Beyond Salsa Bass

Book excerpt: Doubling as a history and music appreciation course, each volume of the Beyond Salsa Bass series is significantly longer than the corresponding volume of Beyond Salsa Piano. At 440 pages, Beyond Salsa Bass Vol. 3 is by far the longest of the 26 Beyond Salsa books and the first to extensively cover New York and Puerto Rican salsa and pre-salsa as well as Latin jazz. Its audio product (separate purchase) has 616 tracks (a generous selection of 60 free audio tracks is also available by download). The book includes a bass tumbao for every piano tumbao in each of Volumes 3 and 4 of the Beyond Salsa Piano series, but it also includes hundreds of bass tumbaos from and historical analyses of areas of Latin music not covered in the piano series: Puerto Rico, New York, Latin Jazz, the Cuban descargas and additional aspects of the Cuban music of 1959-1989, i.e., from the Cuban Revolution to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition to exercises in music notation, the bass series delves far more deeply into history and the biographies and discographies of individual artists than either the piano or percussion series. The bass series could be thought of as a thorough general history of Latin popular music, told from the perspective of the bass student.