Timba is contemporary Cuban dance music. One easy way to tell the difference between a salsa band and a timba one is the presence of a full drum-set. Its funk based beats go along with very syncopated and distinct piano and bass movements. Timba has its roots deep in the Cuban rumba -a folkloric genre native to the island. Underneath the horns and the rapping you can still hear the African rhythms, largely unchanged for generations. In Timba, rumba's sophisticated density is carried on and applied to a big band format.

Origins: In the 1940's and 50's, Cuban musicians traveled to New York and took the mambo with them. They were joined by NY native Hispanic musicians, mostly Puerto Rican, and the mambo took on a distinctly New York sound. It then spread across the US as the famous 'Mambo Craze'.

Then in the turbulent 1960's, young New York musicians took up the mambo and transformed it, adding socially conscious lyrics and musical elements from their native Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, namely their indigenous rhythms of bomba, plena, and merengue, as well as jazz, rock and disco. They simply called this hot mélange of sounds Salsa.

Through the 1970's salsa continued to evolve and expand. Salsa spread around the world, through Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly Colombia, which has become a hotbed of salsa creativity, and as far away as Japan (which developed several world class salsa bands of purely Japanese musicians).

In the early 1980s Cuban artists like Elio Revé and Adalberto Álvarez began to incorporate distinctly salsa sounds into their music. Then NG La Banda burst onto the scene, took New York style salsa, added sounds from the innovative Cuban Latin jazz group Irakere, had the chorus (coro) start with chanting like the rappers that were starting to take off in the U.S., turning the voice into a rhythm instrument, added classical influences that all Cuban musicians learn in music school, and Timba was born.