Salsa
Cuban-Puerto Rican urban dance music, driven by clave and brass
Related
Salsa is Cuban-Puerto Rican urban dance music, formed in New York in the 1960s–70s: clave (a five-stroke pattern) is the frame, with piano montuno, brass, bass and percussion layered over it, made for partner dancing.
It is related to mambo and son, but salsa is more a commercial and arranging umbrella covering several Cuban rhythms. The usual mistake is to treat salsa as one fixed rhythm — it is a label for a repertoire and a scene, containing son, mambo, guaguancó and others under different frames.
Read deeper → clave
Sources
- 萨尔萨的音乐构成与 clave 节奏，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Salsa"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.