• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 03 / 25 / 2011

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By LARRY ROHTER. Published: March 24, 2011. Among the festival schedule’s highlights are appearances by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, who have not performed in New York since 2002 and are considered Cuba’s greatest rumba ensemble, and the Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñeiro, the group that claims to have invented salsa nearly 80 years ago. So now might be the perfect time to get acquainted with the terminology and the various styles of Cuban music.

That’s not as daunting a task as it might seem. The songs may not be sung in English, but Cuban musical influences have become embedded in all corners of American popular music, from ragtime and jazz to rock and soul, especially in its rhythmic foundations.

“American pop music is full of musicians working the Cuban feel into what they do,” said Ned Sublette, the author of “Cuba and Its Music” and a founder of the Qbadisc record label. “It’s in Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, it’s in the rumba beat of Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue,’ and it’s in the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction,’ which is a straight up cha-cha-cha. You can’t get away from it.”

The fundamental building block of Cuban music, as well as several other forms of Latin music, is the five-beat pattern called the clave, from the Spanish word for “code” or “key.” For convenience’s sake many musicians and musicologists, especially those outside Cuba, like to break that pattern down into cells of 3-2 or 2-3.

The clave beat was originally kept by a pair of wooden sticks called claves. But as the music evolved, that task could be transferred to other percussion instruments, like the gourdlike güiro, or to the bass — which often plays a repetitive rhythmic pattern called the tumbao — a piano player’s left hand or even saxophones.

There are also many different ways and places to put accents on the clave, different time signatures and different ways to configure a clave-based band. But whether a group is playing son, mambo, rumba, salsa, cha-cha-cha, guaguancó or timba, all of which are styles that are part of the repertory of the Afro-Cuban All-Stars, who will be playing at the Concert Hall in Manhattan, not straying from clave is essential.

“You have syncopation in Cuban music, with everyone doing their own thing rhythmically, so the clave holds it all together and keeps everything on time,” said Ed Castañeda, who runs the Web site HavanaNewYork.com, dedicated to promoting Cuban music and performers here. “It’s very easy to go out of clave if you don’t pay attention, and that’s a problem with a lot of musicians. So that’s how you can tell a really good Cuban band — when they all stay on the clave.”

A disguised but very familiar example of clave can be found in one of the most popular rock ’n’ roll songs of all time: the Kingsmen’s 1963 hit “Louie Louie.” The composer of that song, Richard Berry, admitted that he lifted the famously infectious da-da-da da-da riff from a Cuban song, “El Loco Cha Cha Cha,” which was written by René Touzet, a bandleader who was also one of the many disciples of Arsenio Rodríguez and his orchestra.

Mr. Berry was originally from Louisiana, where much of the influence of Cuban music has been filtered through New Orleans, which was on the same shipping trade route as Havana dating back to the time when Louisiana was a Spanish colony reporting to a governor-general in Havana. That influence is what the great New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton was referring to when he used to talk about “the Spanish tinge” in jazz and ragtime.

“If you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz,” he said at one point in his Library of Congress recordings, made in 1938. “The difference comes in the right hand — in the syncopation, which gives it an entirely different color that really changes the color from red to blue.”

One early form of clave-based music is the rumba, which is played in 2/4 time and is based on rhythms thought to have been brought to eastern Cuba by Congolese slaves. Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, who will be playing at Symphony Space May 5 to 7, are steeped in that tradition and are today its leading exponent.

“If you play Cuban music, whether contemporary salsa or Latin jazz, Los Muñequitos are a fundamental point of reference you can’t bypass,” said ’Bobby Sanabria, a well-known salsa drummer and music educator in New York. “They’ve influenced everyone, on every level — drumming, dancing and vocal style.”

Classic rumba also has strong religious connotations, associated with the belief system known in Cuba as Lukumi and elsewhere as Santería. Many performers, including Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, employ drum patterns originally meant to summon deities during religious rites, which also contain dance elements.

To find an example familiar to many Americans, one need go no further than “I Love Lucy,” the most popular program on television in the 1950s. When Desi Arnaz, as Ricky Ricardo, sang “Babalu,” he was lifting from Miguelito Valdes’s earlier hit song of the same name, whose lyrics were meant to pay tribute to “Babalu-Aye,” the “Lord of the Earth” and deity of sickness and healing.

Another important strain in Cuban music is the son, the ancestor of both the mambo and salsa. Founded in 1927, the Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñeiro, which will be playing in that classic style at Zankel Hall on April 16, is credited with introducing the trumpet into clave-based Cuban music, which had previously emphasized percussion and strings.

Beginning in the 1930s, Arsenio Rodríguez, a blind singer and songwriter regarded as the single most significant figure in 20th Century Cuban music, expanded the palette of the music even further. He popularized the use of piano, conga drums and multiple trumpets and also adopted new, more complicated rhythms and harmonies.

“Arsenio was a genius and a true innovator,” said the salsa pianist Larry Harlow, who studied at a conservatory in Havana in the 1950s. “Before him it was mostly sextets and septets, not orchestras. He really emphasized the clave, and from his band came all these other conjuntos, all of which were really great.”

The next step was the formation of large orchestras like those of Pérez Prado and Xavier Cugat, who made mambo a worldwide craze, one especially popular in New York City. From that came the cha-cha-cha, which Mr. Sublette describes as “a radical stripping down of the mambo, which is a very complicated music, into a much simpler rhythm so that anyone could dance it.”

After Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, and relations broke down between the United States and Cuba, the musical streams in the two countries began to diverge. In New York the mambo soon evolved into salsa, reflecting the influence of jazz harmonies and instrumentation on local musicians primarily of Puerto Rican descent, while in Cuba the Castro government favored la nueva trova, a more folkloric style emphasizing singer-songwriters over ensembles.

But by the 1990s the dialogue had resumed, and Cuban musicians were able to incorporate features of rock, funk and disco into their music, which led to the popularity of styles called timba and songo. The main exponents of that sound include NG La Banda and the enormously popular dance band called Los Van Van, the subject of “Van Van Fever” (“Eso Que Anda”), a documentary film that will be shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on April 1 and again on May 21 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“People have to realize that Cuban rhythm rules here in New York City and provides the city’s pulse,” Mr. Sanabria said. “We should not look at this as foreign music. It’s part of the American experience, and always has been. Every rock bass line is a variation of a tumbao, and every rock beat is a clave. The clave is in everything, and you can’t kill it.”

Source: www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/arts/music/cuban-music-renaissance-in-new-yor...