ABSTRACT
A significant force in UK world music for over fifteen years, Edinburgh’s Salsa Celtica promotes a particularly resonant blend of Scottish cultural hybridity: a finely-honed marriage of traditional and newly composed Scottish melodies set against Afro-Cuban rhythmic patterns. As a long-term member, I discuss the group from both a personal and ethnomusicological perspective, exploring the changing salsa/celtic balance within this contingent identity, and how these elements play back against a wider conception of contemporary Scottish music. Salsa Celtica’s deft adaptability represents a growing dialogue between increasingly co-territorial musical worlds. But more than this, the band is both product and expression of urban Scotland: its line-up speaks to a city’s ethnic encounters and the music itself is a direct outcome of the self-conscious eclecticism of the Edinburgh session scene. I therefore also investigate how this musically embodied multiculturalism functions as a pragmatic, easygoing and ever more pertinent celebration of contemporary internationalism. Through interviews and musical/visual analysis, I unpack the shifting ground that Salsa Celtica treads between insider and outsider in the world of Scottish music, a fluid musical discourse offering continually varied spaces of negotiation for both musicians and audience.
