Tango brings together a myriad of other styles, including flamenco, polka, hanabera, and milonga. Tango has become one of the most celebrated Latin music genres in dance, having evolved during the 19th century in Buenos Aires’ immigrant communities. Listen to more bachata and merengue on the tropical Latin playlist. Other famous merengue artists include Sergio Vargas, Mala Fe, Elvis Crespo, Milly Quezada and Los Hermanos Rosario. It became popular outside of the Dominican Republic following mass migration of Dominicans to New York City in the 1960s, and has inspired musicians such as Carlos Santana. The merengue is also the Dominican Republic’s national dance, performed in ballroom dance competitions alongside the salsa. It’s usually performed on a diatonic accordion, a tambura (a two-sided drum) and a güira, a metal scraper – merengue music often includes brass, such as horns and saxophone as well.
With African and Spanish influences, it’s based on a repeating five-beat rhythmic pattern called a quintillo. It’s a fast-tempo salsa, with a strong Afro-Cuban influence whose songs often follow a more traditional rumba structure, with a slow start, then a core salsa rhythm with a call-and-response vocal.Īnother genre to have emerged from the Dominican Republic is merengue, whose origins can be traced back to the 19th century. The contemporary salsa sound coming out of Cuba is known as timba. Salsa artists like Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Ruben Blades, Fania All Stars, Marc Antony and Celia Cruz – known as ‘The Queen of Salsa’ - helped to popularise the genre internationally. When a song started, apparently the bandleader would shout ‘Salsa!’ to get the crowd going, hence the name.
When Cuban musicians could no longer go to New York after Fidel Castro had claimed control in 1959, the city’s Puerto Rican musicians quickly filled the vacuum – taking the Cuban-inspired Latin jazz sound and bringing in their own sounds, together with mambo and Latin boogaloo, to create a new style: salsa. Son combined with traditions from African American jazz to create a Caribbean jazz sound, which was embraced by Salsa artists across the Caribbean and the United States, especially among Puerto Ricans in New York.
New York had been a centre of Cuban-style dance music since the 1940s, when Cuban artists brought Afro-Cuban son music into the USA. The first salsa bands were predominantly from Cuba and Puerto Rico – the music then spread through Colombia and the rest of the Americas until it became a global phenomenon. Salsa is one of the best known and most popular Latin music genres worldwide.