Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music by Alexandra T. Vazquez (review)

Listening in Detail examines Cuban music in relation to transnational movements of people and ideas. Refusing to cater to rigid political positions or fantasies about Cuba’s isolation, performance studies scholar Alexandra T. Vazquez addresses the production and consumption of jazz and other popular music with an eye to the experiences of Cuban musicians in the United States and Europe, as well as the musicians’ responses to the revolution. Her work makes a novel contribution to scholarship on Cuban music in considering the role of race in the project of US imperialism. Additionally, Vazquez writes against black studies’ marginalization of Hispanophone nations and explores histories that reveal the “cultural practices of African Americanness as they necessarily intersect with those of the Afro-diaspora” (36). As such the book offers a departure from the nationalistic focus of much of jazz studies and expands thinking about black identities in the Americas.

Vazquez’s methodology of “listening in detail” provides an alternative to sociological or ethnomusicological approaches to Cuban music.¹ Arguing that cultural objects do not present themselves as readily accessible, Vazquez presents “an interaction with, rather than a comprehensive account of, Cuban music” (9). Her approach revolves around details that might escape other modes of analysis. A detail can emerge from events and objects that exceed what is usually defined as music: it might constitute an interruption in a song or a conversation, or could involve music discussed on film, the song an author listens to while writing a play, or an album cover’s design. Vazquez argues that attentiveness to such details makes audible those histories that have been silenced by dominant narratives. As she examines case studies drawn primarily from the 20th century, she serves up an elegant groove of musicians’ accounts, theory, poetic descriptions, and personal impressions. Vazquez also suggests ways for performance studies to explore recording as a performative strategy for intervening in the conditions of historical reproduction and as the inspiration for performative articulations of the relation between writing and listening.

Vazquez’s interest in race and empire prompts her to excavate overlooked geographical relationships. Borrowing from Ana M. López’s concept of “Greater Cuba” (1996), her focus includes not just the island but also the destinations of forced and voluntary Cuban migration and travel. This perspective allows her to account for ties between New Orleans and Havana (chapter 1) and the relevance of Mexico to the development of the mambo (chapter 3). She addresses the forgotten movements of women artists in discussing responses to singer Graciela Pérez’s concert at the Paris club Chez Florence in 1937. Here Vazquez identifies collaboration between Cuban and Afro-American women and defines music as intellectual work (chapter 2). This forms part of her broader argument against locating Cuban music in fixed geographic or temporal terms. Vazquez consistently asserts instead the relevance of the music’s uncontainable nature to the transnational nature of black identity. For example, she explores the performative life of the signature grunt of the King of Mambo, Dámaso Pérez Prado, in the Jim Crow South in 1954 (chapter 3). She discusses a concert in which an audience of black youngsters echoed the grunt in response to Machito and his Afro-Cuban All Stars, to the consternation of police.

Attentive to the inseparability of knowledge and power, Vazquez explores how Cuban music has been studied and presented. She asserts that popular and academic musical anthologies have organized sound to make Cuba both accessible and exotic, and must be seen in relation to histories of the documentation of black populations by social scientists and literary scholars. In her reading of Cuba Linda, an album recorded in 1996 by late jazz pianist Alfredo Rodríguez, Vazquez discusses the relationship between hegemony and racial taxonomy (chapter 1). She argues that the album defies the racial profiling of musical and literary anthologies, as did the revue shows performed in the US...