Salsa Music Articles (Professional News, Research, and Academic)

timberamayor

Son Montuno
Started a thread for music articles as well, since most articles I know of are by musicologists, and while they may talk about dance, they focus on the music. For example:

Timba: The Sound Of The Cuban Crisis
Black dance music in Havana during the Período Especial

(Soas Musicology Series)
Written by Vincenzo Perna as his PhD thesis at University of London 2001.

amazon.com/Timba-Sound-Cuban-Crisis-Musicology/dp/075463941X

Product Description
Cuban music is recognized unanimously as a major historical force behind Latin American popular music, and as an important player in the development of US popular music and jazz. However, the music produced on the island after the Revolution in 1959 has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. The Revolution created the conditions for the birth of a type of highly sophisticated popular music, which has grown relatively free from market pressures. These conditions premised the new importance attained by Afro-Cuban dance music during the 1990s, when the island entered a period of deep economic and social crisis that has shaken Revolutionary institutions from their foundations. Vincenzo Perna investigates the role of black popular music in post-Revolutionary Cuba, and in the 1990s in particular. The emergence of timba is analysed as a distinctively new style of Afro-Cuban dance music. The controversial role of Afro-Cuban working class culture is highlighted, showing how this has resisted co-optation into a unified, pacified vision of national culture, and built musical bridges with the transnational black diaspora. Musically, timba represents an innovative fusion of previous popular and folkloric Afro-Cuban styles with elements of hip-hop and other African-American styles like jazz, funk and salsa. Timba articulates a black urban youth subculture with distinctive visual and choreographic codes. With its abrasive commentaries on issues such as race, consumer culture, tourism, prostitution and its connections to the underworld, timba demonstrates at the 'street level' many of the contradictions of contemporary Cuban society. After repeatedly colliding with official discourses, timba has eventually met with institutional repression. This book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and those working on popular music studies, but also to those working in the areas of cultural and Black studies, anthropology, Latin American studies, Cuban studies and Caribbean studies.
 
Origins of Cuban Music and Dance: Changüí
By Benjamin Lapidus

amazon.com/Origins-Cuban-Music-Dance-ChangY/dp/0810862042

Product Description
Origins of Cuban Music and Dance: Changüí is the first in-depth study of Changüí, a style of music and dance in Guantánamo, Cuba. Changüí is analogous to blues in the United States and is a crucible of Cuban Creole culture. Benjamin Lapidus describes Changüí and its relationship to the roots of son, Cuba's national genre and the style of music that contributed to the development of salsa, in Eastern Cuba. He also highlights the connections between Afro-Haitian music and Cuban popular music through Changüí, connections with the Caribbean that have been largely overlooked in the past. After an initial historical discussion about the region of Guantánamo and the inter-connectedness of its various musical styles with a focus on Changüí, Lapidus discusses the technical aspects of the genre as practiced within the region and beyond. He considers the socio-historical importance of its lyrics, presenting numerous musical transcriptions that explain how the music is structured, as well as providing background stories to songs. In a chapter unique to this book and a first in Cuban musicology and ethnography, Lapidus describes years of festivals and musical competitions to show how local musical identity takes shape, particularly when encountering national narratives of music history. The volume concludes with a comparison between Changüí and son, as well as a bibliography, discography, and videography.

About the Author
Benjamin Lapidus is assistant professor of music at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He has published in Ethnomusicology, Latin Beat Magazine, and the Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
 
And once again let me point out that Timba.com has a lot of great well-documented articles including audio samples, especially the Roots of Timba Series is good because much of it applies to the roots of salsa as well.

http://www.timba.com/encyclopedias/1-online-books
 
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