Do piano players in salsa bands ever get bored playing everything in octaves?

..i have the same thought about latin jazz bassists. all root-fifth-root-fifth-fifth-fifth-root

and with bass players, i have seen guys on stage looking like they'd rather be somewhere else. a couple weeks ago i saw Tito Puente's
Orquestra (now called Frankie Morales Orq. i believe) and the bass player was standing SO still the entire show. there was tons of people dancing, and he wasn't even tapping his foot.

The tumbao rhythms make up for it.

Latin piano style constitutes one of the most original and distinctive features of Latin music. . . . Essentially the solo style comprises a set of standardized patterns or techniques having contrasting textures, which, in a given solo, are introduced in the form of relatively short, discrete phrases. In several of these typical patterns, rhythm and texture are of greater importance than melody and harmony. . . .
The affinities with jazz are apparent mostly in the realm of chord voicings, which often use ninths, thirteenths, and, in less [i]tipico[/i] contexts, piled fourths such as were popularize by McCoy Tyner. However, the differences from jazz are perhaps more striking. Since the emergence of bebop in the early 1940s, mainstream jazz piano style has consisted overwhelmingly of single right-hand runs, punctuated by occasional left-hand chords (comping). That is, essentially a one-handed style (such as prompted Art Tatum to state of bebop pianist Bud Powell, "He ain't got no left"). This texture does occur in Latin piano, but as merely one of several more common textures. In general, Latin piano stresses volume, power, textural contrast, and rhythm more than intricacy of melodic line. As Sonny Bravo states, half in jest, "We're not dealing with subtle music here; we're dealing with savages from the jungle." It may also be noted that such textural variation works much more naturally with harmonically static or repetitive montunos than it would with extended harmonic progressions used in jazz standards. . . .

I get the gist of this, but I couldn't identify a ninth vs. a thirteenth or anything elsa even that modestly technical.

(For those of you interested in improvisation, this book should be worth checking out, especially if you do understand music theory and don't mind an academic approach to music.)

What about rhythm guitarists in reggae bands? Do they get bored?