Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo.
Garcia, David F.
Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. By Ned
Sublette. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004. [xv, 672 p. ISBN 1-55652-516-8. $36.00.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.
Cuban Music from A to Z. By Helio Orovio. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004. [xi, 235 p. ISBN 0-8223-3212-4. $24.95.]
Illustrations, appendices, bibliography.
Cubano Be, Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba. By
Leonardo Acosta. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003. [xvi, 288 p.
ISBN 158834147X. $29.95.] Index.
Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. By
Katherine J. Hagedorn. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
2001. [xvi, 296 p. ISBN 1-56098-947-5. $24.95.] Illustrations, index,
bibliography, discography, glossary, compact disc.
The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, which continues to thrive
with every new solo release, has marked the latest Cuban music craze in
the United States and internationally. In fact, for well over a century
now Cuban music has continued to attain widespread dissemination and
popularity, first through sheet music in the nineteenth century and then
touring musicians and recordings beginning in the early twentieth
century. The genres and styles that Cubans and others have popularized
internationally have included the habanera (mid-nineteenth century), son
(beginning in the 1920s), mambo (late 1940s through the 1950s), cha cha
cha (1950s), charangabased son music (1950s through the 1960s), and
timba (1990s). These repertories, while firmly rooted in Cuba's
musical landscape, also became transnational musics, contributing
significantly to the formation of related musical styles such as salsa,
soukous, and mbalax in other parts of the world. Given the tremendous
impact that Cuban music has had internationally and, in particular, on
popular music of the United States (e.g., Latin jazz), it is important
to note that before the 1990s scholarly, let alone general books on
Cuban popular music, were not readily available in English. Cuban
historians, anthropologists, and others, of course, wrote extensively on
Cuban music throughout the twentieth century. Alejo Carpentier's La
musica en Cuba (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica), originally
published in 1946, continues to be an important historical source for
mostly pre-twentieth-century Cuban popular and art music. It was
translated into English by Alan West-Duran and published as Music in
Cuba in 2001 by the University of Minnesota Press. Cuban ethnologist and
anthropologist Fernando Ortiz produced numerous works on Afro-Cuban
music and culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century,
yet his extremely important works remain untranslated.
It was not until the early 1990s that North American
ethnomusicologists and anthropologists began to research and publish
critical and scholarly work on Cuban popular and folkloric music and
dance. Peter Manuel's Essays on Cuban Music: North American and
Cuban Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) is
particularly notable for bringing together the work and theoretical
perspectives of Cuban and North American musicologists and
ethnomusicologists. Robin Moore's Nationalizing Blackness:
Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) studies issues of race, national
identity, music, and the arts in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, while Yvonne
Daniel's Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) traces the development and
social transformations of rumba music and dance in Cuba. In the last
four years several more books on Cuban music have been published for
scholarly and general audiences. Accordingly, the four works reviewed in
this essay represent an increasing interest among North American
publishers in providing translated editions of previously published
Cuban books as well as historical and ethnomusicological work by North
American writers. They are: Leonardo Acosta's Cubano Be, Cubano
Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba; Helio Orovio's Cuban Music
from A to Z; Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music: From the First
Drums to the Mambo; and Katherine J. Hagedorn's Divine Utterances:
The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria.
The Cuban writer Leonardo Acosta is the author of numerous studies
on Cuban music, culture, and literature. His Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is an
English translation and condensed version of what was originally
published in Spanish as two separate volumes (Descarga cubana: el jazz
en Cuba, 1900-1950 [La Habana: Ediciones Union, 2000] and Descarga
numero dos: el jazz en Cuba, 1950-2000 [La Habana: Ediciones Union,
2002]). For this work Acosta draws from his forty-year career as a jazz
saxophonist and historian of jazz in Havana. Although the author humbly
states that the book is not a "history of jazz in Cuba," but
only an "outline" of that history (p. xii), Cubano Be, Cubano
Bop is in fact comprehensive, very well researched, and stands as the
only work of its kind. The author organizes the chapters
chronologically, the stages of which match with the conventional
periodization sequence typical in jazz historiography: introduction of
jazz to Cuba in the 1900s (chap. 1); first Cuban jazz ensembles of the
1920s (chap. 2); Cuban big bands in the 1930s (chap. 3); the emergence
of bebop, feeling, and mambo in the 1940s (chap. 4); the emergence of
Afro-Cuban jazz in the late 1940s and 1950s (chap. 5); the
popularization and institutionalization of jazz in Havana in the late
1950s (chaps. 6 and 7); developments in jazz after 1959 (chap. 8); and
developments in Cuban jazz after the 1960s (chap. 9). Apart from his
conventional structure, Acosta more importantly chronicles the
contribution to jazz by Cuban musicians dating back to the late
nineteenth century in New Orleans as well as in Cuba. Equally indicative
of the book's scope is the attention the author gives to
developments in Cuban popular dance music that were interlaced with
developments in jazz in Cuba. As Acosta shows, Cuban jazz musicians
(e.g., Guillermo Barretto, Andres Echeverria [also known as El Nino
Rivera], and Israel "Cachao" Lopez) were also active
performers of and innovators in Cuban popular dance music.
Acosta focuses his work almost entirely on providing historical
documentation of places (i.e., names of theaters, cabarets, hotels,
labor union halls, and social clubs), events, periodicals, radio
stations, and recordings that were important to the development,
dissemination, and performance of jazz in Cuba. Although he gives
documentary evidence of jazz in other parts of the island, he mostly
focuses on Havana. Of particular importance to the work is the detailed
information that the author provides on important early Cuban jazz
figures and jazz bands of the 1930s and 1940s, especially Armando Romeu,
Jr., director of the Orquesta Bellamar, many alumni of which eventually
became the leaders of the jazz scene in Havana in the 1950s. The
author's detailed documentation of these early figures is
important, considering that the scant recordings that these musicians
and groups made have practically disappeared. Also significant is
Acosta's documentation of the early musical activities of Luciano
"Chano" Pozo, Rene Hernandez (pianist and arranger for Machito
and His Afro-Cubans), Arturo "Chico" O'Farrill, Mario
Bauza, and others in Havana prior to their immigration to New York City where they would become extremely important in the emergence of
Afro-Cuban jazz in the late 1940s. Acosta's main objective in
detailing the performance of jazz in Cuba is to show that Afro-Cuban
jazz "developed gradually and simultaneously in New York and
Havana, with the difference that here (in Cuba) it was a silent and
almost natural process" (p. 59). Elsewhere, he restates that
"what I'm trying to prove here" is "that socalled
Latin jazz emerged not only in New York ... but also in Cuba, where the
foundations of this fusion music were gradually being laid, over the
course of decades, primarily between jazz on the one hand and son (and
then mambo) on the other" (p. 90). This claim is difficult to
substantiate given the lack of recordings of these musicians playing
jazz before the 1950s. Recordings made in the 1950s and after, however,
are readily available (for example, Bebo Valdes and his Havana All
Stars: Descarga Caliente, Caney CCD 512 [1995], CD) and remain to be
adequately analyzed and compared with contemporary recordings of Latin
jazz in New York City and elsewhere. While the author might have
included, however brief, some musicological analysis of available
recordings, he does provide convincing evidence in the form of
historical data on the performance and development of jazz and,
eventually, Afro-Cuban jazz in Cuba.
This book is intended for general readers as well as scholars of
jazz and Cuban music history. In fact, given the lacunae of Latin jazz
in jazz historiography (see Christopher Washburne, "Latin Jazz: The
Other Jazz," Current Musicology 71-73 [Spring 2001-2002]: 409-26),
this book should be required reading for all jazz historians and
educators or at least for those interested in the long and significant
histories of jazz outside of the United States. To his credit Acosta is
as adept talking about the jazz history of the United States as he is of
jazz history in Cuba. The book includes over sixty black and white
photos of mostly Cuban jazz musicians; other photos depict Max Roach,
Billy Cobham, Zoot Simms, Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes, and other
American jazz musicians performing with Cuban jazz musicians in Cuba. It
is hoped that this work will inspire more historical and musicological
studies on jazz in Cuba and Latin America in general, for as the author
correctly states, "critics and historians of the United States can
be excessively provincial, poorly informed on what occurs in the rest of
the world.... [T]hose who don't know what was happening in Havana,
and in other parts of the island, during the Forties and Fifties ... can
never speak with authority on the origins of any of these musical forms
[i.e., Afro-Cuban jazz, mambo, and salsa]" (pp. 130-31).
Cuban writer Helio Orovio is a music historian who has written
extensively on Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American popular music. His
Cuban Music from A to Z is an English translation and revised third
edition of Diccionario de la musica cubana: biografico y tecnico, the
first edition of which was published in 1981 (La Habana: Editorial
Letras Cubanas), followed by a second edition published in 1992. It
includes over 150 illustrations and 1,300 entries of Cuban musicians
(popular, folk, and art), musicologists and historians, genres, musical
terms, and instruments, many of which have been updated and expanded.
There are also many new entries for contemporary Cuban composers,
musicians, and groups (e.g., Ibrahim Ferrer, Miguel Anga Diaz, and Isaac
Delgado), as well as for others who pursued musical careers outside of
Cuba (e.g., Carmelina Delfin, Orquesta Broadway, and Willy Chirino).
Additional new entries cover musical genres, periodicals, and radio and
television stations that were important to the dissemination of Cuban
music. Ethnomusicologists Katherine Hagedorn (Pomona College) and Robin
Moore (Temple University) and sociologist and Cuban music historian Raul
Fernandez (University of California, Irvine) contributed most, if not
all of these new and updated entries; they also translated, with the
assistance of Sue Steward, all of the entries from Spanish to English.
This dictionary is an indispensable source for music journalists,
the student of Cuban music, and scholars alike. The entries are concise,
accurate, and informative, providing dates and places of birth and death
for musicians, composers, and other important figures in Cuban music
history. Unfortunately, the editors decided not to include many of the
musical transcriptions of rhythmic patterns and compositions that are
found in the Spanish editions, a loss for students and scholars in
particular. On the other hand, the illustrations are of much better
quality than in the previous two editions, and the translations of the
entries are fluid.
Ned Sublette is a musician, record producer, former coproducer of
the public radio program Afropop Worldwide, and cofounder of the record
label Qbadisc. His Cuba and Its Music is a lengthy (over 575 pages)
historical narrative of Cuban music that the author organizes into seven
parts totaling 36 chapters. Sublette prefaces the book by explaining
that it "will inevitably contain a good deal of nonmusical history,
because music, far from being a universal language, is made in the
spaces created by society and empire, and we have to know what those
societies and empires were if we want to understand the music" (p.
viii). Interestingly, Sublette begins his tale with four chapters (Part
1) covering the political, economic, and cultural history of the
Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors in Spain: early Arab and
Portuguese slavery in West and Central Africa; and the expansion of the
Bantu into sub-Saharan Africa. Part 2 (chaps. 5-11) begins to read like
an actual history of Cuban music, covering the development of the
contradanza, danza, and habanera and including discussion of the
political, social, and cultural landscape of colonial Cuba. Part 3
(chaps. 12-15) traces the political and cultural history of African
ethnic groups of the Senegambia, Congo, Calabar, and Oyo (or Yoruba)
regions, the peoples and cultures of which would later contribute to the
development of black cultures and music throughout the Americas. Part 4
(chaps. 16-18) covers the late-nineteenth century in Cuba, focusing on
the wars of independence and the development of the guaracha, rumba, and
danzon. Part 5 (chaps. 19-28) discusses trova (singer-songwriter)
musicians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,
including Sindo Garay, Manuel Corona, Rosendo Ruiz, and Maria Teresa
Vera; early charanga francesas or string and flute-based ensembles
associated mostly with danzon music; the intellectual career of Cuban
ethnologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz; the relationships of
ragtime and tango to the habanera-danzon complex; early rural son music,
its commercialization in the 1920s, and popularization in the United
States where it became known as "rhumba" beginning in the
early 1930s; the introduction of radio and jazz in Cuba; art composers
Amadeo Roldan and Alejandro Garcia Caturla; and the popular light-opera
genre zarzuela. Part 6 (chaps. 29-32) covers the politically turbulent
1930s and the early musical careers of Miguelito Valdes, Arsenio
Rodriguez, Luciano "Chano" Pozo, Arcano y sus Maravillas in
Havana and Mario Bauza and Frank "Machito" Grillo in New York
City. Part 7 (chaps. 33-36) discusses the various styles of mambo that
emerged and became popular in Havana in the 1940s; Chano Pozo and John
"Dizzy" Gillespie's collaborations in New York City; and
Benny More's and Damaso Perez Prado's roles in the
popularization of mambo in Mexico City in the early 1950s.
As the author states: "I am not an academic and, despite the
notes, this is not intended as an academic book" (pp. xii-xiii).
Accordingly. Sublette uses secondary sources for his narrative, citing
extensively from the works of Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Alejo
Carpentier, Max Salazar. Cristobal Diaz Ayala, and many others. This
book is a useful source for non-Spanish readers who are interested in
Cuban music history, especially since many of the secondary sources it
draws from is in Spanish. The author's detailed descriptions of the
cultures of the Yoruba, Calabar, and Congo regions as well as of the
history of slavery in these regions are particularly informative. On the
other hand, Sublette includes many excursions into areas that are
tangentially related to Cuban music. Sections such as his discussion of
New Orleans's racial politics and cultural landscape of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (pp. 99, 105-08), the history of
Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution (pp. 104-05, 108-11), and even
his detailed discussion of the political and economic history of Cuba in
the eighteenth century (pp. 102-04) seem superfluous even though he
eventually connects the importance of the Haitian Revolution and New
Orleans to Cuban culture and music later in the book (chap. 9). Other
excursions, however brief, seem entirely irrelevant such as his tracing
of the blues back to the Senegambia (pp. 162-69); the development of the
American military band or the bass-snare-cymbal combination (pp.
123-24), which the author himself admits "was never an important
part of Cuban popular music" (p. 124); and a lengthy discussion of
the mafia and Fidel Castro's earliest political exploits in the
late 1940s (pp. 514-23). The author also devotes chapters 18 and 19
almost entirely to a sociopolitical and economic history of Cuba's
war of independence with hardly any mention of music.
Finally, there are two isolated, yet nevertheless problematic
aspects of Sublette's treatment of the material. First, in
discussing the survival of African music in the Americas, he refers to
the music of the "Pygmies" as a sort of timeless entity in
making the following claim: "The smoking gun for this survival of
the Pygmy technique [i.e., hocketing] is a group of recordings bluesman
Sonny Terry made beginning in 1938" (p. 49). Besides its lack of
concern for the historicity of "pygmy" music, this statement
is yet another example of the author's excursion into music having
little or no relevance to Cuba. He also seems to perpetuate simplistic characterizations of African and African-derived music as can be
observed in the following statement: "the music of Africa was
already ancient in the first century A.D., and it was as rhythmic and as
infectious then as it is now" (p. 8; my emphasis). Second, the
author seems to suggest (in one instance) that cultural traits survive
genetically in asserting that "genetic analysis" may at some
point "give us perhaps a clearer picture" of an African
cultural map of the New World (p. 76). Theories of cultural continuity
through biological means, of course, have long been rejected by
anthropologists beginning with Franz Boas since the early twentieth
century.
Apart from these relatively isolated problems. Sublette's work
is mostly informative and often entertaining. As already mentioned, this
book is for the general reader, although students of Cuban music might
find it useful as well. The book includes a fairly detailed index,
especially useful for finding specific information quickly, and
bibliography, which itself is a good source for students, scholars, and
other writers interested in researching Cuban music.
Bata drummer, Santeria initiate, and ethnomusicologist Katherine
Hagedorn gives us Divine Utterances, an excellent ethnomusicological
study of Santeria religious and folkloric performance in Havana.
Santeria is the popular name for the Afro-Cuban religious system that
derived from West African religions, primarily of the Yoruba, and
crystallized into a uniquely Afro-Cuban form by the nineteenth century.
Its central component is the veneration of orichas or deities through
the performance of toques or specific rhythms which are executed by bata
drummers. These toques are performed during a ceremony to invoke an
oricha or orichas to take possession of initiates. By virtue of her
initiation as a priestess of Ochun (the oricha of sweet waters and
romantic love) and training as a bata drummer, Hagedorn's
discussion of the more esoteric and performative aspects of the
religion, including invoking possession through drumming, resonates with
ethnographic authority.
The book focuses on the interplay between and overlapping worlds of
"folkloric" presentations of Santeria drumming, singing, and
dance, as exhibited by the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, and actual
"religious" ceremonies. The author does this by observing
rehearsals and performances of the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, a
state-sponsored Afro-Cuban musical and dance troupe since 1962, and
comparing these with her observation of and participation in religious
ceremonies. Through ethnographic description and analysis of musical and
bodily practice, the author keys in on the idea of "intent"
with which she describes the difference between religious and folkloric
drumming and performance. As she notes, "the musicians use the same
bata rhythms and songs in folkloric performances as they do in toques de
santo. What differs is the intent of the performance, and the relative
competence of the participants. The intent of a toque de santo is to
bring down the oricha, an intent realized with the help of competent,
ritually savvy participants, [while] the intent of a folkloric
performance is not to bring down the santo, but rather to provide a
mimetic representation thereof" (pp. 100-01). Hagedorn also makes
use of the theme "divine utterances" to describe the
performative power of singing, drumming, dancing, and praising that,
according to the author, is "translated" or moves fluidly from
sacred to secular (and back again), "radiating outward to imbue a
secular folkloric performance with possible sacredness" (p. 117).
"Intent" and "divine utterance" remain close at hand
in secular contexts, always available or capable of being deployed. In
addition to her ethnographic work, Hagedorn provides historical
background on the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional's formation and
ideological program (chap. 5) and the racist and social stigma
attributed to Santeria practice and practitioners dating back to the
nineteenth century (chap. 6). Here, she focuses on the early work of the
eminent Cuban ethnologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, whose
training as a criminologist formed the basis of his early incrimination
(before the late 1930s) of Afro-Cubans and their cultural traditions.
Hagedorn provides vivid descriptions of both staged and religious
performances of Santeria and her own training in bata drumming with her
teacher and lead drummer of the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, Alberto
Villarreal. This book is particularly important for students and
scholars of ethnomusicology, anthropology, dance, religious studies, and
African diaspora studies. General readers interested in Afro-Cuban
music, dance, and culture will also find this book useful, especially
with regards to Hagedorn's clear explanations of the cosmology of
Santeria, names and characteristics of the major orichas, and other
basic concepts of Santeria. The book comes with a compact disc of twenty
examples, mostly of Francisco Aguabella's and Alberto
Villar-real's groups performing chants and bata for various
orichas. The title of each track is also embedded in the text, guiding
the reader through the listening examples. The work also includes a
glossary of mostly names and terms relevant to Santeria religion, music,
and performance. Hagedorn's experience in and treatment of the
subject matter, based on over ten years of research and active
performance in Santeria, mostly in Havana, make this book an important
contribution to ethnomusicological ethnographies.
The four books reviewed in this essay represent a broad spectrum of
approaches and styles in the study of Cuban music and culture. All are
useful to general readers and pertinent in different ways to students
and scholars of Cuban music. It is the hope of this reviewer that more
academics and historians pursue other types of approaches such as
critical biographies of Cuban musicians as well as produce more critical
histories of musical genres and styles that will contribute to the
growing literature on Cuban music. Also needed are more historical,
ethnomusicological, and anthropological studies focusing on the
interrelationships between Cuban music and dance styles. With the
continuing popularity of salsa and other Latin-based musical styles
throughout the United States and internationally, it is surprising that
no historical work exists on the origins of salsa dance styles including
rueda, a circle dance involving several couples which originated in
Havana in the early 1950s and has become popular among many salsa
dancers in the United States. In studying these dance and musical
styles, academics and historians will find rich and contested histories
that transcend national boundaries while also informing us of their
importance to local musical landscapes throughout the globe.
DAVID F. GARCIA
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
EDITED BY PHILIP VANDERMEER