Salsa

Salsa is built on the clave: a two-bar, five-stroke pattern (most often the 2-3 son clave) that every other instrument has to lock into. Tempos run 180-220 BPM, but the perceived feel is half that. A typical ensemble is piano (playing a montuno — a syncopated two-bar riff), bass (anticipated, usually playing the tumbao on beats 2-and and 4), congas, bongos, timbales, and a horn section of trumpets and trombones. Vocals alternate sung verses (canto) with call-and-response between a lead sonero and a chorus over a vamping montuno section. Lyrics are in Spanish, often narrative, and sometimes politically pointed.

Salsa was named and packaged in late-1960s New York by Fania Records, whose roster (Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz, Rubén Blades, Johnny Pacheco) drew on Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican players living in the city. The music itself was a continuation of Cuban son and mambo — most of the underlying forms predate the salsa label by decades — but the post-revolution US embargo on Cuba pushed the commercial center to New York and made Puerto Rican and Nuyorican musicians the public face. The Fania All-Stars' 1971 concert at the Cheetah Lounge and 1973 show at Yankee Stadium are the genre's defining live moments. From the late 1970s, Colombia (especially Cali) and Venezuela became major centers, and salsa romántica softened the sound for 1980s pop radio.

Find the clave first — once you can clap the 2-3 pattern, you'll hear how every instrument aligns to it. The piano's montuno is a two-bar figure that loops for entire sections; the bass anticipates beat 1 by hitting on the prior beat's "and." Listen for the moment a track shifts from canto to montuno — the lead vocalist improvises and the chorus answers in a fixed two- or four-bar phrase. Horns punctuate rather than carry melody.

Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón's "El Cantante" (1978, written by Rubén Blades) is the genre's signature ballad-to-montuno arc. For an album, Willie Colón & Rubén Blades's Siembra (1978) — at one point the best-selling salsa LP ever — is the place to start.

The word "salsa" as a genre label was a marketing decision by Fania, not a musicological one; many of the older Cuban players on those records resented the term because it lumped son, guaracha, mambo, and cha-cha-chá together under a single commercial banner.