Merengue
Merengue is fast, in two, and relentless. It is the Dominican Republic's national dance music and the easiest style here to identify from across a room, because nothing else moves quite like it.
Latin hits, non-stop
Merengue is fast, in two, and relentless. It is the Dominican Republic's national dance music and the easiest style here to identify from across a room, because nothing else moves quite like it.
Merengue tipico is the older ensemble: a diatonic accordion carrying the melody, a tambora drum played with one hand and one stick, a guira scraper, and a bass instrument. It is loud, close-miked and rhythmically dense.
Orquesta merengue replaces the accordion with a full horn section and a piano, and it is the form that dominated international radio through the 1980s and 1990s. The rhythm section stays the same; the top of the arrangement gets much bigger.
The tambora is played with a stick on one head and the bare hand on the other, producing an alternating pattern that fills the bar without ever crowding the downbeat. It is the single most identifiable sound in the style.
The guira supplies a continuous scraped sixteenth-note layer. Between them the two instruments cover the whole rhythmic surface, which is why merengue can be carried by a very small group and still sound complete.
Merengue sits at the top of the tempo range on this site, and a run of merengue records will lift an hour quickly and then leave nowhere to go. Programmers usually treat it as a peak rather than a bed.
Its close relative in a sequence is fast bachata, which shares the Dominican percussion pair and can be used to step down from a merengue peak without a jarring change of texture.