CLAVE IN TIME
Or, What’s Salsa? A Brief History

There’s always a joker in the crowd to say, “a dip for chips”—and the joker is closer to the truth than he knows, as the term goes back to the 30s in Cuba, when Sexteto Habanero (yes like that burning hot chili pepper) first sang “Echale Salsita!” literally “Throw some spice on it!” with variations still kicking around today like candela! (hot!) and sabroso! (tasty!), which one singer or musician might throw out to encourage another. And it is all these things, hot, spicy, tasty, sweet and sultry, encouraging a chance for passionate interaction. Once when I asked What’s salsa, that inevitable comic slipped, said “a dip for chicks,” and neither was he entirely mistaken.

But Willie Colón, that salsa icon and base of salsa’s later tastes in New York city in the 60s, said it better, calling it “our church prayer, town meeting, singles group and political rally, all at the same time” (Steward 6). Quite a mix, multi-faceted and –flavored. In my life, and as many dancers have shared, salsa is first and foremost a community, always in flux, and flying many flags for all the nationalities, races, and classes it jumbles together for the sake of a dance. A dance—what a great reason to come together—for a dance which is exploration of an art, of your own energies and expressions, and the intimate possibilities of cooperation and play between people.

With romance attached or not, what other way might you hold a lady more or less lovely—or, ladies, a guy more or less adept at the dance and the art of self-cleansing—and, for four or five minutes, to negotiate delicious stretches and snaps of time and space, to ride a wave and feel the falling together of passions, one with and out of and into and through the other rising on sudden tropical storms in the song, say Thank you and be done? Hard not to be carried away, even when you lead.

Just as a base-level contact with another human, it’s grounding, rejuvenating like a deep breath, even when it leaves you breathless, like contact with nature. Not to make overarching generalizations, but after spending a lot of time in more touch-comfortable Latin cultures, it’s clear that such physical contact is sadly missing for most Americans, socially, most of the time.

But here it is, a spectator sport for millions on “Dancing with the Stars,” but which, in the more terrestrial doing, links in to ancient rhythms and traditions of aural and bodily learning, joining to a type of religious practice where mind, body and spirit move in conjunction—how on this bonne terre did they ever get torn?—and cleansing your stresses or sorrows in motion as your body is carried on sonic wave on wave of rhythm, on ritual, on mystery. And if you need another reason to steer you to the dance floor, salsa’s healthy, burning about 42 calories a song, I’m told, for the average dancer and song, and cheaper than even natural gas as a way to stay warm winters.

This just begins to say what Salsa might be for you, but to ask again What’s salsa, we can follow out a history of more modern memory and brewed in the crucible of culture-clash and accommodation whose dynamic of tension and release, tension and release, inheres in the syncopated heartbeat of salsa—|**tac*tac***|tac**tac**tac*|—its sharp march turned rolling flow called clave. In it you can feel resistance, independence, and synergistic exchange, how one transforms and gives meaning to the other, something like a good lead and follow might do. But already I diverge.

To start from the start, then, at least of musicologist conjecture, we’d have to say salsa rhythms go back a couple thousand years, give or take a thousand, to an African bell pattern in six that eventually stretched out to the more stable, danceable 8-beat phrase we know today. But fast forward from those hazy origins and changes to the brutal fact of the slave trade closer to our own time, and we have a more clear cut start, imperial and slave nations, aristocratic colonial courts, the wood and skin of the African conga, the delicate strings of the European violin and flashy American brass and edged clash and commercial ambition in Spanish Harlem and there you have it.

Or, just a little slower. The deepest of salsa’s tangled roots run through the soil of West Africa and, oddly enough, late 17th-century France under Louis XIV. This king was a dancer, particularly fond of a court form called contredanse, danced side by side in a line to a five note cinquillo. The closely allied Spanish court adopted a version called contradanza, and took it, along with many court musicians and more African slaves, to their colonies in the New World. The imperialists danced and amassed great fortunes (or went broke, or were killed in revolt) while the slaves they gathered from West Africa did the hard physical labor in the sugar and tobacco fields. But the Africans had their rhythms, vocal traditions and dances, if not always their drums (the French allowed them to keep their native instruments, but not the Spanish), and resourcefully improvised instruments such as the botija, made from a clay jar for olives, and the cajon, a box used for packing fish, to continue their traditions in a veiled way.

Immigrations from Haiti to Cuba, particularly after revolutions of 1780 and 1840, brought with them fresh infusions of the most direct line to African traditions and instruments, and by the 1850s a style had developed in the Cuban Oriente (East), where the Afro-Haitians would generally land, called son, which joined some of these African structures to the poetry and guitar of Spain (or a a version of that guitar, called the tres) and to indigenous instruments such as the maracas.

“Salsa is son” is a mantra of the salsa diaspora, and truly these wandering guitar and percussion trios were the traveling taproot of the music that became mambo and salsa, speeded spiced and electrified, also, slowed and sweetened, cha-cha-cha, rumba, and bolero. Upon this rhythm’s migration to Havana (especially as its makers were conscripted into the Permanente, or national army) a new style called danzón began to grow near the turn of the century, which fused the son with more courtly instruments such as piano, flute and violin (alive and well today in charanga orchestrations) and a more martial style, popular as a dance of the upper classes. Under the influence of son it evolved into a more widespread couple’s dance, and soon the bubbling excitement of the bongo leapt into the clave-and-maraca mix, along with extended montunos on the piano, and greater vocal focus.

It was about to get even louder, brassier, and swinging hot, however, as American Jazz and Big Band craze swaggered into Havana as it did the rest of the world. During and after Prohibition, encouraged by FDR’s open door policy, and the rather permissive (and corrupt) reign of Batista (1933-1959), Havana had its heyday as a headquarters not only for gangsters, but for musicians looking to have a good time and clear a lot of loot. Cuban musicians who heard these big jazz bands from the states began to further alter their arrangements and to integrate the horn sections (trumpet and trombone especially) into their own sons and danzóns.

Trios thus grew into quartets and sextets (such as the main popularizer of son, Sexteto Habanera) and soon into full blown conjuntos with still more horns, and the powerful African conga. These conjuntos (such as the groups around Antonio Arcano, Arsenio Rodriguez, and Pérez Prado) were starting to swing it with more rhythmic shifts and syncopations and shouts of “Echale salsita!” inventing that sound called mambo, and that quickly spread beyond Cuban borders as local groups became more enamored of the cha-cha-cha. It was an era of rich exchange, and the Latin influence is unmistakable in all the jazz greats from this era, including W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gilespie, and Charlie Byrd, especially in the addition of the congas to many jazz rhythm sections.

With the Cuban revolution and the American response of embargo, such cultural exchange slowed across the borders, but also spiked as a wave of immigrants from Cuba and Puerto Rico moved to New York in the early 60s. Ever since the 1917 Jones Act which converted the former Spanish colony of Puerto Rico to a U.S. Commonwealth state and granted Puerto Ricans American citizenship, the foundations were laid for America’s largest immigrant community, which would provide New York with a Latin music scene in which Puerto Ricans were the main players. While a majority of the Latin musicians in New York were actually Puerto Ricans, most acknowledge that they were working mainly out of Cuban traditions, such as the renowned (and Nuyorican) Tito Puente who put it plainly when he said “What’s salsa? I play Cuban music.” But Puerto Ricans contributed their distinct rhythms such as bomba and plena as well, and unique singing styles of the romantic and mythic jíbaro, distinctively heard in the nasal tones of legendary Héctor Lavoe.

In the inner city other frictions and fusions occurred, especially between the black and latin barrios (Harlem and Spanish Harlem), giving an electrified shock of RnB, Jazz, Boogaloo (Boogalú), Rock and Swing into these island rhythms, serving to develop the style finally called, in the mid-60s, Salsa. At places like Audubon Hall in Spanish Harlem and Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx to the upscale Stardust Ballroom and Palladium right in the center of Manhattan, in neighborhood nightclubs, dancehalls, hotel ballrooms, after-hours bars and social clubs, this music had been brewing from the late-40s on, though called mambo. “Salsa” was actually a term that Izzy Sanábria of Fania Records (known as the “Latin Motown”) came up with in 1964 to market this new “spicy” flavor of music with an inner-city edge. The “Fania Sound” was created by a clique of inventive bandleaders, particularly Johnny Pacheco and Larry Harlow, with an overflowing fund of talent in singers like Lávoe and Celia Cruz, conga masters Ray Barretto, and Joe Cuba, Roberto Roena thrilling on the bongos, Willie Colón’s sultry trombone, and countless other musicians.

Salsa still thrives today for the way it remains open to such shocks and cross-pollinations, embracing the influences of other musical traditions, from the Middle East, Spanish flamenco, French ballads and American rock, hip hop, jazz, rap, samba and swing, to name a few, a veritable “swinging musical jabberwocky” (Steward) for which clave still keeps the beat. Distinct styles of salsa have evolved in Venezuela, and Colombia, drawing on local traditions that, in turn, have influenced the happenings in New York, Puerto Rica and Cuba. Cuba, due in part to its continued isolation even with Miami a mere 90 miles away, has perhaps developed the most distinctive sound, so distinct, in fact that it’s called something else: timba. A bit more percussive and complex, and also drawing more heavily, and lengthily, on the African tradition of coro and pregón (call and response), it muscles native rumba, son and songo up against a more exploratory jazz and rap.

Here in the U.S., after a mellow lull of salsa romantica in the mid- to late-80s, which wrapped languid bolero vocals around catchy if formulaic salsa tunes, salsa is again hitting it with full orchestra salsa dura (hard salsa), and more synthesized, sampled, but nonetheless funky salsa hip-hop, much of it out of New York. New York continues to be one of the great centers of Latin music and dance, movin’ it On2, and with new musical projects born every day. Miami, with its Cuban connection, boasts its own distinctive, timba-influenced music and lots of teasing hand-play in the dance, though, on the other coast, Los Angeles, with Hollywood flash and panache, and strong ties to the thriving scene in Mexico City, shows off a style perhaps fierier.

But the fact is that salsa’s spread well beyond these borders, and in any major metropolis, from Seoul to Seattle, Sydney to Switzerland, Cape Town to Khazakstan, you can have (often every night of the week) that energetic, endorphin-loaded night out called salsa. It’s one of the great pleasures of the dance, for learning it provides an entrée into a new, yet comfortingly familiar community wherever your travels might take you. And in this digital age, songs, and even steps flit in digital space from country to country and city to city quicker than you can say montuno, so that, for better or worse, what you might hear a DJ spinning in Tokyo might not be radically different from the sounds rocking a Prague hotspot. Local bands and dancers keep it unique, though, and provide that giddy synergy and syncopation of passions that the music and dance thrives on.

To circle in to our little part in this vast story, the Saint Louis salsa community has been growing steadily over the last eighteen years, with one salsa band, El Caribe Tropical and its erstwhile director, promoter, and club owner Mateo Mulcahey nudging it along from the start. We now boast a handful bands and clubs which, if not yet bulking up to a full week, allow us all to pursue our passion Thursdays through Sundays (see STL Salsa), with plenty of classes and informal gatherings to fill out those other days that might sadly go without that lifeblood and saucy sauce called salsa. Here I want to extend a resounding GRACIAS! to all the other salsa teachers, promoters, musicians and club owners who are helping to keep the ever-evolving musical, cultural, social concept of salsa alive. Clave: On!