Salsa is Spanish for "sauce" in music it's a term that refers to
the hot, spicy Afro-Caribbean rhythms. When people talk about
salsa music, however, they are usually referring to a generic
term that includes a number of distinct types of Afro-Caribbean
music, although one in particular, the son guaguancó, has
predominated since the 1960s. As Jorge Duany wrote in Latin
American Music Review in 1984, "Salsa is neither a musical style
nor a particular rhythm, but rather a hybrid genre." According
to Duany, the word "salsa" was first used to refer to this
hybrid genre in the 1960s, but it did not gain universal
recognition until 1975, when it was used as the title for a
popular movie. In the late 1990s, with an explosion of interest
in Latin dance music, the word salsa is used for many types of
Latin sound, both dance and music. In an interview with Alan
Feuerstein on the Planet Salsa Web site, salsa maestro Tito
Puente observed: "People think of it as new music, it's really
not! Salsa is a merchandized word, a m