Salsa City Forum » Salsa Music and Dance » The Music

So, I was listening to a Rancid album the other day and it was occuring to me that you could salsa to it.

As I understand it, Salsa is just like most music, its in sets of 8 beats (is that called 8 bar blues officially? I dunno) anyway, my dance knowledge only really stems as far as to know that you can’t Lindy hop to anything other than swing music because of the beat structure. With Salsa its kinda mainstream right? So you could salsa to anything?

Having said that I danced on Tuesday to a ‘salsa’ song and it turned out to be cha cha cha, and I could kinda do it, and I wondered is this just slow salsa? And is meringue just real fast salsa?

And what other actual types of music therefore are there? I always thought it would be cool to make a kind of ska salsa hybrid called salska...

It kind of come down to musical meter and tempo. Most dances are to 4/4 time music so the beat pattern is sets of two. Waltz is one exception with three beat sets. So within most of the dances, if the tempo (speed) is resonable you can do several dances. With that said there are other elements of style in the music (or a bunch of dancers already on the floor) that might not appreciate a Hustle going on in the middle of a Salsa song. Sooooooo make up a new dance and get everyone to do it.

PAS

Salsa and cha-cha-chá are both based on son, the traditional Cuban style, so there are many similarities in the rhythms. But cha-cha-chá is so much slower than salsa you can’t really dance salsa to it (unless you are an absolute beginner using a slow track to help you step carefully through the moves). I’ve written a bit about salsa tempo here.

You can do salsa steps to anything in 4/4 time, but it doesn’t feel right. Myself and the other half danced to the White Stripes once drunk in a pub but I’ve got to say it was more of a comedy moment than an inspiring one.

Uhhhh???
I know its kinda imposible to describe but I don’t get it.

PAS said “Most dances are to 4/4 time music so the beat pattern is sets of two. Waltz is one exception with three beat sets” so is waltz like swing? Cos that was something to do with 3’s...

Oh I dunno,
But the funny thing I found last night is that you can tell if you can salsa to it just by watching everyone else. But what that means is that in the time it takes me to work out if its salsa, the dance floor is full and partners all taken!

It’s not really impossible to describe. People have been making a reasonable job of writing and describing music on paper for hundreds of years. But you do need a basic grasp of the terminology. Here’s the Wikipedia article on time-signatures.

I think what Tommy is getting is can salsa be danced to different styles/genres of music... i.e. Hip hop and classical.

In answer to that, yes, salsa can be danced to many kinds of music including R&B, Hip Hop, Jazz even Disco but pretty much most Latin music. The dance itself is a mixture of many Latin rhythms such as the mambo, rumba, cumbia etc the music has quite a definite rhythm and the beat is a lot clearer due to the instruments being played to emphasise the ‘one’ and there is also the clave too. One would struggle to dance salsa to a Bachata track or a cha cha for example.

As the rhythm is 4/4 as are most songs, yes salsa can be danced technically to most music but obviously it has a whole different feel and look to it.

Tommy,

Sorry my last entry was a bit confusing. 4/4 time generally describes 4 beats with alternating stressed and unstressed beats. Foxtrot and traditional music usually stress the 1 and 3 counts whereas modern music often reverses this and stresses 2 and 4 (upbeats). When I said the beat pattern is two, I meant that the smallest unit of music is two beats (one stressed one not). Waltz by the way stresses the first of three beat sets. Furthermore, dancers often deviate from musicians by counting 2 measures at a time. In other words, they count 1 through 8 (or 1 through 6 for Waltz).

As for Swing and the number 3, it probably has nothing to do with the music. Rather, Swing teachers often count “triple steps” vocally as 1 2 3. In reality, a triple is three steps to two beats of music. Musically it would be counted 1 and 2. If you are more confused now than before, sorry, but you’re not the only one.

PAS

The Essential defining rhythm of Salsa is the Son Clave. The Clave is played over an 8 beat structure in either a 3-2 or 2-3 pattern.
A basic 3-2 pattern would be played on the following beats 123 67 (although this is not strictly true as it played slightly off beat). Listen to a Salsa track and try to hear the Clave, you will notice that all the other instruments arrange their structures around it.
Clave literally translated means ‘key’. No Clave, No Salsa!

Most music is based on the 4/4 pattern including Cha Cha Cha, Merengue, R&B, RocknRoll and Blues which helped define the modern structure of most ‘popular’ music.

It is not the time structure that defines a music but the stresses and patterns of the various instruments within that structure.
Cha Cha Cha uses a 4/4 pattern and the clave, but it also uses a repeating 3 beat rhythm through the structure commonly 2&3 4&5 with the 4&5 given more emphasis.

Speed of the music also has no bearing on the style, original Cha Cha Cha was quite fast as was Mambo. Listen to the ‘King’ Tito Puente, Cuban Pete, Orquesta Aragon or Celia Cruz.

Come to La Tasca on a Saturday, we have a percussionist playing live with the music, so you can hear the individual rhythmical elements within the music.

There are many other instruments within salsa music that are emphasised more in the different styles such as the Cowbell in Cumbia, the Conga in Rumba, the Piano in the Montuno sections.
But all of them are linked by the Clave.

To sum up, you could dance the Salsa steps to any 4/4 rhythm but it wouldn’t be Salsa because the tensions and stresses wouldn’t be there that characterise the movements in the dance. Otherwise everybody would be dancing the same to every style of music.
The stresses in the music characterise the dance.

Hope this helps, if you want to know more come and ask when the music is playing, it helps to explain it better. :)

Andy Witt

The 3-2 son clave pattern is: one, two-and-a-half, four, six, seven.

To say that the speed of the music has no bearing on the style is quite wrong. It’s physically impossible to dance cha-cha-chá at most salsa tempos. You need a tempo that will give you sufficient time to execute the chasse (the cha-cha-chá) over the ‘four-and-five’, ‘eight-and-one’ beat combinations.