Music

In Cuba in 1955, Los Papines fused the violin-based music of charanga

Charanga

Charanga is a term given to traditional ensembles of Cuban dance music. They made Cuban dance music popular in the 1940s and their music consisted of heavily son-influenced material, performed on European instruments such as violin and flute by a Charanga orchestra....

s and the trumpet-based music of conjuntos Eduardo Davidson's La Pachanga (1959), recorded by Orquesta Sublime, introduced Cuba to a Colombian dance (which was confusingly called "charanga" in the USA). But, as Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...

 seized power in Cuba in 1959, the epicenter of Latin music moved to other islands and then south. Charanga and pachanga became brief fads in the USA, while the "son

Son (music)

The Son cubano is a style of music that originated in Cuba and gained worldwide popularity in the 1930s. Son combines the structure and elements of Spanish canción and the Spanish guitar with African rhythms and percussion instruments of Bantu and Arará origin...

" left Cuba and migrated to Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...

.

Dance

As a dance, pachanga has been described as "a happy-go-lucky dance" of Cuban origin with a Charleston

Charleston (dance)

The Charleston is a dance named for the harbor city of Charleston, South Carolina. The rhythm was popularized in mainstream dance music in the United States by a 1923 tune called "The Charleston" by composer/pianist James P. Johnson which originated in the Broadway show Runnin' Wild and became one...

 flavor due to the double bending and straightening of the knees. It is danced to the downbeat of four-four time to the usual mambo

Mambo (dance)

Mambo .In the late 1940s, Perez Prado came up with the dance for the mambo music and became the first person to market his music as "mambo". After Havana, Prado moved his music to Mexico, where his music and the dance was adopted. The original mambo dance was characterized by freedom and...

offbeat music characterized by the charanga instrumentation of flutes, violins, and drums.

External links

• Video of a pachanga dance lesson by Eddie Torres and Melissa Rosado.
• Video of pachanga dance performance by Melissa Rosado at the 2010 Hamburg Salsa Congress in Germany.
• Video of Palladium-era dancers dancing pachanga at the 2004 West Coast Salsa Congress