Pop Music and Culture: CuBop, Up-Rock, Boogaloo and Banda. Latinos Making Music in the United State: "So Near and So Far"

Pop Music and Culture: CuBop, Up-Rock, Boogaloo and Banda. Latinos Making Music in the United States

Pop Music and Culture: CuBop, Up-Rock, Boogaloo and Banda. Latinos Making Music in the United States

CFA MH333/433 A1

MWF 12-1 CFA (855 Commonwealth) B36

Prof. Michael Birenbaum Quintero

Surveys the musical styles of Latinos in the US. Discusses the role of these musics in articulating race, class, gender and sexual identities for US Latinos, their circulation along migration routes, their role in identity politics and ethnic marketing, their commercial crossover to Anglo audiences, and Latin/o contributions to jazz, funk, doo-wop, disco and hip hop. Case studies may include Mexican-American/Chicano, Puerto Rican/Nuyorican and Cuban-American musics; Latin music in golden age Hollywood; Latin dance crazes from mambo to the Macarena; rock en español; the early 2000s boom of Latin artists like Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, and Jennifer López; reggaetón, race politics, and the creation of the “Hurban” market; and the transnational Latin music industries of Los Angeles, New York, and Miami.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

"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: