About the history of salsa
From Thorsten's Salsa Pages
Salsa music or "salsa" is a Latin music generic/umbrella term developed in New York City specifically during the 1970s that was used to describe mainly Afro-Cuban popular Latin dance music generally utilizing rhythms from Cuba and Puerto Rico, particularly son and guaracha. On occasion salsa bands will play other genres, such as son montuno, guaguancó, bolero, danzón, plena, bomba, cumbia and others. Bands have historically played entire songs in these genres or in some instances shift into these genres for a few bars for rhythmic variation. However, typically salsa songs most approximate the Cuban guaracha genre in terms of structure and tempo.
Salsa songs are generally not played exactly, note for note, as a traditional Cuban guaracha. This is because of the music's evolution. Essentially, Cuban music in the form of son and guaracha genres began reaching the United States as early as the late 1920s, though Don Azpiazu's band, with Antonio Machín as lead singer, is credited by some authors with introducing Cuban music to the United States with the song El manicero. In New York, Latino immigrants from Cuba and Puerto Rico began playing this music. That particular phenomenon is responsible for the development of salsa. Basically, this community began playing Cuban music and continued to do so, adopting songs and genres as these were created in Cuba. For example, during the 1940s Pérez Prado popularized the mambo and soon the New York musicians were playing it. These musicians also began playing chachachá after Cuban violinist created the genre in 1949 with the song La engañadora.
What happened was that the New York musicians conserved the basic structure of these Cuban dance genres while adding their own elaborations. Innovators in this regard include Tito Puente, born in 1923 in Harlem to Puerto Rican parents; "Pin" Madera, a saxophonist and arranger for the Machito band; René Hernández, pianist and arranger for the Machito bands; José Curbelo, pianist and bandleader; and other key figures. The recordings of these musicians during the 1940s reveal a new , more expansive approach to harmony than what many Cuban bands played at the time. The changes were significant but not so much that it could be argued that New York musicians of the era were playing a different kind of music than bands in Cuba. That is because the basic song structure and patterns played on the percussion instruments, along with general horn voicings, were all broadly similar. The difference lay in how the musicians in New York interpreted the same rhythms as musicians based in Cuba. That particular New York interpretation or approach would later be called salsa. Despite several authors claiming that salsa is some kind of amalgamation of rock, Cuban music, plena from Puerto Rico, Brazilian music and who knows what else, this is simply not the case. Listening to the music will reveal that. Marc Anthony's album Contra la corriente, for example, a popular salsa album, does not have rock phrases worked in. It does not have bossa nova figures nor plena nor cumbia nor any of the genres certain people cite as being part of salsa. Structurally, the songs are those of guarachas and they have the faster tempos of a guaracha. That said, their sound is far from traditional. The horn voicings are modern, keyboards add to the harmonic layers: this is not by any means traditional guaracha as played, for example, by singer Beny Moré or the Buena Vista Social Club. It very much reflects the sound and approach of New York-based Latin musicians, a sound which has become highly stylized and developed since the 1930s.
Salsa is essentially Cuban in stylistic origin,[1] though it is also a hybrid of Puerto Rican and other Latin styles mixed with pop, jazz, rock, and R&B.[2] Salsa is the primary music played at Latin dance clubs and is the "essential pulse of Latin music", according to author Ed Morales,[3] while music author Peter Manuel called it the "most popular dance (music) among Puerto Rican and Cuban communities, (and in) Central and South America", and "one of the most dynamic and significant pan-American musical phenomena of the 1970s and 1980s".[4] Modern salsa remains a dance-oriented genre and is closely associated with a style of salsa dancing.
Source: Wikipedia
See also Wikipedia about Salsa Music
