FOLKLORIC ROOTS
MAMBO & CHACHACHá
SALSA, TIMBA & JAZZ
LOS TROVADORES
RAP, REGGAETÓN & BEYOND
‘In Cuba the music flows like a river,’ wrote Ry Cooder in his sleeve notes to the seminal Buena Vista Social Club CD, ‘It takes care of you and rebuilds you from the inside out.’
Rich, vibrant, layered and soulful, Cuban music has long acted as a standard-bearer for the sounds and rhythms emanating out of Latin America. From the down-at-heel docks of Matanzas to the bucolic local villages of the Sierra Maestra, everything from son, salsa, rumba, mambo, chachachá, charanga and danzón owe at least a part of their existence to the magical musical dynamism that was first ignited here.
Aside from the obvious Spanish and African roots, Cuban music has intermittently called upon a number of other important influences in the process of its embryonic development. Mixed into an already exotic melting pot are genres from France, the US, Haiti and Jamaica. Conversely, Cuban music has also played a key role in developing various melodic styles and movements in other parts of the world. In Spain they called this process ida y vuelta (return trip) and it is most clearly evident in a style of flamenco called guajira. Elsewhere the ‘Cuban effect’ can be traced back to forms as diverse as New Orleans jazz, New York salsa, West African Afrobeat, and even the famous Habanera aria in Bizet’s opera Carmen.
Son, Cuba’s instantly recognizable signature music, first emerged from the mountains of the Oriente region in the second half of the 19th century, though the earliest known testimonies go back as far as 1570. Famously described by Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz as ‘a love affair between the African drum and the Spanish guitar,’ the roots of this eclectic and intricately fused rural music lie in two distinct subgenres: rumba and danzón.
While drumming in the North American colonies was ostensibly prohibited, the Spanish were slightly less mean-spirited in the treatment of their African brethren. As a result Cuban slaves were able to preserve and pass on many of their musical traditions via influential Santería cabildos, religious brotherhoods that re-enacted ancient African percussive music on simple batá drums or chequeré rattles. Performed at annual festivals or on special Catholic saint’s days, this rhythmic yet highly textured dance music was offered up as a form of religious worship to the orishas (deities).
Over time the ritualistic drumming of Santería evolved into a more complex genre known as rumba (see boxed text,). Rumba first metamorphosed in the dock areas of Havana and Matanzas in the late 19th century and was originally viewed as a lewd and unsophisticated form of entertainment for black Afro-Cubans only. But while the music itself sat well outside the cultural mainstream, the dances and rhythms of rumba gradually permeated more accepted forms of popular Cuban music and it became universally popular.
On the other side of the musical equation sat danzón, a type of refined European dance closely associated with the French contredanse or the English ‘country dance’ of the 19th century. Pioneered by innovative Matanzas band leader Miguel Failde in the 1880s, the Cuban danzón quickly developed its own peculiar syncopated rhythm borrowing heavily from Haitian slave influences and, later on, adding such improbable extras as conga drums and vocalists. By the early 20th century Cuban danzóns had evolved from a stately ballroom dance played by an orchestra típica into a more jazzed-up free-for-all known alternatively as charanga, danzonete or danzón-chá.
Welded together, rumba and danzón provided the musical backbone that ultimately paved the way for son, a distinctive blend of anticipated African rhythms and melodic rustic guitars over which a singer would improvise from a traditional 10-line Spanish poem known as a décima.
In its pure form, son was played by a sextet consisting of guitar, tres (guitar with three sets of double strings), double bass, bongo and two singers who played maracas and claves (sticks that tap out the beat). Arising from the precipitous mountains of Cuba’s influential east, the genre’s earliest exponents were the legendary Trio Oriental, who stabilized the sextet format in 1912 when they were reborn as the Sexteto Habanero. Another early sonero was singer Miguel Matamoros, whose self-penned son classics such as ‘Son de la Loma’ and ‘Lágrimas Negras’ are de rigueur among Cuba’s ubiquitous musical entertainers, even today.
By the 1930s the sextet had become a septet with the addition of a trumpet, and exciting new musicians such as blind tres player Arsenio Rodríguez – a songwriter who Harry Belafonte once called the ‘father of salsa’ – were paving the way for mambo and chachachá.
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In the 1940s and ’50s the son bands grew from seven pieces to eight and beyond until they became big bands boasting full horn and percussion sections that played rumba, chachachá and mambo. The reigning mambo king was Benny Moré (see boxed text,), who with his sumptuous voice and rocking 40-piece all-black band was known as El Bárbaro del Ritmo (The Barbarian of Rhythm).
Mambo grew out of charanga music which itself was a derivative of danzón. Bolder, brassier and altogether more exciting than its two earlier incarnations, the music was characterized by exuberant trumpet riffs, belting saxophones and regular enthusiastic interjections by the singer (usually in the form of the word dilo! or ‘say it!’). The style’s origins are mired in controversy. Some argue that it was invented by native Habanero Orestes López after he penned a new rhythmically dexterous number called ‘Mambo’ in 1938. Others give the credit to Matanzas band leader Pérez Prado who was the first musician to market his songs under the increasingly lucrative mambo umbrella in the early ’40s. Whatever the case, mambo had soon spawned the world’s first universal dance craze and, from New York to Buenos Aires, people couldn’t get enough of its infectious rhythms.
A variation on the mambo theme, the chachachá was first showcased by Havana-based composer and violinist Enrique Jorrín in 1951 while playing with the Orquesta América. Originally known as ‘mambo-rumba,’ the music was intended to promote a more basic kind of Cuban dance that less coordinated North Americans would be able to master, but it was quickly mambo-ized by overenthusiastic dance competitors who kept adding complicated new steps.
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Salsa is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of musical genres that emerged out of the fertile Latin New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s when jazz, son and rumba blended to create a new, brassier sound. While not strictly a product of Cubans living in Cuba, salsa’s roots and key influences are descended directly from son montuno and owe an enormous debt to innovators such as Pérez Prado, Benny Moré and Miguel Matamoros.
The self-styled Queen of Salsa was Grammy award–winning singer and performer Celia Cruz. Born in Havana in 1925, Cruz served the bulk of her musical apprenticeship in Cuba before leaving for self-imposed exile in the US in 1960. But, due to her longstanding opposition to the Castro regime, Cruz’ records and music have remained largely unknown on the island despite her enduring legacy elsewhere. Far more influential on their home turf are the legendary salsa outfit Los Van Van, a band formed by Juan Formell in 1969 and one that still performs regularly at venues across Cuba. With Formell at the helm as the group’s great improviser, poet, lyricist and social commentator, Los Van Van are one of the few contemporary Cuban groups to have created their own unique musical genre – that of songo-salsa. The band also won top honors in 2000 when they memorably took home a Grammy for their classic album, Llego Van Van.
Modern salsa mixed and merged further in the ’80s and ’90s, allying itself with new cutting-edge musical genres such as hip-hop, reggaetón and rap, before coming up with some hot new alternatives, most notably timba and songo-salsa.
Timba is, in many ways, Cuba’s own experimental and fiery take on traditional salsa. Mixing New York sounds with Latin jazz, nueva trova, American funk, disco, hip-hop and even some classical influences, the music is more flexible and aggressive than standard salsa, incorporating greater elements of the island’s potent Afro-Cuban culture. Many timba bands such as Bambaleo and La Charanga Habanera use funk riffs and rely on less conventional Cuban instruments such as synthesizers and kick drums. Others – such as NG La Banda, formed in 1988 (and often credited as being the inventors of timba) – have infused their music with a more jazzy dynamic.
Traditional jazz, considered the music of the enemy in the Revolution’s most dogmatic days, has always seeped into Cuban sounds. Jesús ‘Chucho’ Valdés’ band Irakere, formed in 1973, broke the Cuban music scene wide open with its heavy Afro-Cuban drumming laced with jazz and son, and the Cuban capital boasts a number of decent jazz clubs (Click here). Other musicians associated with the Cuban jazz set include pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Isaac Delgado and Adalberto Álvarez y Su Son.
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The original trovadores (traditional singers/songwriters) were like wandering medieval minstrels, itinerant songsmiths who plied their musical trade across the Oriente region in the early 20th century, moving from village to village and city to city with the carefree spirit of perennial gypsies. Equipped with simple acoustic guitars and armed with a seemingly limitless repertoire of soft, lilting rural ballads, early Cuban trovadores included Sindo Garay, Nico Saquito and Joseíto Fernández, the man responsible for composing the overplayed Cuban trova classic, ‘Guantanamera.’ As the style developed into the 1960s, new advocates such as Carlos Puebla from Bayamo gave the genre a grittier and more political edge penning classic songs such as ‘Hasta Siempre Comandante,’ his romantic if slightly sycophantic ode to Che Guevara.
Traditional trova is still popular in Cuba today though its mantle has been challenged since the ’60s and ’70s by its more philosophical modern offshoot, nueva trova (see boxed text, opposite).
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The contemporary Cuban music scene is an interesting mix of enduring traditions, modern sounds, old hands and new blood. With low production costs, solid urban themes and lots of US-inspired crossover styles, hip-hop and rap are taking the younger generation by storm.
Born in the ugly concrete housing projects of Alamar, Havana, Cuban hip-hop, rather like its US counterpart, has gritty and impoverished roots.
First beamed across the nation in the early 1980s when American rap was picked up on homemade rooftop antennae from Miami-based radio stations, the new music quickly gained ground among a population of young urban blacks culturally redefining themselves during the inquietude of the Special Period. By the ’90s groups such as Public Enemy and NWA were de rigueur on the streets of Alamar and by 1995 there was enough hip-hop to throw a festival.
Tempered by Latin influences and censored by the parameters of strict revolutionary thought, Cuban hip-hop – or reggaetón as locals prefer to call it – has shied away from US stereotypes taking on a progressive flavor all of its own. Instrumentally the music uses batá drums, congas and electric bass, while lyrically the songs tackle important national issues such as sex tourism and the difficulties of the stagnant Cuban economy.
Despite being viewed early on as subversive and antirevolutionary, Cuban hip-hop has gained unlikely support from inside the Cuban government, whose art-conscious legislators consider the music to have played a constructive social role in shaping the future of Cuban youth. Fidel Castro has gone one further, describing hip-hop as ‘the vanguard of the Revolution’ and – allegedly – once tried his hand at rapping at a Havana baseball game.
Today there are upwards of 800 hip-hop groups in Cuba and the Cuban Rap Festival is well into its second decade. The event even has a sponsor, the fledgling Cuban Rap Agency, a government body formed in 2002 to give official sanction to the country’s burgeoning alternative music scene. Groups to look out for include Obsession, 100% Original, Freehole Negro (cofronted by a woman) and Anónimo Consejo, while the best venues are usually the most spontaneous ones.
It’s hard to categorize Interactivo, a collaboration of young, talented musicians led by pianist Robertico Carcassés. Part funk, jazz and rock, and very ‘in the groove,’ this band jams to the rafters; a guaranteed good time. Interactivo’s bassist is Yusa, a young black woman whose eponymous debut album made it clear she’s one of the most innovative musicians on the Cuban scene today. Other difficult-to-categorize modern innovators include X Alfonso, an ex-student of the Conservatorio Amadeo Roldán; and dynamic nueva trova–rock duo Buena Fe, whose guitar-based riffs and eloquent lyrics push the boundaries of art and expression within the confines of the Cuban Revolution.
In the late 1990s, US guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder famously breathed new life into Cuban son music with his remarkable Buena Vista Social Club album. Linking together half a dozen or so long-retired musical sages from the 1940s and ’50s, including 90-year-old Compay Segundo (writer of Cuba’s second most played song, ‘Chan Chan’) and the pianist Rúben González (ranked by Cooder as the greatest piano player he had ever heard), the unprepossessing American producer sat back in the studio and let his ragged clutch of old-age pensioners work their erstwhile magic. More than two million albums later, European and North American audiences are still enraptured by the sounds.