Writing a Christmas song that is not a carol: the seasonal salsa problem
What makes an original Latin Christmas song work: avoiding carol harmony, keeping the montuno, seasonal imagery without novelty, and why bells are a trap.
An original Christmas salsa has to solve a specific problem. Familiar carol harmony pulls a track towards a northern European sound that fights the rhythm section. The usual solution is to keep normal salsa harmony and let the imagery, the arrangement details and the mood carry the season instead.
The harmony trap
The moment you reach for the chord movement of a traditional carol, a track starts to sound like a carol with congas added. That is a novelty record, and it is not what any of this material is trying to be. The harmonic language of the northern European Christmas repertoire is diatonic, plagal and hymn shaped, and it does not sit comfortably over an anticipated bass and a montuno.
The alternative is to write an ordinary salsa or bolero and let the season live in the words, the title and the atmosphere.
Bells, and why they are risky
Sleigh bells are the fastest available signal for Christmas and also the least interesting. In a Latin arrangement they compete directly with the guiro, the maracas and the shaker, all of which already occupy the high frequency continuous band. Adding sleigh bells on top usually just makes the top end busy.
Arrangements that want a seasonal colour without that clutter tend to use a bell tree or tubular bell as an event rather than a texture, once at a section boundary.
Where the season actually lives
In practice it lives in three places: the lyric, the tempo choice and the instrumentation around the edges. A slightly slower tempo than the band's usual, a string pad or a solo guitar in the introduction, and a lyric about a specific December scene will read as Christmas far more convincingly than any amount of jingling.
A long tradition
None of this is new. The Caribbean has been writing seasonal music in its own forms for as long as it has had forms, from aguinaldos to Christmas boleros. The Latin Christmas mix note covers the parranda and aguinaldo traditions this sits within.