Breif History of Salsa music

 

Salsa music is a popular dance music genre that initially arose in New York City during the 1960s. Salsa is the product of various musical genres including the Cuban son montuno, guaracha, cha cha chá, mambo, and to a certain extent bolero, and the Puerto Rican bomba and plena. Latin jazz, which was also developed in New York City, has had a significant influence on salsa arrangers, piano guajeos, and instrumental soloists.

 

Salsa is primarily Cuban son, itself a fusion of Spanish canción and guitar and Afro-Cuban percussion, merged with North American music styles such as jazz. Salsa also occasionally incorporates elements of rock, R&B, and funk. All of these non-Cuban elements are grafted onto the basic Cuban son montuno template when performed within the context of salsa.

 

The first salsa bands were predominantly Cubans and Puerto Ricans who moved to New York since the 1920s. The music eventually spread throughout Colombia and the rest of the Americas. Ultimately, it became a global phenomenon. Some of the founding salsa artists were Johnny Pacheco (the creator of the Fania All-Stars), Celia Cruz, Ray Barretto, Rubén Blades, Willie Colón, Larry Harlow, Roberto Roena, Bobby Valentín, Eddie Palmieri, and Héctor Lavoe

 

Salsa as a musical term:

Salsa means 'sauce' in the Spanish language, and carries connotations of the spiciness common in Latin and Caribbean cuisine. 

 

In the 20th century, salsa acquired a musical meaning in both English and Spanish. In this sense salsa has been described as a word with "vivid associations". Cubans and Puerto Ricans in New York have used the term analogously to swing or soul music. In this usage salsa connotes a frenzied, "hot" and wild musical experience that draws upon or reflects elements of Latin culture, regardless of the style.

 

Various music writers and historians have traced the use of salsa to different periods of the 20th century. Max Salazar traces the word back to the early 1930s, when Ignacio Piñeiro composed "Échale salsita", a Cuban son protesting tasteless food. While Salazar describes this song as the origin of salsa meaning "danceable Latin music", Ed Morales describes the usage in the same song as a cry from Piñeiro to his band, telling them to increase the tempo to "put the dancers into high gear". Morales claims that later in the 1930s, vocalist Beny Moré would shout salsa during a performance "to acknowledge a musical moment's heat, to express a kind of cultural nationalist sloganeering [and to celebrate the] 'hotness' or 'spiciness' of Latin American cultures". World music author Sue Steward claims salsa was originally used in music as a "cry of appreciation for a particularly piquant or flashy solo". She cites the first use in this manner to a Venezuelan radio DJ named Phidias Danilo Escalona; In 1955 Cheo Marquetti created a new band called Conjunto Los Salseros and recorded some new songs ( Sonero and Que no muera el son ).In 1955 José Curbelo recorded some others salsa songs (La familia, La la la and Sun sun sun ba bae). The contemporary meaning of salsa as a musical genre can be traced back to New York City Latin music promoter Izzy Sanabria.

 

In 1973, a the television hosted Salsa show which was the first reference to this particular music as salsa. was using [the term] salsa, but the music wasn't defined by that. The music was still defined as Latin music. And that was a very, very broad category because it even includes mariachi music. It includes everything. So salsa defined this particular type of music... It's a name that everyone could pronounce.

 

Sanabria's Latin New York magazine was an English language publication. Consequently, his promoted events were covered in The New York Times, as well as Time and Newsweek magazines. They reported on this "new" phenomenon taking New York by storm—salsa.

 

But promotion certainly wasn't the only factor in the music's success, as Sanabria makes clear: "Musicians were busy creating the music but played no role in promoting the name salsa."Johnny Pacheco, the creative director and producer of Fania Records, molded New York salsa into a tight, polished and commercially successful sound.

 

The unprecedented appeal of New York salsa, particularly the "Fania sound", led to its adoption across Latin America and elsewhere.

Globally, the term salsa has eclipsed the original names of the various Cuban musical genres it encompasses. Ironically, Cuban-based music was promoted more effectively worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s by the salsa industry, than by Cuba. For a brief time in the early 1990s a fair number of Cuban musicians embraced the term, calling their own music salsa Cubana. The practice did not catch on, however.

 

Issues of identity and ownership

There is considerable controversy surrounding the term salsa and the idea that it is its own distinct genre. Several New York musicians who had already been performing Cuban dance music for decades when salsa was popularized initially scoffed at the term. For example, Cuban-born Machito declared:

 

"There's nothing new about salsa, it is just the same old music that was played in Cuba for over fifty years."Similarly, New York native Tito Puente stated: "The only salsa I know is sold in a bottle called ketchup. I play Cuban music." Eventually, though, both Machito and Puente embraced the term as a financial necessity.

 

The salsa conflict can be summarized as a disagreement between those who do not recognize salsa as anything other than Cuban music with another name,and those who strongly identify with salsa as a music and culture distinct from its Cuban primogenitor.

 

The concept of salsa music which began as a marketing ploy created by Izzy Sanabria was successfully exploited by Fania Records, then eventually took on a life of its own, organically evolving into an authentic pan-Latin American cultural identity. Music professor and salsa trombonist Christopher Washburne writes:

 

This pan-Latino association of salsa stems from what Felix Padilla labels a 'Latinizing' process that occurred in the 1960s and was consciously marketed by Fania Records: 'To Fania, the Latinizing of salsa came to mean homogenizing the product, presenting an all-embracing Puerto Rican, Pan-American or Latino sound with which the people from all of Latin America and Spanish-speaking communities in the United States could identify and purchase.' Motivated primarily by economic factors, Fania's push for countries throughout Latin America to embrace salsa did result in an expanded market. But in addition, throughout the 1970s, salsa groups from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru and Venezuela, among other Latin American nations, emerged, composing and performing music that related to their own specific cultural experiences and affiliations, which posited salsa as a cultural identity marker for those nations as well.

 

The Cuban origins of the music do not conveniently fit into the pan-Latino narrative. Many leading salsa artists have described salsa in broad and inclusive, but vague terms, making no mention of the music's Cuban foundation. For example, Johnny Pacheco has consistently articulated a vision of salsa as a broad, multi-ethnic movement: "Salsa was, and still is, a Caribbean musical movement."Similarly, Willie Colón sees the scope of salsa's power to unite in the broadest terms: "Salsa was the force that united diverse Latino and other non-Latino racial and ethnic groups... It is a concept. An open, ever-evolving musical, cultural, socio-political concept."Rubén Blades' definition of salsa is also inclusive: "Salsa music is urban folklore at the international level."Journalist Scott Heller writes, "[Salsa music] circulates across national boundaries, becoming a useful example of the globalization of culture and of the ways that people build community in diaspora.

 

As an example of this, ethnomusicologist Ed Morales notes that the interaction of Latino rhythms and Jazz music in mid-twentieth century New York was crucial to the innovation of both forms of music. Musicians who would become great innovators of Salsa, like Mario Bauza and Chano Pazo, began their careers in New York working in close conjunction with some of the biggest names in Jazz, like Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, Morales noted that:

 

"The interconnection between North American jazz and Afro-Cuban music was taken for granted, and the stage was set for the emergence of mambo music in New York, where music fans were becoming accustomed to innovation."He later notes that Mambo helped pave the way for the widespread acceptance of Salsa years later. In the pivotal documentary movie Salsa: Latin Pop Music in Cities (1979), the history of salsa is explained as a mixing of African, Caribbean, and New York cultures and music, with no mention of Cuba. In one scene, the Afro-Cuban folkloric genres of batá and rumba are shown being performed in Puerto Rico, implying that they originated there.

 

In advancing the concept of salsa as a musical "sauce", containing many different ingredients from various cultures mixed together, some point to the occasional use of non-Cuban forms in salsa, such as the Puerto Rican bomba.

 

The percentage of salsa compositions based in non-Cuban genres is low though, and despite an openness to experimentation and a willingness to absorb non-Cuban influences, - such as Jazz and of Rock and Roll, with regards to formal structure, and many other informal influences from talented musicians of a broad range of musical and ethnic backgrounds; such as Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Italians and Jews: anyone with talent and the will to experiment - salsa has remained consistently wedded to its Cuban templates.

 

 It was common practice for salsa bands to resurrect pre-salsa Cuban classics. For example, several of Arsenio Rodriguez's son montunos from the 1940s, such as "Fuego en el 23" (recorded by Sonora Ponceña) and "El divorcio" (recorded by Johnny Pacheco) were modernized by salsa arrangers. The pan-Latin Americanism of salsa is found in its cultural milieu, more than its musical structure. 

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Today, competing nationalities claim ownership of the music, as there are musicians in New York City, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela, who claim salsa was invented in their country.

 

The salsa controversy is also closely tied to the decades-long estrangement between the governments of the United States and Cuba, and the United States embargo against Cuba. Radio stations in the United States would get bomb threats (presumably from Cuban exiles) for playing Cuban records over the air.

 

Homegrown salsa on the other hand, was embraced. For a time the Cuban state media officially claimed that the term salsa music was a euphemism for authentic Cuban music stolen by American imperialists, though the media has since abandoned this theory.

 

Mayra Martínez, a Cuban musicologist, writes that "the term salsa was used to obscure the Cuban base, the music's history or part of its history in Cuba. And salsa was a way to do this so that Jerry Masucci, Fania and other record companies, like CBS, could have a hegemony on the music and keep the Cuban musicians from spreading their music abroad."Izzy Sanabria responds that Martínez was likely giving an accurate Cuban view point, "but salsa was not planned that way"