How much do Salseros know about Merengue?
The word merengue by itself is a dessert composed of beaten egg-whites and sugar. In another sense merengue is also the folkloric music and dance of the Dominican Republic. My all-time baseball hero Sammy Sosa is from the Dominican Republic. Sammy Sosa is from the town of San Pedro de Macor. Anyway, somehow someone made the connection of the dessert and the music and came-up with the concept of what we know as merengue music and dancing. The only thing that comes to my mind is that back in the days before the electric mixer, this dessert had to be done by hand. In order to obtain the consistency for the merengue dessert, one had to beat the egg-whites so very fast to produce a frost. The merengue music is a fast rhythm 2 x 4 beat. The guayano instrument is played with a precise continuous quick strokes and it represents the constant beat of the groove. Much like the cowbells one hears in salsa “ti-ti-to-ti-to”. The guayano is the metal scraped cylinder that is on every merengue band, t
