Baltimore Salsa Blog

Genealogy of Salsa – Part 2

By Rafael Rios

With roots on the island of Cuba, Son Cubano is a style of music that became popular in the second half of the 19th century in the eastern province of Oriente. The earliest known son dates from the late 1500s (the oldest known son is "Son de la Má Teodora", from about the 1570s in Santiago de Cuba). It combines the structure and elements of Spanish canción and the Spanish guitar with African rhythms and percussion instruments of Bantu and Arara origin.

While originally a Cuban music style Son has also become a word used for rural traditional musical styles of Spanish speaking countries and apart from the Cuban variant called Son Cubano other son traditions exist in Mexico where for example the Son Jarocho of Veracruz and the Son Huasteca of the Sierra Huasteca constitute distinct popular musical styles where the concept has been fusioned with indigenous musical styles

In Cuba, the Rumba is a generic term covering a variety of musical rhythms and associated dances. The rumba has its influences in the music brought to Cuba by Spanish colonizers as well as Africans brought to Cuba as slaves.

Rumba arose in the Cuban provinces of Havana and Matanzas in the late 19th century. As a charged Afro-Cuban dance, Rumba was often suppressed and restricted because it was viewed as dangerous and lewd. A Cuban Rumba song often begins with the soloist singing meaningless syllables, which is called 'diana(s)'. He then may proceed to improvise lyrics stating the reason for holding the present Rumba ('decimar'; span.: to make ten-line stanzas), or instead tunes into a more or less fixed song such as: "Ave Maria Morena" (Yambú, Anónimo), "Llora Como Lloré" (Guaguancó, S. Ramirez), "Cuba Linda, Cuba Hermosa" (Guaguancó, R.Deza), "China de Oro (Laye Laye)" (Columbia), "Malanga (Murió)" (Columbia)".

The Mambo is a Cuban musical form and dance style. The word mambo (conversation with the gods) is the name of a priestess in Haitian Voodoo, derived from the language of the African slaves who were imported into the Caribbean

The history of modern mambo begins in 1938, when a danzón called "Mambo" was written by Orestes and Cachao López. The song was a danzón, descended from European social dances like the English country dance, French contredanse and Spanish contradanza, but it used rhythms derived from African folk music. The contradanza had arrived in Cuba in the 18th century, where it became known as danza and grew very

popular. The slang use of the term Rock and Roll in the United States meaning to dance is the same slang use of the term Mambo or Guaguanco in Puerto Rico. In a dance setting the male would ask the female; “Would you like to Mambo?” or “Do you like the Guaguanco?” This has the same meaning as asking, “Would you like to Rock and Roll?”

Montuno has two meanings in Salsa music. Firstly, it refers to the repeated part of the song, like a chorus/refrain in popular music. Here the choro (chorus/choir) and pregon (soloist) sing in a call and response style. There can also be instrumental solos in the montuno. Secondly, it is the name given to the particular style of piano playing common to Cuban/salsa music. It features a repeated syncopated piano vamp, often with chromatic root movement.

At its root, however, Salsa is a mixture of Spanish and African music, filtered through the music histories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and adapted by Latin jazz and Latin popular musicians for Latino populations with diverse musical tastes. The basic structure of a salsa song is based on the Cuban guaracha, beginning with a simple melody and followed by a montuno section in which the singers improvise in a call and response pattern. César Miguel Rondón, in El Libro de la Salsa, noted that Eddie Palmieri's arrangement of the trombone was always “in a way that they always sounded sour, with a peculiarly aggressive harshness,” and Isabelle Leymarie in her book Cuban Fire: The Story of the Salsa and Latin Jazz cites the same work and says that Rondón stressed that salsa's “trademark horn is the stalwart trombone, which carries the melody or plays counterpoint behind the singer.” Peter Manuel notes in his book Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae how New York and Puerto Rican salsa differs from the 1950s Cuban "Son" in various ways, such as the greater use of timbales and trombones, the occasional use of Puerto Rican elements like the declamatory exclamation le-lo-lai, its frequent lyrics about barrio life in New York and elsewhere, the "smooth" sound of the salsa romántica style that emerged in the 1980s.

The most important instrumentation in salsa is the percussion, which is played by a wide variety of instruments, including claves, cowbells, timbales and conga. Apart from percussion, other core instruments are the trumpets, trombones, and bass, usually an electric baby bass.. Other melodic instruments are commonly used as accompaniment, such as a guitar, the piano, and many others, all depending on the performing artists. 0Bands typically consist of up to a dozen people, one of whom serves as band leader, directing the music as it is played. Two to four players generally specialize in horns, while there are generally one or two choral singers and players of the bongo, conga, bass guitar, piano and timbales. The maracas, clave or guiro may also be played, typically by a vocalist. The bongocero will usually switch to a kind of bell called a campana (or bongo bell) for the montuno section of a song. Horns are typically either two trumpets or four trumpets or, most commonly, two trumpets with at least one saxophone or trombone. If you exclude the percussion section of a Salsa band and add as percussion a drum kit and a large wind section you will obtain a Swing Band. A smaller version of the Swing Band is called a Jazz Band.

Following this lineage we can say that the great grandparents of Salsa are: The English, French and Spanish Country Dances, which married the African dances and rhythms and produced as children the Danzon, Rumba and Son Cubano. The Danzon, Rumba and Son Cubano found that they could marry the Swing and Big Band Styles, which eventually gave birth to the Mambo. The Mambo met the Guaracha and Guaguanco and produced the Cha-Cha-Cha, Pachanga, and Boogaloo. Cha-Cha-Cha, Pachanga and Boogaloo met Jazz and Rock and Roll to give us our favorite -- the Salsa!