Cuba - Lonely Planet [40]
FOLKLORIC ROOTS
Son, Cuba’s instantly recognizable signature music, first emerged from the mountains of the Oriente region in the second half of the 19th century, though the earliest known testimonies go back as far as 1570. Famously described by Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz as ‘a love affair between the African drum and the Spanish guitar,’ the roots of this eclectic and intricately fused rural music lie in two distinct subgenres: rumba and danzón.
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The Empresa de Grabaciones y Ediciones Musicales (Egrem) is Cuba’s government-run recording and publishing company. It was formed in 1964 and runs the famous Casas de la Música in Centro Habana, Miramar, Varadero, Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba.
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While drumming in the North American colonies was ostensibly prohibited, the Spanish were slightly less mean-spirited in the treatment of their African brethren. As a result Cuban slaves were able to preserve and pass on many of their musical traditions via influential Santería cabildos, religious brotherhoods that re-enacted ancient African percussive music on simple batá drums or chequeré rattles. Performed at annual festivals or on special Catholic saint’s days, this rhythmic yet highly textured dance music was offered up as a form of religious worship to the orishas (deities).
Over time the ritualistic drumming of Santería evolved into a more complex genre known as rumba (see boxed text,). Rumba first metamorphosed in the dock areas of Havana and Matanzas in the late 19th century and was originally viewed as a lewd and unsophisticated form of entertainment for black Afro-Cubans only. But while the music itself sat well outside the cultural mainstream, the dances and rhythms of rumba gradually permeated more accepted forms of popular Cuban music and it became universally popular.
On the other side of the musical equation sat danzón, a type of refined European dance closely associated with the French contredanse or the English ‘country dance’ of the 19th century. Pioneered by innovative Matanzas band leader Miguel Failde in the 1880s, the Cuban danzón quickly developed its own peculiar syncopated rhythm borrowing heavily from Haitian slave influences and, later on, adding such improbable extras as conga drums and vocalists. By the early 20th century Cuban danzóns had evolved from a stately ballroom dance played by an orchestra típica into a more jazzed-up free-for-all known alternatively as charanga, danzonete or danzón-chá.
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RUMBA
Rumba – Cuba’s hypnotic dance music – was first concocted in the docks of Havana and Matanzas during the 1890s when ex-slaves, exposed to a revolving cache of outside influences, began to knock out soulful rhythms on old packing cases in imitation of various African religious rites. As the drumming patterns grew more complex, vocals were added, dances emerged and, before long, the music had grown into a collective form of social expression for all black Cubans.
Spreading in popularity throughout the 1920s and ’30s, rumba gradually spawned three different but interrelated dance formats: guaguancó, an overtly sexual dance; yambú, a slow couple’s dance; and columbia, a fast, aggressive male dance often involving fire torches and machetes.
Pitched into Cuba’s cultural melting pot, these rootsy yet highly addictive musical variants slowly gained acceptance among a new audience of middle-class whites and, by the 1940s, the music had fused with son in a new subgenre called son montuno which, in turn, provided the building blocks for salsa.
Indeed, so influential was Cuban rumba by the end of WWII that it was transposed back to Africa with experimental Congolese artists such as Sam Mangwana and Franco Luambo (of OK Jazz fame) using ebullient Cuban influences to pioneer their own variation on the rumba theme – a genre popularly known as soukous.
Raw, expressive