The legacy of salsa music is aware of no borders. From Havana to New York, San Juan to Barranquilla, Caracas to Dakar and past, salsa has circled the world.
While the identify “salsa” was coined as a advertising idea for the city Latin combine popping out of New York that was recorded on the Fania label within the ’60s and ’70s, its roots are indisputably in Cuba. Tito Puente, whose 1957 album Dancemania was a milestone within the evolution of the sound that might grow to be generally known as salsa, routinely dismissed the time period, saying that “salsa is one thing you placed on spaghetti.” Celia Cruz, who was dubbed the queen of salsa after she left Havana for New York, would outline it as “Cuban music with one other identify.”
While the sound we now acknowledge as salsa had been simmering for many years, it got here to a boil in 1971 at Manhattan’s Cheetah Club, the place the multi-national Fania All-Stars made historical past with a steady jam that marked an ecstatic level of no return for the music. Artists in Puerto Rico, Colombia and Venezuela made it their very own; it was adopted by African musicians, who in salsa reclaimed the rhythms that had traveled with slaves to Cuba. In Cuba, salsa additionally accomplished a spherical journey with Cuban musicians creating their very own “Cuban salsa” model within the 1990s. Over the years, salsa has gone from arduous to softly romantic and again once more. Most not too long ago, salsa met reggaeton in collaborations with tropical and concrete artists.
Salsa is by nature transformational. Multinational and multigenerational, it embodies the shared heritage of Latin music.
From its Cuban roots to latest hits, listed below are twenty movies following salsa’s evolution.