The salsa style emerged in New York in the 1970s when Latin musicians, searching for a tougher, more strident sound, started updating big band arrangements that had been used by Cuban bands for the previous 20 or 30 years. Salsa is a mixture of Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other indigenous Caribbean styles combined with pop and jazz styles of the U.S.
The origin of salsa can be traced to the explosion of the Afro-Cuban “
mambo
craze
” inin...