Salsa

In dry terms, salsa is a popular form of Latin-American dance music with Afro-Caribbean, usually Cuban, origins. But no other genre (or, more accurately, collection of genres: chachachá, mambo, etc.) defies the straightjacket of a bland definition like salsa because, let's make no bones here, it's the sexiest sound in the universe, overflowing with passion, vitality, pure sensory pleasure. Allow Tito Puente ("The King of Latin Music") and Celia Cruz ("La Guarachera de Cuba") to show you why.

Gloria Estefan delivers the definitive conga in Next Steps.

Crossover salsa in the '80s was dominated by Gloria Estefan, who scored one of her biggest hits with Miami Sound Machine in 1985 — "Conga" — while the genre's current moves into the mainstream have been spearheaded by Marc Anthony, whose English version of "Dímelo" ("I Need to Know") went Top 5 in the U.S. in 1999. Anthony had been inspired to switch from freestyle to salsa by Panamanian singer Rubén Blades ("Decisiones"), whose lyrical sophistication dubbed him the thinking person's salsa star.

A couple of salsa supergroups loom large among our Deep Cuts.

Think of Colombian salsa, and you can't look past Grupo Niche, founded in Bogota in the late '70s and based since 1982 in Cali — "Solo un Carino" appears on 1984's No Hay Quinto Malo. Fluid salsa supergroup the Fania All Stars ("Anacoana") was the brainchild of composer — and salsa godfather — Johnny Pacheco, and since 1968 has operated as a showcase for the brightest stars on the Fania label, although the outfit's golden age was over by the late '80s.

Salsa is the beating heart of Latin music, a blend of tropical and exotic influences once described by practitioner Rubén Blades as a "concept" rather than a fixed style. As the beats and rhythms of our comprehensive Salsa Essentials start to infect your body and soul, you'll realise that salsa is a free-flowing, liberating force that can never be pinned down. Here, you can become familiar with legends and leading lights from the length and breadth of the Latin world: Cuba's Celia Cruz, Venezuela's Oscar D'León (a.k.a. the Improviser or "Sonero" of the World), Puerto Rico's Tito Nieves, Colombian fusion artist Carlos Vives . . . and many more.