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TIMBA 101 While we don't promise to teach you how to dance like Charanga Habanera, speak as fluently as a Havana cab driver or tell jokes like Alvarez Guedez we can at least promise to teach you the hell Alvarez Guedez is! Consider it a crash course in Cuban culture. Just pick a class from the list below and be on your way to higher learning!
Timba.com is
dedicated to all Cuban music of all styles and from all eras. But both in
our name and in the interest of what is happening in today's Cuban music, we
place an emphasis on Timba.
What is "Timba"? Here's a very short, very abbreviated history:
Timba has its roots deep in the Cuban rumba. Underneath
the horns and the rapping you can still hear the African rhythms, largely
unchanged for generations. But of course Timba is much much more. In the
1940s and 50s, Cuban musicians travelled to New York and took the mambo with
them. They were joined by NY native hispanic musicians, mostly Puerto
Rican, like Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez and the mambo took on a distinctly New
York sound and spread across the US in the Mambo Craze. Midwest housewives
were learning the mambo at Arthur Murray dance studios. Ricky Ricardo's
band played the mambo on I Love Lucy.
In the turbulent 1960s, young New York musicians took up the mambo and
transformed it, adding socially conscious lyrics and musical elements from
their native Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, bomba, plena, merengue
as well as jazz, rock and disco. They called this hot melange of sounds
"Salsa" and through the 1970s salsa continued to evolve and expand. Salsa
spread throughout the world, through Latin America and the Caribbean,
particularly Colombia which has become a hotbed of salsa creativity, and as
far afield as Japan which developed several world class salsa bands composed
completely of Japanese musicians.
During this time, the orthodox opinion in Cuba was that there was no such
thing as "salsa". The purists saw salsa as nothing more than a corruption
of Cuban son. The extreme among these did not even acknowledge the mambo as
a separate style. But in the early 1980s something happened. Artists like
Elio Reve and Adalberto Alvarez began to incorporate distinctly salsa sounds
into their music. Then NG La Banda burst onto the scene. NG took New York
salsa, added in sounds from the innovative Cuban Latin jazz group Irakere,
had the coro start chanting like the rappers that were starting to take off
in the US, turning the voice into a rhythm instrument, added classical
influences that all Cuban musicians learn in music school and Timba was
born.
Other singers and groups spun out of this initial effort, Issac Delgado,
Klimax, Manolin el Medico and many more had their start in NG La Banda.
Long time musical renegades, Los Van Van shifted their own unique sound to
incorporate the new music into their repetoire. New acts like Bamboleo, Paulito and
Manolito entered the scene with their own versions of timba. And for the
first time, the Cubans took up the name "salsa" and embraced it as their
own: "Salsa....de Cuba... ¡Chevere!" sings Issac.
Today, timba, like salsa before it, is spreading around the world. There
are timba bands in the US, in Europe, in Australia, in South America. This
is what Timba.com is all about: the evolution of a wonderful music from
primal roots, absorbing influences from everywhere continuously expanding
and changing, all the while making people everywhere dance their asses off.
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