Talk:Salsa (dance)/Archive 1

Music versus Dance
One thing that gets everyone confused is that "beat" is not really a precise term. Trained musicians use terms like measure, quarter-note, etc. Primitive drummers tend to learn by ear and don't use any standard terminology. Modern conga drummers use the term half-beat to refer to striking the drum. There are 8 half-beats in the 4 quarter-note measure, and two measures per phrase, which means there are 16 half-beats per phrase. The clave hits on half-beats 1..4..7...11.13..., where half-beats are numbers from 1 to 16. (Drummers don't usually number half-beats, I'm doing it here for clarity.) The word beat used by listeners, including the musicians listening to what they are playing, refers to how the ear combines all the sounds and try to make some sort of rhythmic ordering from them. Generally, the deepest and loudest instrument drives the beat. Either the congo drums, or a bass drum, or an acoustic or electric string bass. The clave is (at least originally) played by high-pitched sticks and hence cannot drive beat. Clave is important in timing because high-pitched sounds are clear and precise and cut through all the other sound distinctly, whereas deep sounds are very imprecise. Anyway, the ear generally tries to sort the sounds into an alternating pattern of strong and weak beats, and then to group by 3 or 4. 3 is waltz and not relevant here. If the first beat is strong, then the rhythm is normal, otherwise it is syncopated. But what is the first beat, since rhythm is repeating? What is the starting point of a circle? We need a point of reference. That point of reference is the melody, since melody tends to naturally order itself in such a way that our ear perceives a starting point. Just as in speaking, our ear can perceive the start of a sentence. So what happens is that the ear picks up the melody and says this is beat 1 of a 4 beat measure, and then we can decide whether this beat of the rhythm is stressed or not. If stressed, then we should break there. Otherwise, we should wait for beat 2, since it will feel more normal to break on a stressed beat.

But what if the person doing all this doesn't have a musician's ear? Then instead of listending to the melody to find a point of reference for beat 1, they listen instead to the rhythm and when they hear a stressed beat, they say that's beat 1, when in fact it is beat 2.

If you're still confused, then ask a musician whether Cuban music is syncopated or not? If so, then the stressed beat must be beat 2, because that is what syncopated means. If you still think beat 1 is the stressed beat after being told that the music is syncopated, then it means you don't know how to listen to determine where beat 1 begins.

Bottom line for dancers. Break on the first stressed beat, which is what feels right to most people for most salsa music, and you'll be doing the right thing.


 * "That point of reference is the melody, since melody tends to naturally order itself in such a way that our ear perceives a starting point. Just as in speaking, our ear can perceive the start of a sentence." Really? Actually I think the reference point is the loudest beat of a measure or phrase (i.e. the part of the waveform containing most physical energy). Loudness is what accents are all about. So instead of looking for "deepness" or "drumminess" shouldn't we wait for the loudest beat of a song? Why worry so much "syncopated"? Mostly original mambo is syncopated and there are only very few of them in heavy rotation. So shouldn't we worry more about offbeat which offers us multiple starting points within one measure and enables us to perform all kinds of breaks: on-one, on-two, on-three, on-five, on-six?
 * "Bottom line for dancers. Break on the first stressed beat, which is what feels right to most people for most salsa music, and you'll be doing the right thing." Many people do that. They break on three. Or on five. Yes, they caught a stressed beat but they neither got a first nor a syncopated beat but a totally different one. Count three has more importance in samba rhythms, beat five is subordinated to beat one within a phrase. And then there are songs which force us to sometimes break on one and sometimes on five because they have uneven numbers of measures within their structural parts (verse, chorus etc.) und thus seem to change clave from 2-3 to 3-2 or the other way round.
 * This "bottom line" works okay in many cases as a rule of thumb but to really understand what you're doing there seems to be no substitution for knowing the real structure of the song on basis of phrases. I'm with German wikipedia but feel free to post in English: Thetawave.

Picture
The picture doesn't show neither fun nor passion of the dance. The guy looks on the floor, the girl looks frightened rather than sexy. Let's search more. Mikkalai 08:31, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

We really need to get a better picture than what's currently the top-most picture... Can someone upload an action photo that shows a woman in a spin or something? Plakskull 23:08, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Lautaro.
 * Help yourself to any picture from my webpage: Bailattelo.Com

What happened to Izzy Sanabria?
He published Latin NY magazine and was instrumental in popularizing the term "salsa."


 * tell us more! I moved the "origin of term" to the salsa (music) talk page, but any info that can be traced into real documents is like gold dust around here! Sweavo 09:42, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

What happened to Francisco Vasquez?
You mentioned the brothers but seemed to leave out the lead brother, Francisco. Your facts seemed very vague about LA Style. Why not just contact one of them to get the rundown?
 * Well volunteered! Be sure and get the interview published someplace!  Wikipedia discourages "original research" and prefers to cite documentary evidence! Sweavo 14:36, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

4 beats vs 8 beats
I disagree with the 3rd paragraph that states that Salsa is danced to 8-beat music. Almost 100% of the time salsa music will have 4 beats per measure. And the dancer completes one instance of the pattern in one measure. If you count the "off-beats" you get 8 beats. Also, a little further on it says that ... hmmm ... you may be right... ah never mind. Think about it for a bit.


 * In purely the musical field, Cuban and North American musical conventions diverge on whether the clave cycle goes over one or two 4-beat bars. However, convention in the English-speaking salsa world is to count 1 to 8 over the basic step, which is 1 cycle of the clave, or two cycles of the tumbao.  Convention in the English-speaking world is that the tumbao is one bar long.  So the question of whether the music is 4 or 8 beats is ambiguous, but thankfully also irrelevant.  The salsa basic is danced over 8 counts regardless.  Does that sound about right? Sweavo 09:37, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

BPM Range of Salsa Music
The article read: "Music suitable for dancing ranges from about 150 beats per minute (bpm) to around 250 beats per minute (bpm), although most dancing is done to music somewhere between 160-220 bpm." As a DJ I changed the BPM range listed once before only to be changed back. Even at 150 beats per minute would be extremely fast music (think techno music) and I don't even know what music if any reaches 250 beats per minute. What is the reasoning behind doubling up the BPMs. Convention for how you normally set BPMs would make salsa between 75 and 125 beats per minute. At 75 beats per minute it starts sounding very my like Cha Cha Cha and at 125 beats per minute it sounds like a "descarga". At http://www.promoonly.com/view_title.php?TitleID=96720 information Jennifer Lopez's salsa remix of "Que Hiciste" is listed at 108 BPM. Promo Only is a famous world wide DJ service. I have come to the same number manually tapping out the BMP. People probably dance at the lower speeds too. I can't really imaging how anyone could move as fast as 150 bmp in salsa. Brisito (talk) 14:00, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

There is a lot of confusion because BPM can stand for 'beats per minute' or 'bars per minute'. Ballroom tempo is always quoted in bars per minute. All of my salsa music is in the range 30 to 50 bars per minute. The assumption is usually that the music is in 4/4 time and there are four beats to a bar, giving a range of 120 to 200 beats per minute, which is similar to what the article says. If you are making different assumptions about the definition of a beat then you will get different values.

I think you must be doing this, because you say Cha Cha is 75 BPM. Cha cha is standardised at 30-32 bars per minute. Thus cha cha is either 30 or 120 BPM. To get a value of 75 you must have screwed something up. 93.97.170.37 (talk) 04:08, 15 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I count beats per minute, and when I do, I find that my salsa music does indeed fall in the range between 160-220+ bpm.Cold Salsero (talk) 06:21, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

SalseroW's addition to external links section
I'd like others' comments on the disposition of the external link added by SalseroW to a salsa video website called watchsalsa.com. Originally he replaced an existing, long-standing link to a salsa video website with his own. I thought his site looked acceptable, so I just restored the original link without removing SalseroW's. But then SalseroW pushed his link to the top of the list, at which point I became concerned that his intent was promotional rather than to be helpful. So I removed the link as a spam link. Now he's put his link back, and again deleted the existing link to the ucan2.com website. I'd like to suggest that under the circumstances, given SalseroW's aggressive behavior, (a) SalseroW's link be removed or, failing that, (b) be kept underneath the previously existing salsa video link. —Largo Plazo (talk) 13:05, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
 * IMO if watchsalsa.com makes you pay or subscribe, it has no place here. If it's free and informative, I think it could stay.  -Sweavo (talk) 18:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Origin of Term
Bold text As far as I know the name of Salsa does did not originate as an allusion to being "tasty" but because the music is a mix of different styles, like son, etc. Get-back-world-respect 17:18, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
 * Not what I heard. I heard it was coined to mean "spicy" and was popularised by a New York DJ. Sweavo 09:37, 15 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Um, wasn't salsa around WAY before 2007? (at least in PR) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.248.86.16 (talk) 20:57, 12 October 2010 (UTC)


 * In any case I have greatly reduced the info on the origin of the term here, and refer instead to Salsa (music) which is an excellent article, well cited. Signed by who?


 * I've heard something similar to Sweavo, I heard Izzy Sanabria (from New York) coined the term...from Izzy himself! I've seen old video footage from the 60s or 70s where he talks about it. Anyway, it's mentioned in this discussion in the What Happend to Izzy Sanabria? section. Cold Salsero (talk) 05:24, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Rueda Glossary
I created a wikibook for rueda commands. I did not take the time to do it all in english, but the german version is more advanced. Get-back-world-respect 11:37, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Salsa Disco section
That part looks really inappropriate to me. It is not NPOV and makes unverified and unverifiable claims. Please edit or remove. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.162.24.138 (talk) 19:43, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

"Modern Salsa has elements of Jazz, funk reggae, hip-hop samba and even mambo." Considering that we r talking about the dance i find this sentence pretty weird, i'll remove it. --Echosmoke (talk) 00:27, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Similarities in Salsa and Samba
THERE ARE NO SIMILARITIES IN SALSA AND SAMBA EXCEPT FOR THE MUSIC —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.189.130.129 (talk) 22:24, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * nor are there similarities in the music, except for the spelling Sweavo (talk) 17:17, 17 June 2010 (UTC)