How do we identify Salsa music?

[squirrel]

What tells one a song is Salsa???

The rhythm? The beat? The instruments used? The language?

Are DLG a Salsa band? What about Gilberto Santa Rosa? They are so different...

Modern singers and bands mix Salsa and other musical genres... like hip hop... is the result Salsa????

Salsa music is based on clave... Victor Manuelle doens't use the clave... are his songs Salsa?

[MacMoto]

My two cents...

To me it's the clave-based rhythm that makes salsa salsa. The clave beat does not have to be played out; it can be implied by the rhythm pattern of other instruments. Salsa doesn't have to be played by a salsa band to be salsa (and most salsa bands also play other forms of music too). You already know my view on the language aspect :wink:.

In Britain "R&B salsa" is the in thing right now, and some of these songs have the salsa rhythm while others don't (or, at least, I don't hear it). We dance to both anyway.
And of course people commonly dance salsa to "not strictly salsa" music anyway, like boogaloo ("Micaela" is probably one of world's most popular "salsa" songs that aren't salsa), timba, son. I also feel there's a very clear difference between salsa and mambo as music, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

[SDsalsaguy]

Have to agree with MM on this one... you can dance "salsa" to a lot of different music genres (even rap! :shock:) but it's not really salsa music if it's not based on the clave.

[jhb]

That's a very good question! Seemingly simple, but very difficult to answer.

It has be be clave-based, but it can't just be the clave that makes Salsa of course! Lots of music that isn't Salsa is clave-based: Son, Mambo. And the few Salsas that take the rumba clave, we would still call Salsa, right? It's also the instrumentation and the feel that make Salsa what it is.

Really, salsa is a mix of all sorts of elements together: son, mambo, old-school rhythm and blues, jazz, funk among others, that comes together to make a sound we can identify as Salsa, even if it is hard to describe.

As Louie Armstrong said when asked what Jazz was: "If you have to ask, you will never know".