timba

American  

[teem-buh] / ˈtim bə /

noun

plural

timbas

1. a genre of Cuban dance music with fast, complex rhythms, influenced by salsa, son cubano, Afro-Cuban folk music, and American R&B and funk.

2. a long, tapered hand drum used in many genres of Latin American music.

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Example Sentences

Both 72, they call the event Los Tradicionales — “the traditional ones” — because their goal is to help preserve Cuba’s rich dance heritage, from rumba to timba to casino, an ancestor of salsa.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 4, 2026

Singer and trumpet player Alexander Abreu spent the last decade updating and refining the sound of timba with his band Havana D’Primera.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 23, 2019

With Ola Fresca, the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mr. Conde draws from a variety of Afro-Latin traditions, tossing son, salsa and timba into a nonacademic stew, ready for the street fair, dance club or concert hall.

From New York Times • Sep. 21, 2017

To help organise the concert, they called on the help of timba star Isaac Delgado.

From The Guardian • Mar. 25, 2016

This contrivance is called by the natives timba.

From The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 — Volume 10 of 55 1597-1599 Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions of the Islands and Their Peoples, Their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as Related in Contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, Showing the Political, Economic, Commercial and Religious Conditions of Those Islands from Their Earliest Relations with European Nations to the Close of the Nineteenth Century by Robertson, James Alexander