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

Opening with the question “what do musicians sound like?” (12), Alexandra Vázquez’s book Listening in Detail is itself a literary performance. At times using prose-like sentences, Vázquez relates the intimate experiences by which she gives meaning to music. Using a handful of recorded performances by Cuban musicians for analysis, she unravels unique particulars of their sounds and life histories, which in turn offers an innovative method towards audiovisual observation.

Vázquez builds upon Naomi Schor’s Reading in Detail (1987) in which Schor traces “the detail” from a theological concept to a post modern aesthetic category. Vázquez insists that the elaborated approach is not meant to translate Schor’s work on literature to musical repertoire, but rather to “retell the story from the perspective of the detail” (29). A detail is vaguely defined as anything that does not constitute the dominant narrative. As such, Vázquez places the specific sounds she has selected for analysis into their respective historical contexts and outlines the set of circumstances from which they were derived. Her best example of such is the attention she gives to the mambo-legend Pérez Prado’s grunt. It is the inflections, ambiances, refrains, pauses, non-lexical noises, grunts, or breaths, which provide Vázquez catalysts for inquiry. Treated as minutiae data these details can reveal as much, if not more, than the technical descriptions of rhythmic patterns, lyrics, or melodies, which tend to be the leading narratives of musical scholarship. In this manner, Vázquez presents readers to “an experience with,” rather than “an account of,” Cuban music (38).

The book’s first chapter, “Performing Anthology,” offers a detailed listening of Alfredo Rodríguez’s 1996 compilation album titled Cuba Linda. Vázquez argues that the anthology by Rodríguez defies the racial profiling of many musical compilations that try to make Cuba exotic, Buena Vista Social Club being the more famous and most “fatigued example” (10). In her engagement of Rodríguez’s Cuba Linda, Vázquez offers an analysis of Cuban and American jazz as an intertwined trend between the post-colonial cities of Havana and New Orleans. Within this geographical musical framework, she situates African American and Afro-Cuban cultural production as a result of their shared aesthetics, providing ample examples in literature and musical repertoires. By describing and observing each song in Rodríguez’s anthology she exemplifies the technique of listening in detail and illustrates what such particulars can be, what they offer for analysis, and the possible ways to extrapolate narratives from them.

The second chapter, “Una Escuela Rara: The Graciela School,” jumps from an analysis of Rodríguez’s anthology to Vázquez’s examination of oral history interviews with “the first lady of Latin jazz,” Graciela Pérez. A few of the interviews with Graciela are her own, but the center piece of her analysis is derived from an audio recording conducted by René López and Raúl Fernández obtained at the National Museum of American History. Vázquez listens, and subsequently writes, in detail, about Pérez’s nuances, her tones, her treatment of the interviewers, all of which she extrapolates to tell a larger narrative about Pérez’s character and biography. Vázquez additionally shares a few glimpses into her own engagements with Graciela which serve to add biographical perspective and convince us of the conclusions she draws from her detailed listening. This chapter also includes a historical overview of the all-female Cuban Anacaona Orchestra, regarded as a pioneering entity for women in Cuban music during the 1930s, of which Graciela Pérez was a member (93-102).

The unequivocal grunt of mambo musician Pérez Prado becomes the center point of the third chapter, “Itinerant Outbursts.” Vázquez’s emphasis is not on what the grunt is saying, but rather what it is doing. In Vázquez’s own words...