Cuba - Lonely Planet [41]
The best places to see and hear authentic rumba in Cuba are in its two rumba cities: Havana and Matanzas. The former has great live performances in the Callejón de Hamel every Sunday at 2pm, El Gran Palenque in Vedado, and Centro Cultural Recreativo Los Orishas in Guanabacoa. The latter showcases the real deal outside the Palacio del Junco (municipal museum) on Friday at 4pm Click here. If you’re in Trinidad, check out the 10pm shows at the Palenque de Congos Reales.
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Welded together, rumba and danzón provided the musical backbone that ultimately paved the way for son, a distinctive blend of anticipated African rhythms and melodic rustic guitars over which a singer would improvise from a traditional 10-line Spanish poem known as a décima.
In its pure form, son was played by a sextet consisting of guitar, tres (guitar with three sets of double strings), double bass, bongo and two singers who played maracas and claves (sticks that tap out the beat). Arising from the precipitous mountains of Cuba’s influential east, the genre’s earliest exponents were the legendary Trio Oriental, who stabilized the sextet format in 1912 when they were reborn as the Sexteto Habanero. Another early sonero was singer Miguel Matamoros, whose self-penned son classics such as ‘Son de la Loma’ and ‘Lágrimas Negras’ are de rigueur among Cuba’s ubiquitous musical entertainers, even today.
By the 1930s the sextet had become a septet with the addition of a trumpet, and exciting new musicians such as blind tres player Arsenio Rodríguez – a songwriter who Harry Belafonte once called the ‘father of salsa’ – were paving the way for mambo and chachachá.
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MAMBO & CHACHACHá
In the 1940s and ’50s the son bands grew from seven pieces to eight and beyond until they became big bands boasting full horn and percussion sections that played rumba, chachachá and mambo. The reigning mambo king was Benny Moré (see boxed text,), who with his sumptuous voice and rocking 40-piece all-black band was known as El Bárbaro del Ritmo (The Barbarian of Rhythm).
Mambo grew out of charanga music which itself was a derivative of danzón. Bolder, brassier and altogether more exciting than its two earlier incarnations, the music was characterized by exuberant trumpet riffs, belting saxophones and regular enthusiastic interjections by the singer (usually in the form of the word dilo! or ‘say it!’). The style’s origins are mired in controversy. Some argue that it was invented by native Habanero Orestes López after he penned a new rhythmically dexterous number called ‘Mambo’ in 1938. Others give the credit to Matanzas band leader Pérez Prado who was the first musician to market his songs under the increasingly lucrative mambo umbrella in the early ’40s. Whatever the case, mambo had soon spawned the world’s first universal dance craze and, from New York to Buenos Aires, people couldn’t get enough of its infectious rhythms.
A variation on the mambo theme, the chachachá was first showcased by Havana-based composer and violinist Enrique Jorrín in 1951 while playing with the Orquesta América. Originally known as ‘mambo-rumba,’ the music was intended to promote a more basic kind of Cuban dance that less coordinated North Americans would be able to master, but it was quickly mambo-ized by overenthusiastic dance competitors who kept adding complicated new steps.
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SALSA, TIMBA & JAZZ
Salsa is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of musical genres that emerged out of the fertile Latin New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s when jazz, son and rumba blended to create a new, brassier sound. While not strictly a product of Cubans living in Cuba, salsa’s roots and key