Timba

Timba is the late-1980s/1990s Cuban dance-music future that grew up alongside salsa, not in answer to it. It draws on songo, Irakere's jazz-fusion ambition,...

Timba is the late-1980s/1990s Cuban dance-music future that grew up alongside salsa, not in answer to it. It draws on songo, Irakere's jazz-fusion ambition, funk and rock and Afro-Cuban folkloric vocabulary — and what you actually hear is song-specific piano and bass tumbaos, sudden gear-changes, arranged rhythmic bloques, drum-kit integration, wide jazz harmony and Havana's urban social codes. José Luis "El Tosco" Cortés founded NG La Banda in 1988, widely identified as the first timba band, and singers like Issac Delgado pushed the form forward. Timba is salsa's sibling, not its descendant — a parallel modernity that runs the same Cuban DNA through a fiercer, more virtuosic machine.

Era

Timba

Traits

Rhythmically aggressive, harmonically elastic Cuban dance music from songo + jazz-fusion; gear-changes and bloques.