratón" by Cheo Feliciano
and comment on its themes and instrumentation.
Listen to "Cocinando Suave” and “Summertime”
by Ray Barretto and comment on the instrumentation and rhythms.
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