Cuban Music Guide

More than anything, the son is a mood, an idiom in rhythm and instrumentation. In the 1960s it joined with working-class black dance rituals like the rumba and more formalized innovations for dance halls (danzón) or big band nightclub arrangements (mambo) in New York record studios to create what is popularly known as salsa. These elements were at least the Cuban contribution. The Nuyorican musicians who devised salsa were also drawing on indigenous Puerto Rican forms like the bomba and plena as well as rock ‘n’ roll, whose contribution was more atmospheric than musical—rudeness, noise, frenzy. Salsa is a marketing term, not a musical one; performers never play salsa. They distinguish their compositions by names like son montuno, guaracha, guajira, pachanga, or chagüí. These are the names of Latin sounds, referring, among other things, to actual beats (el compás), rhythmic moods, particular arrangements or instrumentation, or a period style.

Carpentier begins his history of Cuban music with composers, performers, and styles that flourished before the age of recording, but a number of CDs now in print feature material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as more contemporary work that postdates Music in Cuba. Several anthologies offer a historical overview of Cuban music. The best by far is Cuba: I Am Time, produced by Al Pryor, Jack O’Neil, and Nina Gomes; it contains an informative 112-page booklet on Cuban music. Learning the Cuban sound on its own terms means recognizing its homages to the past—its awareness of its own history. The traditional repertory of Cuban music, in other words, has its standard hits—a sort of pantheon that is adapted anew in each generation. I Am Time includes a number of them, mostly in original recordings by the breakthrough groups of the 1920s, when son fully came into its own: Trio Matamoros’s “Son de la loma” and “El manicero” [The peanut vendor], Ignacio Piñeiro’s “Echale salsita,” María Teresa Vera’s “Arrolla cubano,” Sexteto Habanero’s “Tres lindas cubanas” (probably the best-known Cuban song), and Chapottíny Sus Estrellas’s “La guarapachanga.”

Cuban music can best be heard as a combination of elements that never fully merge, that remain in productive tension: Spanish-Cuban rural genres like the guajira and the guateque, on the one hand, and Afro-Cuban devotional music, on the other. The former—with its tres-playing and secular, often political, lyrics—finds two memorable representatives in Sonora Matancera (Clássicos de la música cubana) and Duo los Compadres. Among the finest examples of Afro-Cuban devotional music—solo lyrics against a background of pure percussion—are the “orishas” of Merceditas Valdes (Afro-Cuban, vol. 2) or, in a slightly more modern version, Celina González’s Santa Bárbara. The evolution of religious hymns into secular forms is key to understanding what the Cuban sound is up to, and even in the most modern Cuban salsa, the African gods—Babalú Ayé, Yemayá, Changó, Obatalá—are present. There are many intermediate stages. To get a sense of the African origins of rumba, for example, and its birth in barracones and working-class barrios, listen to La rumba de Cuba or Los Muñequitos de Matanzas’s Vacunao. To learn differences among the various Cuban beats and styles (separating your guarachas from your pregones), check out Grupo Sierra Maestra’s Grandes exitos.

Much of what is meant by “Cuban music,” of course, has to do with an entirely different arena of sound—a string of nightclub and ballroom hits stretching from the 1920s to the 1950s. To hear what Carpentier was watching Europeans soak up in the smoky Parisian clubs of the interwar years, listen to Cubans in Paris, 1930–1938. A fine anthology of the big band craziness of the 1940s and 1950s can be found on The Best of Mambo, 1949–1957, vol. 1, featuring the immortal Dámaso Pérez Prado, Machito, Mario Bauzá, and Graciela. For the schmaltzy, crooning side of the Cuban cabaret sound, try El gran Vicentico Valdés and, above all, the legendary Beny Moré (15 exitos de...