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Rafael Cortijo helped start Salsa

We can’t end our week of music from Puerto Rico without even a nod to salsa, one of Puerto Rico’s most danceable musical exports, and one of its formative stars, Rafael Cortijo.

The musical progeny of Cuban son, from which it borrows its signature 3-2 and 2-3 clave patterns, the genre may have started in Cuba and Puerto Rico but really took root in the ’60s and ’70s in New York City where Puerto Rican immigrants fused son, mambo and little guaracha to make an extraordinary new musical form. In this video meet Rafael Cortijo, a leading Puerto Rican big band leader from the ’50s and ’60s. He and his combos started by performing only plena, then branched out to merengue and, eventually, salsa.

We love to dance the Plena

Puerto Rican plena, also nicknamed “el periodico cantado (“the sung newspaper”), formed as a distinct musical genre in the late 1800s when sugar cane plantation laborers, manual workers and former slaves moved to Puerto Rico’s urban areas and communicated the news of the day to each other through music and dance.


A Puerto Rican plena ensemble consists of a variety of percussion instruments such as guiros, congas, timbales, maracas and panderos (small tamborines), as well as a 4-stringed Puerto Rican guitar known as a cuatro. The plena has no fixed rhythmic form, but, unlike bomba which is primarily African, weaves in a multitude of rhythms from Puerto Rico’s Spanish, African and Taino cultures. Enjoy the plena in this video while grooving along with these gentlemen, who are clearly having an extraordinary time.

Rule, Rule, Rule Sonda

Dance along with Hermanos Ayala as you meet bomba….

“Rule Sonda,” is a Puerto Rican bomba — music in which drumming and dancing are very closely connected, and in which the dancers generally usually lead the drummers rather than the other way around. Puerto Rican communities with strong ties to Africa developed bomba, with its energizing drumming and dancing, in the 17th and 18th centuries, giving enslaved Africans a medium to express both their struggles and triumphs through song. In this video Hermanos Ayala will make sure you dance.