Latin Jazz and Afro-Modernism

Modern artists' break with classical traditions was influenced by African art, as in Pablo Picasso's influence from African masks.

 

... and the modern dance of African-American choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham.

The living presence of traces of African culture, music, and religion in Afro-Cuban music was also inspiring for black artists, like the brilliant jazz revolutionary Dizzy Gillespie. After helping transform swing music into the more technically sophisticated and experimental be-bop  in the 1950's...

... he incorporated Afro-Cuban musicna, composer, and ritual practitioner Chano Pozo into his big band for an important concert in Carnegie Hall in 1947.

George Russell's pioneering composition "Cubano Be Cubano Bop" was premiered by Gillespie and Pozo there in 1947.

As was Pozo's composition "Manteca."

Aside from sparking Latin jazz, it also changed African-American music, allowing for a new type of rhythm in the bass, from swing to Cuban "tumbao"
Swing / Walking bass line (jazz):

Tumabo bass line (here, by Cachao, from 1957):

Machito and his Afro-Cubans were also popular among African-Americans experimentalists.  One of these musicians was the legendary African-American saxophonist Charlie Parker, here playing with Machito. (Jazzheads can check out an analysis by Steve Coleman here).

 

"Progressive jazz" musicians on the West Coast, many of whom were white, were also collaborating with Cuban musicans. Vibraphonist Cal Tjader worked closely with the legendary Afro-Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaría. Stan Kenton also worked with Cuba musicians, incudingthe Mahcito band, and even covered "The Peanut Vendor."

Timbal, bongó and tumbadora. Danzón, son, rumba / Mambo Era New York City

Cuba is a major music hub, with many musical styles that would become important in the US. Many of these arise from the particular kinds of Afro-Cuban musical forms that emerged in this country, which was demographically important in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The legal importation of slaves in Cuba did not end until 1867, and slavery as an institution continued on the island until 1886.  African cultural forms continue to be central, in one form or another, to Cuban culture and music.

We've already talked about briefly batá drums and ritual orisha drumming, but Cuban non-religious music is also permeated by neo-African forms, some more and some less creolized. These too have become part of modern popular music and have influenced salsa and mambo in the US. These musics are undergirded by the rhythmic base of three different instruments — conga, bongó, and timbales— each coming from a different Cuban musical tradition.

For non-religious drumming, the drum-dance-song tradition called rumba, played on conga drums, remains popular both in Cuban and in New York. There are three kinds, the archaic style called yambú (sometimes played on wooden boxes), the male solo dance called columbia (which overlaps in some of its dance moves with abakuá), and the couple dance called guaguancó, in which the man tries to "vaccinate" the woman.

The distinctive drum pattern (and clave, which is slightly different from son) of guaguancó shows up in lots of music, including the most modern salsa. Indeed, rumba is one important root for the musics that in New York would come to be called mambo and salsa.

The other is a more creolized from called son. It's all based on clave - a rhythm played by two little sticks that are also called clave. Sometimes it's not played at all but is implicit in the musicians' minds. Son clave is tresillo followed by two beats (3-2 clave) or preceded by them (2-3).
"Échale salsita," an old school son music by the legendary Septeto Nacional, founded in 1929 by Ignacio Piñeiro. Notice the instruments - trumpet, clave, maracas, güiro, guitar, tres, bass, and bongó/campana (bell).  Back in the 1920s, the real old school sextetos used to have a marímbula or even a botija instead of a bass. Notice that bongó drums are different from the conga drums traditionally used in rumba.

Rumba and son were brought together by the amazing son innovator Arsenio Rodríguez's in the late 1930's, making a more modern, more percussive, more urban modern son, as in his "Fuego en el 23"

or in the way he built layered hornlines that did as much rhythmic work as harmony and melody, in final sections he called diablos.

Son was brought to the US by the Cuban bandleader Don Azpiazú, whose version of the classic son, "El Manicero" (The Peanut Vendor), written by Moisés Simón later covered by Stan Kenton and about 73,000 other people) premiered on Broadway in 1930.

An older form is danzón, which is basically salon music supplemented by timbales and a güiro scraper. "Isora," a gorgeous danzón composed in 1939 by the sister of bandleader and bassist Israel "Cachao" López.  Listen for the different sections, marked by transitions with unison hits by all the percussion (plus some sick flutery by the Puerto Rican musician Néstor Torres). The intro to the last section (called the mambo) is marked by the timbales.

A Cachao mambo that he peeled off from the danzón - "Chanchullo" from 1939. NY Puerto Rican mambo king Tito Puente would adapt the song as "Oye Como va," which the Chicano rocker Carlos Santana would cover in the 1960s.

This would become the U.S. branch of mambo. Another would arrive in Mexico, in a more pop-friendly version, with the Cuban musician Dámaso Pérez Prado in the 1950s.

It was between the three genres, danzón, son, and rumba, that the mambo rhythm section, featuring timbales, bongó and bell, and congas, would emerge.

So: mambo developed from injecting rumba and danzón into son.  Arsenio Rodriguez brought the conga and his band popularized an expanded instrumentation including three trumpets and a piano as well. The timbales and the unison breaks of danzón would also be incorporated the mambo, which Cachao peeled off from the danzón to make it its own montuno-like jam session. Mambo would morph into both pop versions (Pérez Prado in Mexico, some of what pop bandleaders like Cugat did in the US), and grittier and more experimental versions in New York (Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, and Machito and his Afro-Cubans).

Meanwhile, in New York...

... in the 1930s, there were tons of Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians playing old school "típico" style uptown for a Latino audience, including Cuban Alberto Socarrás, Puerto Rican Noro Morales, Cuban Alberto Iznaga, Puerto Rican Augusto Coen, Puerto Rican Manuel "El Canario" Jiménez, the Puerto Rican Cuarteto Victoria of Rafael Hernández, and the Cuban former singer with Don Azpiazú Antonio Machín's Cuarteto Machín. These might change formats for diferent audiences. The Cuban son outfit Cuarteto Caney played both in a "típico" format for uptown audiences and in a "continental" format for downtown gigs. And we've already seen how Don Azpiazú's band (fronted by singer Antonio Machín) had already performed the seminal Cuban hit "El Manisero" (The Peanut Vendor) on Broadway in pretty much the same way as they'd played it in Cuba, to great popular acclaim.

Mario Bauzá learned jazz arrangement and harmonies during his work with the African-American swing musicians Cab Calloway and Chick Webb. In the 1940's he took those lessons to Machito and the Afro-Cubans. Mario Bauzá is the second trumpeter from the left.

More Machito: "Carambola"

Now in the 1970s, an elderly Machito and Graciela (his sister and  vocalist with the Afro-Cubans), with Bauzá grooving out behind, perform the santería-themed song "Changó 'tá vení."

The Machito group was popular among white audiences during the mambo craze of the 1950's, as in this redo of the Chick Webb swing tune "Stompin' at the Savoy" as "Mambo a la Savoy." They also had a fair number of sings that might be described as "exotic," like "Desert Dance / Cleopatra Rumba."

Much of Bauzá's story can be found in the PBS series Latin Music USA, starting at 4:22.

 

See also the sections on Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo (15:40), mambo (21:50), the NY Puerto Ricans Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez (21:50), and the Palladium, 26:44. For more on Jews and Latin music, there's a great interview with Jewish mambonik turned salsero Larry Harlow.

What characterizes mambo musically is:

• Full percussion - Timbales, Congas, and Bongo/Cowbell
• Piano and bass
• Large horn section, playing in percussive blocks, layered parts, or together in fast snaky melodies
• In the case of Pérez Prado - "the grunt"

"So Near and So Far" — Rhumba with an "H"

The great Nat King Cole "Quizás, Quizás, "Quizás" (1958)

Downtown 
The deluge begins - the Cuban musician Don Azpiazú's Havana Casino Orquesta (Antonio Machín on vocals) brings a popular Cuban song based on a peanut vendor's sales pitch to Broadway in 1930, and the Latin floodgates open.

Spanish-Cuban Xavier Cugat (with Lina  Romay) doing "Bim Bam Bum."

Here he is again, with Anglo singer Dinah Shore, doing the "Latune" - "The Breeze and I" (originally composed as "Andalucía" by Cuban Ernesto Lecuona).

Sorry, one more Cugat/Romay number.

"La cucaracha (The Mexican Cockroach Song)," repurposed in 1934 from an old song from the Mexican Revolution for the 1943 film "Viva Villa." 

"Aquarela do Brasil" by Ary Barroso (a modified Brazilian samba from 1939)

Here's Desi Arnaz's signature tune "Babalú" (a vanilla version of  the great Cuban bandleader Miguelito Valdéz's santería themed song of the same name for the Afro-Cuban divinity Babalú-Ayé)

Film
Disney's 1945 "Good Neighbor Policy" era film, "The Three Caballeros":

Brazilian (but Portuguese-born) Carmen Miranda's exceedingly strange "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti" hat from the 1943 film "The Gang's All Here," directed by choreographer Busby Berkeley.

Miranda, whose costume was based on Afro-Brazilian fruit-sellers from the Bahía region, was incredibly popular (and would later become an icon of drag performance). Another Latin American movie star, Lupe Vélez (a.k.a. "The Mexican Spitfire") performed roles that "spectacularized" her ethnicity, in Shari Roberts' terms. She's also extremely funny.  She also occasionally sang, as in this "Latune" from 1939.

More Latin music in film - Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in "Flying Down to Rio" (1933)

Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in the film You'll Never Get Rich sing and dance the English-language, Latin beat rhumba "So Near and So Far." (1941)

And so on...
Another 1940's "Latune" - Bing Crosby's version of "You Belong to My Heart" (originally "Solamente una vez," here sung in Spanish by African-American crooner Nat King Cole)
African-American bandleader Cab Calloway's "Chili con conga" (rhyming it with "That's a new song-a")

1950's "Latunes"
Perry Como's "Papa Loves Mambo"
Rosemary Clooney's "Mambo Italiano"

1960's:
Doris Day's "Be True to Me" (Originally "Sabor a mí").
Elvis Presley's bolero "It's Now or Never"

Bonus:

Tango fever

The Castles, Vernon and Irene.

Vernon & Irene Castle doing their thing.

Among other things, Irene Castle was responsible for a change in the standards of female beauty from the corseted vuluptuousness of the so-called "Gibson Girl" (like Camille Clifford, below)...

... to an  uncorseted, more lithe figure, bobbed (short) hair, more comfortable dress allowing for freer movement, and a look described as "boyish" or "spritely." Irene Castle:

Paragon of white masculinity, Teddy Roosevelt:

Famous (Italian) latin lover, "tango pirate," and dance world habitué Rudolf Valentino: 

Valentino played an Argentine cowboy in the famous tango scene from the silent film "The Four Horsemen."

Musical contagion and social class is a big theme in this country...

One of few actual Argentine tangos popular in the US was "El Choclo."

Facundo Posada, Argentine tanguero, represents the lost Afro-Argentine component of tango, also reflected in Candombe drummimg from Uruguay.

The great James Reese Europe

One of the tangos recorded by Europe's "Society Band" in late 1913. Listen here.

Puerto Rico, from Borinquen to Los Nueva Yores to the Harlem Renaissance

Just because they're cute, and a national symbol of Puerto Rico, here's the native frog called a coquí:

Here are some folks in Ohio getting down at home to  Puerto Rican jíbaro music, the music of Puerto Rico's white peasantry from the mountain areas. The music features the cuatro, guitar, güiro and bongó.

The ten-line poetry form called the décima uses the rhyme scheme AABBAACCDDCC. In improvised competitions, called controversias, singers battle each other, often improvising around a final line given to them in advance, called the pié forzado. Here with the classic "Le lo lai" opener and some pretty virtuosic cuatro. 

We've already heard bomba, the Afro Puerto-Rican drum-dance, here at a block party in the town of Loiza.

Plena is street and carnival music using small, medium, and large tambourine-like instruments called panderetas, güiro, and call-and response lyrics about local events. Old-school plena often has a harmonica.

Here's how the different percussion instruments fit together to make the plena rhythm, here demonstrated by the great group Pleneros del 21.

  

Puerto Rican New York City

Historical Puerto Rican population in New York City
Year	Pop.	±%
1910	554	—
1920	7,364	+1229.2%
1940	61,463	+734.6%
1950	187,420	+204.9%
1960	612,574	+226.8%
1970	817,712	+33.5%
1980	860,552	+5.2%
1990	896,763	+4.2%
2000	789,172	−12.0%
2010	723,621	−8.3%
2012	730,848	+1.0%

New York was a major center for the recording of nostalgic música jíbara musing on the condition of the Puerto Rican peasant on the streets of New York. Some are funny, about people putting on airs or becoming creative in two languages (lyrics here), and  some nostalgic or melancholy

The recording industry in the NY was the place where Puerto Ricans, both those form the island and those residing in NY, recorded. "Matan a Bum Bum," (about the murder of a famous plenero) an urban, orchestrated plena, recorded by the great Puerto Rican bandleader Manuel Jiménez (1895-1975), aka "El Canario" (The Canary). You can hear the panderetas marching along in the background.

Another early orchestrated plena recording, "Santurce," by César Concepción (1909-1974).

The great Afro-Puerto Rican bandleader, Augusto Coen (1895-1970)

Coen's "Cambia el aguja."

Coen, who arrived in New York in 1919, was one of the first musicians to bring big band arrangements into Puerto Rican music - he had already had experience with jazz, such as Lew Leslie's Blackbirds review:

He was far from the only one...

Puerto Ricans of the Jazz Age 

(For more, see Basilio Serranos' recent book Puerto Rican Pioneers in Jazz, 1900-1939.)

The 369th Regiment "Hellfighters" band, led by Lt. James Reese Europe - and a bunch of Puerto Rican musicians including Rafael Hernández, Rafael Duchesne Mondríguez, his cousin Rafael Duchesne Nieves, Gregorio Félix Delgado, and the lesser-known Jesús Hernández, Antonio González, Genaro Torres, Eligio Rijos, Arturo B. Ayala, saxophonist Ceferino Hernández, bassoonist Pablo Fuentes, mellophonists Francisco and Eleuterio Meléndez, euphonium players Nicolas Vázquez and José Froilán Jiménez, and tuba players José Rivera Rosas and Sixto Benitez - plays the significantly titled "How You Going to Keep 'Em Down on the Farm."

Here's boricua Rafael "Ralph" Escudero (tuba) in Fletcher Henderson's seminal jazz band, alongside the likes of saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong. Escudero may or may not have also been known as Bob Escudero. Fellow Puerto Rican Fernando Arbello also played trombone in the band.

 

Arbello also played trombone with the Claude Hopkins band. His composition "Big Chief de Sota," also known as "Grand Terrace Swing," co-written with Andy Razaf, was also covered by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in 1936 (here faturing the great Roy Eldridge on trumpet and "Chu" Bery on tenor sax):



Noble Sissle, an African-American and ex-Hellfighter, and the singer of the recording above, had a group which in 1929 included Rafael Duchesne Nieves and Moncho Usera and made this recording, "Miranda." The group would also include violinist Oscar Madera.

Moncho Usera also co-composed tresillo-filled "Under the Creole Moon" with Noble Sissle and the New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet. I'm not sure who's responsible for the songs' cornball lyrics. Usera's big band would later be one of the musicians responsible for the "big band" sound's popularization in Puerto Rico.

Gregorio Félix played jazz clarinet with Fess Williams and His Royal Flush Orchestra as well as starting his own calypso band.

Bassist Francisco Tizol and saxophonist and clarinetist Carmelo "Jejo" Yarí played in African-American Leon Abbey's Savoy Bearcats.
Rogelio "Ram" Ramírez subbed for the great Duke Ellington  Jimmy Davis, and James Sherman wrote the classic torch song "Lover Man" for the legendary jazz singer Billie Holliday

Here's Ramírez with his own trio.

All of the photos below are taken from Basilio Serrano's important article "Puerto Rican musicians of the Harlem Renaissance." Centro Journal 19:2 [2007], pp. 94-119, which is available here.

"Caravan," by Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol, performed by Duke Ellington's big band.

What's missing from this account of James Reese Europe's Hellfighters?

From Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans

The Caribbean

African-derived music in Cuba. Ritual drumming and Yoruba-language song in the Santería or Regla de Ochá religion. (This example is from New York, where the Cuban master drummers Román Díaz and Pedrito Martínez live).

Neo-African secular (non-religious) music, with clear relation to African musics but created in the Caribbean. Here, the Afro-Puerto Rican music called bomba in the town of Loiza, PR.  Bomba, too, is practiced in the United States today by stateside Puerto Ricans.

These kinds of music circulated throughout the Caribbean, crossing national and linguistic lines. Compare the previous video of Puerto Rican bomba with gwoka from the French island territory of Guadeloupe.

Also compare with this 1800s artist's conception of dances in Congo Square in New Orleans, where, unlike in the rest if the US,  drumming was permitted until 1845 (Manuel 11).

This continues to be reflected in some New Orleans practices like Mardi Gras Indians and second line

 and jazz funerals.

Awesome polyrhythm (rhythms that have more than one pulse, so you can tap your feet to or clap to the same rhythm in different ways). This is the Afro-Cuban religious music called güiro. The timeline, tapped on a metal implement has 12 beats, but the instrument in the middle plays 4 beats over it. You could just as easily clap it in 3.

Here are some of the central rhythms in Afro-Caribbean music. They're all represented here repeated once.

Straight, un-syncopated 4/4 pulse
2+2+2+2
X . X . X . X .  / X . X . X . X .

Tresillo
3+3+2
X . . X . . X . / X . . X . . X .   

Cinquillo
2+1+2+1+2
X . X X . X X ./  X . X X . X X .

(Note that this is basically the tresillo with two extra beats
X.xX.xX. / X.xX.xX.)



Habanera
3+1+2+2
X . . X X . X . /  X . . X X . X .

(Note that this is basically the tresillo on top of the 1 and 3 of a straight 4/4.
X . . X . . X .
X . . . X. . .)

This will make sense when we do it in class!

Many of these rhythms are still important in music from the Spanish- and English-speaking Caribbean, as well as African-American music today.

It's worth noting that African-American music here in the US has long had some syncopated tresillo-like motifs in the cakewalk, ragtime, charleston, and other genres. This sometimes sounds like a tresillo without the last beat, as in the Charleston: 3+5 or X . . . X . . . .

Creolization
The process of creolization often produced unexpected results, as in the encounter of neo-African music and neo-European dance in the Haitian-influenced "Tumba Francesa" of eastern Cuba. Again, note the persistent cinquillo being tapped out with drumsticks on a wooden surface.

Much Caribbean salon music has these rhythmic cells under an elegant European façade, as in Puerto Rican danza, such as "Margarita" by Manuel Tavárez (1843-1883).Notice the faint cinquillo rhythm in the background. Sometimes it alternates with a straight 1-2-3-4.

Even more creolized was the Cuban danzón. This piece was the first recorded danzón, "Las alturas de Simpson" by Manuel Failde, from 1879 - pretty much a cinquillo-fest.

The way these bands included black and mixed-race musicians taking up cosmopolitan badn instruments was reminiscent of similar proceses in New Orleans. Indeed the corent and clarient bands of the early period of danzón sound reminiscent of early jazz.

There were important links between St. Domingue (Haiti), Cuba, and New Orleans. Take for instance, the formulation of brass bands. Here, New Orleans stalwart Kid Ory's band:

Compare with the Cuban danzón bands of the time.


The habanera rhythm became popular worldwide, particularly in Spain, Argentina (tango), Brazil (maxixe), and Mexico. For his 1875 opera Carmen, set in Spain, French composer Georges Bizet composed perhaps the most enduringly famous habanera, "Love is a rebellious bird," here sung by the great María Callas.

Bizet's habanera was borrowed from a composition by the Spaniard Sebastián Yradier called "La paloma." Yradier himself borrowed the habanera from the music he had heard while stationed in Cuba (then under Spanish rule) in the late 1850s.

Yradier's 1859 composition "La Paloma"b was brought to New Orleans to great acclaim by the band of the Eigth Regiment of Cavalry of the Mexican Army, a large military band which held a long residency in the Crescent City during the World's Fair of 1884-85. They also sold a good deal of sheet music including their repertoire of habaneras, danzas, contradanzas, danzones, and other Cuban and Caribbean pieces. "La Paloma" remains popular today. Here's one recording from 1928 by the soprano Amelita Galli-Curci.

The habanera and its underlying tresillo remained an important resource for New Orleans musicians, as explained here by the pianist Jim Hession. (He's a little confused in his terminology, and he tends to muddle "charleston," and "habanera," but in his playing you get the idea).

Or, better yet, the seminal New Orleans pianist and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) illustrating the “Spanish tinge” himself:

By the turn of the 20th century, the habanera was all over the African-American popular music called ragtime. (Ragtime explained here). The most famous ragtime today is probably Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” made famous again by the 1970a movie The Sting and ice cream trucks across the nation. Joplin likley picked up ragtime at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Chicago was connected by river and rail trade with New Orleans. Notice how the melody shifts from the rag syncopation to the  habanera at the end of the line.

Scott Joplin’s “Solace (Mexican Serenade)” – notice the habanera rhythm

Here's “The Dream” by Jesse Pickett (a roving pianist active in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York), played by Eubie Blake,  (who was born in 1887 in Baltimore) - neither were New Orleanians or Missourians, but from the East COast, which shows how fast the rhythm became popular.

St, Louis composer W.C. Handy starting incorporating the habanera in his music as a deliberate effect. His famous St. Louis Blues (1911) is a "tango-blues" – find which section is the tango (that is, using the habanera) and which is the blues:

W.H. Tyers’ “Maori (A Samoan Dance)” (1908)  – find the habanera: