Origins

Salsa's roots can be traced back to the African ancestors that were brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish as slaves. Salsa's most direct antecedent is the Cuban guaracha genre, which itself is a combination of African and European influences. But other genres have been part of the salsa repertoire: son montuno, bolero, danzón, bomba and others, and prior to the late 1970s and early 1980s, figured prominently in recordings. Since that time a more generic rhythm is played and it can be characterized as a highly stylized guaracha. Large son bands were very popular in Cuba beginning in the 1930s; these were largely septetos and sextetos, and they quickly spread to the United States.^[25] In the 1940s Cuban dance bands grew much larger, becoming mambo and charanga orchestras led by bandleaders like Arsenio Rodriguez and Felix Chappotin. In New York City in the '50s, the centers for mambo in the United States included the [[Palladium Ballroom and the PArk Palace Ballroom, among others. The most popular artists at that time were known as "The Big Three": Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez. New York began developing its own Cuban-derived sound, spurred by large-scale Latino immigration, the rise of local record labels due to the early 1940s musicians strike and the spread of the jukebox industry, and the craze for big band dance music.^[26]

Mambo was very jazz-influenced, and it was the mambo big bands that kept alive the large jazz band tradition, while the mainstream current of jazz was moving on to the smaller bands of the bebop era. Throughout the 1950s Latin dance music, such as mambo, rumba and chachachá, was mainstream popular music in the United States and Europe. The '50s also saw a decline in popularity for mambo big bands, followed by the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which greatly inhibited contact between New York and Cuba. The result was a scene more dominated by Puerto Ricans than Cubans.