From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz (Music of the African Diaspora)

216 Pages·2006·2.16 MB·English

by  Raul A. Fernandez

From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz
music of the african diaspora
Edited by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., and Rae Linda Brown
1. California Soul: Music of African Americans in the West,edited by Jacqueline
Cogdell DjeDje and Eddie S. Meadows
2. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions,by Catherine Parsons Smith
3. Jazz on the Road: Don Albert’s Musical Life,by Christopher Wilkinson
4. Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars,by William A.
Shack
5. Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West,by Phil Pastras
6. What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and
Activists,by Eric Porter
7. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
8. Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans,by
William T. Dargan
9. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba, byRobin D. Moore
10. From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz,by Raul A. Fernandez
From Afro-Cuban Rhythms
to Latin Jazz
Raul A. Fernandez
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
CENTER FOR BLACK MUSIC RESEARCH
Columbia College Chicago
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University of California Press
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Center for Black Music Research
Columbia College Chicago
©2006by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fernandez, Raul A., 1945–.
From Afro-Cuban rhythms to Latin jazz / Raul A. Fernandez.
p. cm. — (Music of the African diaspora ; 10)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn-13, 978-0-520-24707-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10,0-520-24707-8(cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13, 978-0-520-24708-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10,0-520-24708-6(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Blacks—Cuba—Music—History and criticism. 2. Latin
jazz—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series
ml3565.f47 2006
781.64(cid:118)097291—dc22 2005015752
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CONTENTS
Preface
vii
part i / popular music
1
one. The Salsa Concept
13
two. Ontology of the Son
22
three. The Aesthetics of Sabor
42
part ii / on the road to latin jazz
59
four. Magic Mixture
71
five. Drumming in Cuban
83
six. Lords of the Tambor
99
seven. Chocolate Dreams
129
eight. The Taste of ¡Azúcar!
140
Afterword
161
Notes
163
Index
179
PREFACE
As the twentieth century drew to a close, a small band of elderly Cuban
musicians, known collectively as the Buena Vista Social Club, was play-
ing to sold-out concert halls throughout the world, selling hundreds of
thousands of compact discs, and starring, with Ry Cooder, in an award-
winning documentary by Wim Wenders. They reminded us, not for
the first time in that century, that the irresistible rhythms of traditional
Cuban dance musics continue to excite audiences everywhere.
Tosome extent, the success of Buena Vista Social Club was based on
the international listening public’s familiarity with Cuban popular mu-
sic forms. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the sounds and
rhythms of this relatively small island already exerted a sort of musical
hegemony within the Caribbean basin. As early as the 1880s, the bolero,
known for its passionate love lyrics, was evolving in Santiago de Cuba. It
quickly spread throughout Spanish-speaking Latin America, becoming
a hemisphere-wide genre. In the 1930s, the rhumba became the rage in
the United States and Europe.1It traveled to Africa, where it influenced
the development of soukous,today’s most common urban music in sub-
Saharan Africa. In the 1940s, another Cuban music genre and dance
vii
viii / Preface
style, the mambo, spread around the world. In the 1950s, a third dance
boom accompanied the development of the cha-cha-cha by Cuban or-
chestras. Rhumba, mambo, and cha-cha-cha became de rigueur in ur-
ban dance halls, spreading Cuban music around the globe.
From the mid-nineteenth century on, Cuban musicians have regaled
the world with their spirited creations for dancing: the habanera, the
bolero, the danzón,theson,the rumba, the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, the
pachanga, the songo, and more. As Nuyorican salsa and Latin jazz pi-
anist Eddie Palmieri once said onstage, Cuban musicians have produced
“the most complex and exciting rhythms of the planet.” One important
aspect of Cuban music, in particular the songenre, is its capacity to easily
absorb elements from other music, mixing them to create new fusions.
Thus, in the second half of the twentieth century, the popular dance
music of Cuba, in particular the son,became the foundation of new syn-
thesis—a mixture of conventional jazz harmonics with the driving
rhythms of the Cuban son—known as Afro-Cuban jazz or Latin jazz.
The early appeal of Cuban music forms lies in their qualities as fer-
tile mixtures of earlier European-origin instruments, melodies, and
rhythms with African-origin instruments, melodies, and rhythms. The
high quality of the resulting hybrids has been acknowledged by schol-
ars of music and by artists. Cuba’s famed novelist and musicologist
Alejo Carpentier called the powerful simplicity of the son“an elemental
symphony.” Distinguished poet Nicolás Guillén took the son as the
source of many poetic ideas. He penned several books of son-inspired
poetry that became the centerpiece of the Spanish Caribbean’s black po-
etry movement beginning in the 1930s. From the 1920s on, traveling
Cuban musicians took advantage of the obvious popularity of local
dance music and sought their fortune playing it in major cities around
the world, in Mexico City, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and Madrid.
Another aspect of Cuban popular music that helped its early spread
was its broad similarity to other musics of the Caribbean, such as the
Trinidadian calypso, the Dominican merengue, and so forth. Like
those neighboring styles, Cuban popular music was truly a people’s mu-
Preface / ix
sic, developed by working-class musicians, with lyrics that dealt
poignantly with everyday themes of work and play, love and despair.
Cuban popular music is sensual; it contains frequent references to food
flavors, and it seems driven by the sense of taste: the defining concept
for Cuban music is sabor(translated approximately as “flavor”), a term
that plays a central role in it, much like the term swingdoes for jazz.
It may be misleading to refer to Cuban popular music as simply
“dance” music because of its unusual complexity. This quality arises as
a consequence of Cuba’s felicitous music history. Cuba absorbed and
claims as its own several “classical” genres. These include the great vo-
cal traditions of West Africa; the complex drum rhythms of Yoruba-
land, Calabar, and the Congo River basin; the North African–tinged
cante jondo of Andalusia, Italian opera, Spanish zarzuela, and Euro-
pean art music and ballet. Cuban popular singers intone melodies in
manners that may recall old African chants, Spanish flamenco, or Ital-
ian bel canto. For the last two centuries, leading Cuban musicians have
included master drummers in the Afro-Cuban tradition as well as mu-
sical creators in the Western European art music style, from baroque
composer Esteban Salas in the early nineteenth century to Leo Brouwer
today, and superb performers from nineteenth-century violinist
Brindis de Salas to contemporary guitarist Manuel Barrueco. The vari-
ous styles of music performed by these musicians were never com-
pletely separated in Cuban culture: many musicians expertly trained in
European classical music forms nevertheless were active as composers
and players of popular dance music.
Thus, several centuries of interaction between musicians and audi-
ences from diverse backgrounds in Cuba have produced one of the most
intricate and appealing dance musics of the world. A media critic, after
attending a concert by Cuba’s famed dance band Orquesta Aragón,
summarized his impressions in this way: “The layered rhythms, oddly
placed accents, perpetually changing instrumental textures and unex-
pected stops and starts indicated Orquesta Aragón was playing dance
music of a higher order than the term usually suggests.”2