The Chicago International Salsa Congress - A Timbero's Perspective

Article and all Photos by Bill Tilford, All Rights Reserved

(This installment is for both Salseros and Timberos in the hope that they may remember that there are some common challenges that are faced by all.)

Welcome to the third installment of our series.  We'll have a lot of photos later on along with the first in a series of sound clips that we hope will help illustrate that many common misconceptions about both "Cuban Salsa" and Timba music are exactly that.   In the meantime, I would like to expand a little on some earlier themes from the first two chapters. 

Why I listen to both Timba and Salsa:  For one thing, I'm a lot older than Timba is, and I was born with a pair of ears that were being used before Timba came along (along with hands and an embouchure that were being used to play music back then.)  Old enough to be around when Van Van first started to play Songo, which came before Timba.  For another, while Timba has a number of modern innovations that I really love (including on occasion more intricate rhythms, what my friend and colleague Kevin Moore likes to call "gears" and, at times, some more interesting variations with chord progressions), the best Salsa bands have remained a better home for the soloist, whether trumpet, trombone, saxophone or even piano. This means that many Timba musicians also play Jazz, Salsa and other genres to express the rest of their musical selves. There are exceptions on both sides of this equation, but most of the time this holds true; in fact, the Timba bands that have allowed the greatest amount of freedom for soloists have sometimes lost support among their hard-core fans. Tiempo Libre comes to mind in the United States; they have done a lot of wonderful work, some of which has been properly recognized with GRAMMY nominations, and yet they have had stronger support from the general public than from hard-core Timberos.  (Fortunately, there are more than enough listeners in the former category to keep them working the circuit.)  This state of affairs is unfortunate but quite real, and to some degree it has even held the music back at times as musicians who could be putting even more ingredients into their Timba are forced to weigh the possible consequences of doing so and sometimes end up playing it safe instead. 

Why Timberos and Salseros should learn to get along better:  For one thing, you have something in common - you are still going out to hear live musicians play interesting music. Kudos to Timberos and Salseros both for that, but in this age of Reggaeton, Hip Hop, You Tube and Spotify, there are fewer bodies willing to go out and actively support the music, so in most of the country, the bands need both the Timberos and the Salseros to get together enough paid tickets to justify a concert. Therefore, we all need each other as well, and it's time to stop pretending that this isn't the case. Incidentally, one of the reasons that live music doesn't always sound "like it used to" is that it frequently isn't played like it used to be -- in past decades, bands with ten or more musicians playing this music were the norm.   Many bands in Cuba are still able to field those numbers, but in the United States, this is difficult due to an increasingly-hostile economic environment for the music, and the band that may have had twelve members in the 1980s may now be forced to play with 6-8 musicians instead. For that matter, the situation  may eventually change in Cuba as well over time as musicians there are required to be increasingly less reliant upon government funds. 

What does this mean for you? 

For Timberos, it means two things. First, if we really want to see more live Timba in the United States, we will need to learn to be more tolerant than we have been in the past if and when a Timba band throws in a Salsa tune or two or some sort of fusion during the set. The reason for this lies in the second thing:  live audiences for both Salsa and Timba are difficult to sustain in the US nowadays, so the presence or absence of some Salseros (and right now, there are a lot more of them than us) in the audience may very well determine the future of live Timba in the United States. We can still have a pura session at a house party or in the restaurants, but at large concerts, we'll need to be more understanding if a band does what it needs to do provided that it doesn't completely "sell out" or get corny. Remember too that if we come down too hard on new fusion experiments, we are being no different than the previous generation that tried to freeze the music forever in the 1950s. 

For Salseros, this means that you'll being seeing more bands that play modern Cuban music reach out to you more directly in the future since all things being equal, musicians like to have audiences and eat. You'll be seeing more bands labeled as "Cuban Salsa". Hopefully you will approach them with an open mind and come to the concerts without preconceptions.  If you do, you are in for some pleasant surprises. 

Why the past matters for the future:  One thing that concerns not just me but many observers among musicians and some dancers is that a lot of knowledge about the musical "building blocks" of both Salsa and Timba aren't always being passed on to dancers or even some musicians that just pick up their instruments and play whatever is on the chart without learning more about where it all came from and how the variations work. For musicians, this could become a problem over time because neither Salsa nor Timba was created out of thin air, and the less that today's performers know about the history and structure of the music, the more likely they are to get repetitive and stuck in ruts.  For dancers, the more you that know about the music, the more your own dancing will be enriched. We'll talk more about this in our next (and final) installment about the CISC, but for now, keep in mind that it is possible to respect the past without being stuck in it.  Many of the best ingredients for new things come from there when used in new ways.  

In our next (and final) installment, we're going to talk specifically about where we thought the CISC performed well and share a couple of suggestions for opportunities to do even better.  We'll also have some positive suggestions for the DJ community, venues, and the community at large.  For now, we have both another photo gallery with demonstration and competition dancers as well as some sound samples to help introduce Salseros to the more accessible forms of Timba. 

To see the photo gallery and listen to the sound samples, click here. 

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