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?