Saturday: 5 p.m. Railroad, 9:15 p.m. Kenduskeag; Sunday: 12:30 p.m. Kenduskeag, 4:15 p.m. Kenduskeag

Edwin Ortiz y su Orquesta La Romana has been “spicing up” the clubs of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore with its New York-style salsa sounds since 1989. Over the last two decades, Washington has become the third-largest salsa market after New York and Los Angeles in the United States. The group is considered the best band in town, the one that salsa-mad Washingtonians of every stripe love to dance to.

Bandleader and percussionist Edwin Ortiz grew up in New York’s East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio. His parents were among the 800,000 Puerto Ricans who moved to New York between 1940 and 1969. His father was a music lover, a “house singer” as Ortiz describes him, always buying records, and singing and dancing. Ortiz’s two older brothers were his inspiration. Both became accomplished musicians who worked with two legendary Puerto Rican architects of salsa; one played with Willie Colon and the other with Tito Puente. While the roots of salsa are traced to Cuban music, credit for its international popularity belongs to the Puerto Ricans of New York.

The foundation of salsa is the Cuban son (sound in Spanish), a style with African and Spanish elements that developed in the mountains of Cuba’s Oriente Province. The heart and soul of son is the syncopated clave, a five-note, two-bar rhythmic pattern of African origin. It’s the irresistible beat that forms the backbone of today’s salsa. By the 1920s, the son had become so popular with Cubans that it had essentially become the island’s national music.

Beginning in the 1930s, the creative combination of the son with other styles and influences in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the rich, multicultural soil of New York City eventually developed into what is now called salsa. The first known use of the term “salsa” (Spanish for “sauce”) to describe any kind of danceable Latin music was by Cuban composer and musician Ignacio Pi?ero in 1937. He composed a son he called “Echale Salsita,” which means “spice it up a little,” a title inspired by the bland American food he was served while on tour in the U.S. As New York City became home to a growing number of Cuban, Puerto Rican and other Latin immigrant groups in the mid-20th century, new musical forms emerged.

The term “salsa” began to circulate more widely in the 1960s and ’70s as a description of Latin music that was “spiced up” with elements of other types of music and made into dance orchestral arrangements. It came to characterize a highly danceable, energetic and rhythmically complicated music that blends many distinct Afro-Latin and American musical styles, including Cuban son and mambo, Puerto Rican bomba and plena, Dominican merengue, Cuban Yoruba ritual music, African-American big band jazz and R&B.

With the emergence of communism under Fidel Castro, diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Cuba were severed in 1962, and interactions between New York and Cuban musicians virtually ceased. Subsequently, a distinctive New York Latin style began to emerge whose primary exponents were, and still are, Puerto Rican, though salsa is now performed by musicians from all over the world.

When a job brought him to Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, Ortiz found the salsa scene practically nonexistent. He performed with one of the only two salsa bands in the area. In 1989, he took over management of one group and renamed it Orquesta La Romana after the place in the Dominican Republic purported to be the birthplace of merengue music, which was in vogue at the time. The name helped to get gigs, but salsa never left the band’s repertoire and is once again the group’s primary focus. The ensemble is regularly called upon to accompany visiting salsa stars such as Cano Estremera, Lalo Rodriguez, Hector Tricoche, Alfredo De La Fe and Jimmy Bosch. But, as festival-goers will discover, Orquesta La Romana and its lively New York-style salsa can create quite a stir all by themselves.