Musicality Defined

At dinner with a few salsa friends, one of the topics was musicality and I realized that as much as I've talked about musicality in the past, I might not have done a good enough job of defining it. Formally wikipedia has it defined as "Musicality refers to fitting a dance to the music being played, with the goal of relating the dance to the music's rhythm, melody, and mood." What they don't mention is how a dancer is able to apply the moves to the music when they haven't necessarily heard the song before. For salsa the answer is patterns. Salsa like most other music is made up of repeating patterns and eventually (bars of 4 and 8 and somtimes 3s), when you've been exposed to a mass of music your mind begins to naturally recognize the patterns to the point that you know when and how the breaks and accents will come, bars ahead of time. Think of it like that you've heard a song on Z100 a million times and can't get rid of. You know the song so well that you know all the lyrics and the precise way the beats change etc. It's predictive!

To me this is a more advanced topic, but the sooner you begin to try playing with the music, the sooner you can truly start enjoying it. Especially if you're a follow, since you have less to worry about, in the sense that follows aren't required to think ahead of time, unless it's musicality. I find that most dancers are so worried about not screwing up that they completely ignore the mood, the breaks and the reasons why certain moves are done. A lead will go into moves with the specific intent of either setting himself and/or his partner up to add styling. This becomes critically important when you get to a more advanced level or if you're trying to choreograph. Performance doesn't really interest me necessarily, but watching the better dancers, you'll notice that musicality is a top priority. This is something that I need to work on, but it does get better the more you listen to salsa, and even a little musicality makes the song A LOT more fun. 

This is their personal interpretation, but you get the idea. So next time you're dancing, think about how you handle walk arounds, dips, wraps or spins etc. 

This Fernando Sosa video with Jessica Santiago (she is stunning isn't she) really affected the way I danced. In particular is the section starting about 40 seconds into it until 1:20. It's really impressive and even though it's a song Fernando has heard a million times, it's just interesting how he handled it and it has changed my mindset completely. 

At the social I frequent weekly, one of the songs that is played and that really lends itself well to musicality is La Pantera Mambo by La33. The attached video will serve as an example:

Even tougher than predicting the breaks is predicting the accents:

A few more examples (although rehearsed):

So you get the idea. La Pantera Mambo is a great song. Another song that is very popular and is one of the easiest songs to predict breaks with is Orquesta La Palabra's "Lady" or Ray Barretto's Guarare. Also here is a great thread on salsaforums about this exact topic.