Broken Melodies and Deep Grooves: Listening at the Limits of Cuban Music in Miami

This essay, a response to Alexandra T. Vazquez’s Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013), follows Vazquez’s lead to “listen in detail” to two ongoing musical projects, conceived and executed in the Little Havana nightclub known as Hoy Como Ayer, that dismantle popular Cuban musical forms and reinvent not only Cuban music but US popular music as well. The broken melodies of composer and violinist Alfredo Triff and the deep groove of the Spam Allstars, a jam band that draws from Cuban son, classic soul, and Miami Bass, deterritorialize Cuban music from fixed national imaginaries and reterritorialize an alternative Cuban repertoire within the forever-shifting imaginary of Miami.