A Guide to Salsa

The history of salsa is rich with both characters and musical innovation. Let us introduce you to the genre’s new wave of rising stars, as well as the giants of eras past who’ve inspired them.

For some kids, it was Michael Jordan. For the socially conscious, it could have been Bob Marley or Che Guevara. But for Christian Alicea, a young man from Lares, Puerto Rico, who’d only ever dreamed of one day becoming a world-famous salsa singer, it was Héctor Lavoe—the man most music historians would point to as having helped grow salsa from a Caribbean-centric phenomenon into a worldwide force. According to the video for Christian Alicea’s 2023 single “Bendición Mame y Pape,” it was Héctor Lavoe’s poster that hung in Alicea’s childhood bedroom, a constant reminder of how far the young salsero’s dedication could take him. The Ponce, Puerto Rico-hailing Lavoe is, of course, one of the all-time voices in the history of Latin music, a sonero (vocalists capable of crowd-thrilling improvisations during extended jam sessions) whose talents helped take salsa to new heights, and the one who—in collaboration with the great Willie Colón—helped put New York City’s groundbreaking Fania Records on the map. Since its evolution from the Afro-Caribbean rhythms that make up the music’s backbone to orchestral, jazz-borrowing (and -influencing!) big-band compositions, salsa has made a way for Latinos from Cuba and Puerto Rico—most principally—to tell the stories of their communities and to look great doing so. And this is to say nothing of the way the music moves an audience. (You’d have to learn how to dance to truly understand.) And though the salsa of today exists in conversation with the salsa of so many eras past, Alicea—who plays both charming and handsome in front of a microphone the same way his idol did—is part of this new crop of salseros pushing the genre forward. Alongside him are Philadelphia-born Boricua Luis Figueroa, Peruvian singer Daniela Darcourt and percussionist Tony Succar, Venezuela’s Jonathan Moly, “El Salsero Mexicano” Jimmy Rodriguez, and Moa Rivera. They aren’t just disciples of Lavoe and the aptly named Fania All-Stars, but artists who operate in a tradition of so many legendary singers and bandleaders, names like Joe Cuba, Cheo Feliciano, La India, and Celia Cruz. And like the greats did in their own eras, they’re setting the tone for “Salsa De Ahora.”

Salsa as a term began as something of a catchall for the music built from the Afro-Cuban rhythms of guaguancó, son, son montuno, guaracha, rumba, and cha-cha-cha, as well as Puerto Rico’s bomba y plena rhythms. The word itself appears on releases dating back to at least the 1930s, a time when Cuban singer Benny Moré is said to have shouted it while performing, to acknowledge that things were really heating up. As an art form with its deepest roots in Cuban soil, salsa’s earliest stars were naturally Cubanos. Practitioners like Machito (nee Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo) and his sister Graciela, Mario Bauza, Francisco Fellove, and La Lupe gave a consistently evolving, if increasingly popular, sound its earliest legs. It was in the ’50s and ’60s that salsa as we understand it today began to take shape, during the reign of Machito, Tito Rodríguez, and a percussionist with a million-dollar smile named Tito Puente. The bands got bigger, the percussion even more intense, and the music overall was inspired by a tumultuous and ever-changing world: For Latinos in particular, the influence of Black American jazz, the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, the civil rights movement in the United States, and a number of liberation movements across Latin America informed both worldviews and music-making. New York City was a hotbed of cultural exchange and innovation, a combination that yielded the rise of personalities like Joe Cuba (a Harlem-born Puerto Rican known as the father of the boogaloo sound, a fusion of R&B, soul, mambo, and son montuno), piano virtuoso Eddie Palmieri, and a larger-than-life Cuban singer named Celia Cruz, as well as bandleaders like Pete Rodríguez, Cheo Feliciano, and Johnny Pacheco, the flautist, vocalist, composer, and arranger who co-founded Fania Records. All told, they created some of the most important albums in salsa history.

For salsa fans of a certain age, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico has always been—and will always be—the most beloved of the island’s many contributions to the art form. Formed in 1962 and still performing to this day, El Gran Combo boasts so many legendary players as alumni that’s it’s been referred to as “La Universidad de la Salsa.” But we wouldn’t have El Gran Combo if not for the dissolution of Rafael Cortijo’s Cortijo y Su Combo, a calypso-influenced band that first featured eventual Gran Combo founding members Rafael Ithier and Roberto Roena, among others. Pre-Gran Combo, Cortijo and Ismael Rivera, the vocalist known as “El Sonero Mayor,” had taken the bomba and plena rhythms they grew up with in Puerto Rico and incorporated them into Cortijo’s conjunto-style ensemble. El Gran Combo would, of course, go on to become the more revered group of the two, but they were far from the only notable Puerto Rican sound of the era. A group called La Sonora Ponceña had plenty of hits, orchestrated by one of the most revered pianists in salsa history, the great Papo Lucca. A new crop of voices, from proper soneros to coristas (those with a gift for earworm-like choruses) and more straight-ahead cantantes, were also churning out classic after classic, etching names like Paquito Guzmán, Chamaco Ramírez, and Hector Tricoche—all of whom did stints in Tommy Olivencia’s orquesta—into the history books.

There’s an old saying among the financially responsible, typically used to warn young people of the perils of dating without proper resources: “No romance without finance.” The story of salsa in the 1990s and 2000s is basically the inverse. What sold in that moment was salsa romántica, an altogether lighter and slower-paced subset of the salsa that preceded it (salsa dura, or “hard salsa”). Salsa romántica’s lyrics are—as one would assume—largely expressions of love, but stylistically it also eschewed the blissfully indulgent descargas (heavy solos and calamitous instrumentation) that lovers of salsa dura appreciate so much. Pundits have attempted to explain the popularity of salsa romántica using everything from the sunsets of Fania legends—Héctor Lavoe, for example, died impoverished while suffering from AIDS in 1993—to the increasing popularity of merengue to the birth of hip-hop, a force destined to capture the hearts and minds of youth the world over. But what was clear for even casual salseros was that love was in the air, and that you could hear it coming by the sound of the clave. Salsa romántica’s popularity ushered in the era of stars like Marc Anthony—a New York-based singer who, coincidentally, would go on to play Héctor Lavoe in the film version of the singer’s life story—as well as the unforgettable voices of Victor Manuelle, Gilberto Santa Rosa, and Jerry Rivera. A new generation of salsa fans adored it, and the artists conquering the genre today—names like Peruvian-born Yahaira Plasencia; Huey Dunbar, the now-solo former member of ’90s salsa sensation DLG; and Moa Rivera, son of Jerry—operate largely in a salsa romántica mold.

Salsa is written and recorded largely in Spanish, but you needn’t have been raised en El Barrio to have encountered some of the culture’s biggest hits. In many areas of the world, Spanish-speaking and otherwise, the voice of a singer like Frankie Ruiz—the New Jersey-born Puerto Rican sonero with classics like “Tú con Él” and “Desnúdate Mujer” under his belt—is as recognizable as that of Stevie Wonder. And though it plays as conspicuously immodest, a song like “Ven Devórame Otra Vez” (translation: “come devour me one more time”) by the incomparable Lalo Rodríguez is an all-timer of salsa romántica and just as likely to play at a family party as it would at a nightclub back in the day. But salsa is about plenty more than relationships, and a song like “Rebelión” by Colombian singer Joe Arroyo exists in the ranks of protest songs like Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” What “Rebelión” has that those other selections do not, though, is the ability to summon bodies to a dance floor like ants to an unguarded mango slice. The message is important, but so, too, is the one at the heart of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico’s “El Menu,” where a rundown of the band’s favorite dishes doubles as an assurance of how you’ll feel when you’ve consumed what they’ve cooked up onstage: happy and full.