Improvising Sabor

The term ‘salsa’ has come to stand for a particular standardized set of performance practices and the dominant narrative of its origins, particularly through the lens of the Fania Records story, has tended to over-simplify Latin music history in the USA. This book documents an understudied period of Latin music history across the divide of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to demonstrate a wider narrative which includes the history of the influential charanga orquestas of 1960s New York. A típico aesthetic is shown to be an important one with the combination of charanga and conjunto stylings giving rise to a plurality of ensemble types, each with a distinctive sabor and varying degrees of cubanía. In this book Miller thus examines the New York contexts for Cuban dance music performance in the first part of the twentieth century before considering the mid twentieth-century developments. The text makes its argument for a distinctive New York sabor through interviews with performers and through the sensitive transcription and analysis of recordings by Orquesta Broadway, Pacheco y su Charanga, Charlie Palmieri’s Charanga Duboney, Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta, and Ray Barretto’s Charanga Moderna, amongst others. Analytical transcriptions of improvisations, in dialogue with musicians’ own perspectives, highlight a specific Latin music performance aesthetic or sabor that is rooted in both Cuban dance music forms and the rich performance culture of Latin New York.