Welcome back everyone! This is my second episode that digs deep into the amazing world of Latin American music. I’m dedicating it to my amazing mom, Graciela Zocca Hines, who turned 86 years young during the writing and production of this episode. My mom was born and spent her childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina! My mom, more than anyone else, gave me my love for music, and it’s been my mom who has supported me and my brothers all our lives in whatever adventures we’ve had. Happy Birthday, Mom – we love you!
Latin music and American music were once considered to be separate and unique. They had distinctly different properties and music labels managed them differently. But not anymore.
Danny Ocean is a singer-songwriter and native of Caracas, Venezuela, and has said “Music is something that transcends beyond any language or nationality…it’s all about being a global artist.” In our age of instant satellite television feed, 24-hour news channels, web-based subscription music services, and so on – the term “cross-over” artist really doesn’t mean very much anymore. Latin music becoming mainstream is not a crossover, but rather an indication of the world we live in. America’s demographics have changed in many ways over the last century. Today, Latin culture is American culture. Latins are now the largest minority in the United States, and the second largest ethnic group after whites.
In our last episode, we looked at the origins of Latin music – European, African, Native American – and how important the resulting folk music became in everyday life as well as memorializing bigger social movements. In different regions and conditions, a wide variety of music was created and spread, combining with other forms, and again casting off whole new sounds, colors and beats. In countries throughout Latin America, as well as in the United States, entire traditions sprang up and a lot of it has made its way into our music as well, entering through port cities on both coasts and through the Southern border with Mexico, carried by new American immigrants, or exported by traveling musicians, and blending with the music that was already here.
Cuba is home for many of the Latin genres born during the 20th century. From the perspective of a musical family, the "son, could be thought of as the great grandmother of everything that flowed from Cuba afterwards. It ‘son’ combined Spanish popular music and African rhythm rumba. It emerged in Eastern Cuba and gathered steam during the early 20th century. It’s played by ensembles called conjuntos of different sizes.
This is a ‘son’, called “Echale Salsita” by Ignacio Pineiro, performed by a conjunto sepeteto. During the ‘20s, Cuba’s upper class adopted a similar sound, called the danzon, and it was a descendant of the French "contredanse" or contradanza. It was performed by "charangas" – orchestras dominated by flutes and violins) in which violin provided the main riff and flutes improvise).
Conjunto Trios feature 2 to 3 guitars, maracas or claves
The conjunto Sexteto includes Guitar, tres, bass (or marimbula – an African bass-type instrument with three strings), bongos, maracas and claves
The conjunto septet is the largest of the ‘son’ ensembles and adds a trumpet to the sexeteto line-up.
The ‘golden age’ of these Charanga orchestras was in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and the bands had names like Orquesta Neno Gonzalez, Orquesta Belisario Lopez and Orquesta de Cheo Belen Puig. In the 1940s, another Cuban band leader, Arsenio Rodriguez, a virtuoso of the tres (Cuban guitar), set the standard for the Cuban conjunto (adding congas, piano and trumpets to the traditional guitar-based sexteto) to innovate a new kind of ‘son’ based on the piano and the congas.
Another Cuban dance music called the mambo was actually imported from Congo by the Cuban bassist Israel "Cachao" Lopez and by his brother, the pianist and cellist, Orestes Lopez. Orestes played in Antonio Arcano's Orquesta Radiofonicaand in 1937, he created the Danzon Mambo. Israel "Cachao" Lopez wrote the Orquesta’s arrangements that earned the group worldwide fame. The mambo fused rumba rhythms with big-band jazz to make a danzon for the working class. An example of it is the chachacha, epitomized by Damazo Perez Prado's Mambo Jumbo (1948). that, after the 1953 recording of Enrique Jorrin's La Enganadora (1948) and especially
The mambo became a USA craze in 1954.
Charangas, played mambos, chachacha’s and rumbas, and had Cuba putting on its dancing shoes until 1959 until Castro seized power. That was when the music died in Cuba and the action picked up in other islands, including Trinidad.
Calypso came out of the islands of Trinidad and Tobago and we’re listening to the very first recording of a Calypso song, Julian Whiterose's Iron Duke in the Land (1914). Like the Mambo, Rumba and Chachacha, the Calypso was another dance that made it across the water and into America’s dance halls and radio waves.
But the first real ‘star’ of calypso music was Hubert "Roaring Lion" Charles. His songs Send Your Children to The Orphan's Home (1927), Marry An Ugly Woman (1934), Three Cheers For The Red, White and Blue (1936), Netty Netty (1937) Mary Anne (1945) are all considered standards of calypso music. In total, he recorded over 100 singles across the span of his career. Others include Harry Belafonte’s Jump In The Line, Day O and Island in the Sun. In order to record their music, Trinidad’s musicians had to travel to New York, since there were no closer recording studios.
A major breakthrough in Calpyso music came in the 1940s, when Trinidad's musicians innovated the steel band, which dramatically changed the sound of calypso. About steel band music, the Trinidadian composer and arranger, Michelle Huggins-Watts said, “[the music] really came from the bowels of our impoverished lower classes and we are extremely proud of that.”
Trinidad was colonized by the French who brought their tradition of “Carnival” with them – like we have in New Orleans. African slaves formed the core of the French plantation system and like everywhere, they brought their rhythm with them – something that lasted through Trinidad’s emancipation in the 1830’s. The French allowed their slaves to have their own festival, and like everywhere else, the rhythm was the foundation for the music, and they used whatever they had to drum out their music. Metal objects worked best, and eventually they settled on steel oil drums; today its more common to use chemical drums. Trinidad’s invention was hammering dents into the oil drums that produce specific pitches
During the 1960s, Trinidad’s musicians blended Calypso with soul music, and in the 1970’s, calypso-soul was driving its beat in the discos. This song, Bass Man by Winston "Mighty Shadow" Bailey is an example. of calypso soul. Shadow was enigmatic. On stage, he always dressed entirely in black, including either his cape or waistcoat and wearing a hat. As unique as he looked, his song delivery was also all his own. He’d alternate sung vocals hypnotically chanted choruses, and was constantly in motion – usually jumping in place. True to his ‘bass man’ nickname, his songs had unrelenting bass lines. Check out some of his classics, “Dingolay”, “Tension”, and “Poverty Is Hell”. The first song that made him famous though was called “Bassman”, it’s the one we’re listening to now. He earned a number of prestigious awards in the Caribbean Diaspora scene, including The Hummingbird Medal, one of the highest civilian honors bestowed in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) for his contributions to the arts.
Puerto Rico has its own traditions. One of these is bomba, a dance with alternating movements between a man and a woman, and backed by very percussive music – it has sixteen distinct rhythmic patterns. Think of bomba as you would think of the work songs, field hollers, and spirituals created in the American south by African slaves – because bomba has the same African roots. The word, bomba, itself refers to the dance, the music, and even the instruments used to perform it. Bomba is everything. It can be upbeat, as in holandé, which is really upbeat, or a yubá, which is slower, meditative and spiritual. Even though it was originally a slave music, bomba has become the wellspring for all things cultural coming from Puerto Rico.
Usually, the musicians set the pace for the dancers – in bomba though, it’s the other way around. Experiencing a bomba is like watching a conversation unfold. There is a dancer in the center of a group of the main bomber. A drum called a buleador marks the beat, but the seguidor or primo – is the main attraction. It’s a drum and it’s used to follow and imitate in sound the steps of the dancer. There is only one maraca, usually played by the singer, the cuá or fuá (two sticks played against the wood of the drum barrels or another piece of wood,
Two of the most important names in bomba music arew Rafael Cortijo and Ismael Rivera (Cortijo y Su Combo). They made bomba mainstream music in the 1950’s. One great
example of bomba music played by Ismael Rivera and Cortijo y Su Combo would be the song titled Volare. It has the great rhythmical bomba beats that have caused audiences from all over Latin-America to get up on their feet. In the slavery days, men dominated in the dancing, with strong, jerky leg movements and sharp steps, while women used skirts to make subtle swings and shy movements. Then came Caridad Brenes de Cepeda, who changed the genre forever. She did away with the demure movements and used her skirt to make more aggressive moves, raising it higher than before as a sign of rejecting oppression. Today, bomba is still performed, and is dominated by women singers, dancers, and drummers who use the music to express their frustrations about inequality, gender gaps, and other struggles.
Closely related to bomba, Puerto Rico is also the original home of plena music. In the last episode, you and I talked about Mexican corridos, and how they were used to communicate important narratives. Plena lyrics are like that, too. They convey a story about events, address topical themes, often comment on political protest movements, and offer satirical commentaries. It’s been described as "the newspaper of the people." Unlike bomba with its 16 rhytms, Plena has only one.
In 1917, the Jones Act made Puerto Rico a territory of the United States and its people, citizens. Many Puerto Ricans began immigrating to American cities such as New York and Miami starting in the 1940’s, and they brought bomba and plena music with them. By the 40’s, big-band music was in high gear in the U.S., becoming, along with country music, the sound track of the WWII/ Silent Generation. Go back to episodes eight and ten (Country Music Blazes a Trail and Jazz in Defense of Equality and Justice for All) for more on that!
The mingling of Jazz and Bomba was like the re-uniting of long separated brothers and sisters – because of course, they were! As the two styles confronted each other, a fusion of the Latin and Jazz styles occurred. Big band leaders, such as Puerto Rico’s Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez laid a foundation for what was about to become another Puerto Rican derived music.
Cuba’s Machito and a few other musicians from Cuba also helped to shape salsa’s development. The term salsa, much like the term jazz, is simply a word used to describe a fusion of different rhythms. The term was derived by marketers at the end of the ‘60s to help target the Latin audience they were sure would gravitate to the new sound. Although the music traces back to the Cuban ‘son’, we have to thank the Puerto Ricans – and especially the transplanted New York Puerto Ricans for making it a world music.
Based on the African-Cuban ‘son’ - salsa is built around percussion instruments like the clave, maracas, conga, bongo, tambura (a two-headed drum, originally made from salvaged rum barrels), bato – a Mandingo (a tribe from Mali) version of a three-stringed bass), and cowbell to recreate the back-and-forth dynamic of traditional African songs in which drumming is a blend of music and communication. To that big, African foundation, a piano, horn section, bass, a guitar (called a tres), and singers provide more traditional Western-sounding melody, harmony, and counterpoint. Salsas biggest artists have included Willie Colon, Larry Harlow, and Eddie Palmieri. We’re listening to Willy Colon and Ruben Blades and their song Buscando Guayaba. Colon is a great example of the Puerto Rican immigration story I mentioned. He’s the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, who grew up in the South Bronx but spent summers with his Abuela on the family’s farm outside Manati, Puerto Rico. He started playing trumpet in the school band, and then progressed to trombone. Besides being a respected salsa musician, he has always been an involved civil rights, community, and political activist. Additionally, he’s been one of the first Latins to serve as a member of the Latino Commission on AIDS, President of the Arthur Schomburg Coalition for a Better New York, member of the Board of Directors of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute the first person of color to serve on national board for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
With a name that means “party,” rumba is a vibrant form of music and dance that dates back to mid-19th century Havana. It developed in two major cities in Cuba: Havana and Matanzas, and like all the music that came from the African diaspora, it was an important to their survival and retention of human dignity. Rumba was developed in two major cities in Cuba: Havana and Matanzas. This particular music evolved as a way for the slaves to cope with the struggles of the daily life.
The three rumba forms are Yambu, Guaguanco and Columbia and three different sized drums combine to produce rumba rhythms. Each style has a very different mood.
Yambú is a romantic dance; a single couple slowly and respectfully dances within a circle formed by the drummers, singers, others waiting to dance. They mostly dance apart, except for when the man places a hand on the woman’s shoulder.
Guaguancó is symbolic sexual foreplay. Men dance a vacunao, a hip-thrusting gesture and women avoid the men’s advances by turning away or covering their pelvic areas with their skirts.
In the Columbia, men individually enter a circle to compete with each other. These competitions include dancing with candles on their heads, swinging large knives around their bodies, or performing acrobatic movements around objects like hats or bottles that were laid on the ground.
As you can hear, rumbas are fiery music! Even though slavery in Cuba ended in 1886, rumba lived on, despite the efforts the white population took to suppress it. They thought it too ‘raw’. In 1925, Cuba’s president, Gerardo Machado, indirectly tried to ban it by making it illegal to dance in publich to African drums with “bodily contortions”. After the Cuban revolution though, Fidel Castro fully embraced it since it was the Afro-Latin music of the working class.
Let’s travel south of the Equator now, to Brazil. Home of the samba!
Brazil deviated from the usual European, arrogant white-person approach to imperialism… a little bit. At least they showed more tolerance for the black slave class and the Native Americans. Whereas the Mexicans and Peruvians effectively erased their original indigenous cultures, Brazil chose to integrate them into them into the general population. In Brazilian music culture, there have been two great centers, Bahia and Rio de Janiero. Bahia is to Brazil’s musical traditions as New Orleans is to America’s. the melting pot where African traditions mixed with local and European concepts. We talked about New Orleans in several season one episodes, including episodes 3, 5, and 6. Check out those for a great introduction if you missed those episodes!
On the other hand, Rio is more like America’s northern cities, pre-jazz. It was the capital of the aristocracy. Here, European culture was imported, and the rest of the city’s population eeked out impoverished lives in the city’s slums, where poor (black and white) immigrants from the rest of Brazil (including Bahia) lived in miserable conditions. In the twilight years of the 19th century, Rio’s orchestras – called “choros” (basically, woodwinds and horns, with the clarinet as the soloist) performed European dance music (such as waltzes and polkas) were called "choro". These snooty ‘choro’ ensembles looked down on the African percussion instruments.
Sambas rose up in Bahia. The word itself comes from an African term, mesemba, which came from Bahia and was probably related to the Candomble rituals.
In our previous episode, we talked about how Catholicism was like a sheet stitched over pagan religions. Candomblé involves the worship of spirits known as orixás. Their names and attributes come from traditional West African gods, but these spirits are interpreted like Roman Catholic saints. The samba was probably invented by African-Brazilians in the working-class slums of Rio de Janeiro. The samba’s rhythm had three roles: singing, dancing and parading (at the carnival – think of Fat Tuesday in New Orleans).
This recording from 1916, by a black musician named Ernesto "Donga" dos Santos: Pelo Telefonewas the first record to be advertised as "samba”. Obviously, this song sounds very different from the more drum oriented samba music; in fact, it was the starting point for a different form of samba, known as Samba Carnavalesco.
In season one, episode six, the Classical- Jazz affair, we talked about how Western Europe in the 20’s was in love with anything related to primitive peoples, meaning Native Americans and Africans. So, five years after Pelo Telefono, a white samba player, named Manuel Diniz, invited a black choro ensemble, ‘Os Oito Batutas’, led by flautist/ composer Pixinguinha ("the Bach of choro") and Donga on guitar to play some shows in Paris. Diniz and Os Oito Batutas were heralded by Parisian culture just like the black American singer and dancer, Josephine Baker, had been in the same period. I told you about Josephine Baker in episode six, too.
Dizin and the Batutas made the Samba a dance craze in Paris, and, by extension, the rest of Western Europe. The band brought a few things home with them; fame, money and some new instruments to add to Samba, including trumpets, trombones, saxophones and banjos. Making the sound more like North American jazz opened up another market for samba music, too.
And then, in 1930, along came a young white musician from Rio’s middle class, named Noel Rosa. Rosa introduced a more song-oriented and less "African" form of samba with his song, Com que Roupa?
So, Salsa, like jazz in the United States, was a blanket term for a variety of music with a kind of rhythm, but there were different kinds of samba. The most adventurous and extreme is called batucada.
"Batucada" is both the name for a large samba percussion group, for a samba jam session, and for an intensely polyrhythmic style of drumming. A batucada can be played by ensembles with hundreds of percussionists.
Closely related to batucada, another form of samba called Samba de Enredo emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1900s and sounds like this.
Groups performing Samba de Enredo feature a very large percussion section including the following instruments:
Surdo drums (basic pulse in 2, divided among three sizes of surdos)
Pandeiro – a tambourine (16th note division)
Cuica- a friction drum that makes a varying squeeky sound (accents)
Tamborim – a small round frame drum, of African origin, coming in different sizes, and hit with a stick. (syncopation)
Caixa (snare drum)
Agogo bells – based on West African bells, comes in either double or single bell varieties.
Samba de Enredo is ‘street music’, coming from Brazil’s Afro-Brazilian population.
Brazil was also the original home of Bossa Nova music.
I thought twice about including this, because it’s not a music that rose up the typical way. Instead, it came from a couple of Brazilian musicians, including Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Joao Gilberto, who combined with Americans like Frank Sinatra and the sax players, Stan Kenton and Stan Getz to create a new sound that would better represent the current musical interests of Brazil’s affluent youth.
Other famous Brazilian bossanova musicians include Luiz Bonfa` (Manha de Carnaval, 1958), Jorge Ben (Mais Que Nada, 1963), Sergio Mendes.
Far more original was the synthesis offered by black guitarist Djalma "Bola Sete" DeAndrade (3), who blended samba, jazz, American folk music and European classical music in the effortless improvisations of The Solo Guitar (1965), Ocean (1972), Shambhala Moon (1982).The movement lasted just a few years – from the late 1950’s to the early ‘60s.
From Brazil, let’s travel south now to Argentina, eighth largest country in the world, the second largest country in South America after Brazil, bordered by the Andes Mountains and Chile to the west, the birthplace of the Argentine freedom fighter, Che Guevara, home to the gauchos, and musically known for its tangos.
Starting in the 1890’s, the tango was, originally, was danced among the working class in Buenos Aires, who took the rhythms of African slaves who were brought to Argentina from Congo, and named the music after the African drums, called tan-go.
The music was influenced by Cuban music and the milongo, an older genre that came out of the Río de la Plata areas of Argentina, Uruguay and the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The choreography came out of the brothels, patterned after the obscene and violent relationships between the prostitute, her pimp and a male rival. With that background, you can see why the first thought people have about the tango is that it’s a sultry, passionate, dramatic dance. At first, it was only an instrumental music, and later lyrics were added to the songs. The lyrics, like the dance movements draw from the seamier side of life – written in ‘lunfardo’ – or street slang used by criminals. (Originally, a lunfardo was a thief.)
One of the earliest hits of tango was pianist Enrique Saborido's Yo Soy La Morocha (1906). By that time, tango had already established itself as a major genre among young Argentinians.
By the teen years of the 20th century, the instrumentation of your standard tango orchestra had been established to include a piano, violins, and a bandoneon (basically an accordion). A major international hit, Mi Noche Triste (1917), the song that introduced lyrics into the tango. The version we’re listening to was recorded in 1930 by Carlos Gardel – he was known as ‘the master of erotic abandon’ - the most charismatic vocalist. If you’d been a high society type in the in the years leading up to WWI, rubbing elbows with people like Lindbergh or Hearst, you’d have danced to this at their parties.
By the ’40s, the bandoneon became much more important to the sound of the tango, and the king of it was a player named Anibal Troilo. He basically set the rules that everyone else playing tangos followed for the next twenty years into the 1960’s.
The tango has continued evolving in interesting ways. For instance, the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla (1921) created something totally new when he mixed tango with classical music. He’s composed pieces for bandoneon and orchestra, pieces for bandoneon octets and quintets, even a tango opera and a tango oratorio. Fascinating. I’m adding a link to a performance of his tango opera, Maria de Buenos Aires, on the American Song podcast Facebook fan page. https://youtu.be/zLjH3xWiYBI You’ll definitely want to check it out!
From Argentina, let’s head north to Peru. Festejo and lando are two styles of music and dance that hold important places in Peru’s Afro-Latin communities.
Festejo comes from the Spanish word for party – fiesta, and as you’d guess, festejo is an upbeat, happy music, whichis pretty damn ironic, when you think that it was created by African slaves held in bondage down in Peru. It was their coping mechanism to survive their misery.
Festejo has been called the most
flirtatious and erotic dance form in the world. (I guess whoever said that hadn’t been to recent high school dances to see couples grinding on each other.) To give you an idea, in a form called ‘Alcatraz’, dance partners (traditionally a woman and a man) both use a candle to try and light a piece of cloth attached to their partner’s lower back – the point is to burn your partner’s clothes off and get each other naked.
Peruvian music has Andean, Spanish, and African roots. Before the Spanish arrived, Peru’s Native American tribes had created a wide range of localized music. Their instruments included small flutes and leather drums. Over time, new instruments developed among the natives - like the charango, sort of like a lute, and developed by the Quechua people – direct descendants of the Incas. When the Africans came, they brought their rhythms and knowledge of African percussion – like the cajon, which had African origins.
If you’ve never heard a charango, here’s your chance. This is Sebastian Perez, a charango player living in Santiago, Chile.
While the Native Americans contributed the charango, the Africans brought their knowledge of the cajon with them. The cajon is the principal instrument of the peoples originally brought to Peru from Africa. After they’d arrived, some of the Africans were put to work at the ports, loading and unloading ship cargo – cargo that was shipped in wooden boxes resembling the cajons, with the exception of the sound hole which they added. In Africa, those cajons had been used to send messages long distances with special rhythm patterns, and that became the basis of the African rhythms heard in Peruvian music today! Here’s an example of cajon playing
Besides the festejo, the lando is a second dance music from Peru, and like the cajon, it came from Angola. The word "landó" came from an African word, ondú, which is an African dance. Today, lando music is a symbol of black, Peruvian music – a lot like the ‘son’ or ‘samba’ are in Cuba and Brazil.
America’s Latin cultures continue to have a major influence on our nation as a whole. Understanding and appreciating the rich musical legacy that comes from Latin America is essential to understanding the whole story of American Song.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s trip across South America and the Caribbean and the many types of music that had their origins here in the New World. Like the United States, all of these nations and cultures were heavily influenced by the blending of European, Native American and African rhythms, instruments, and living experiences. Leave any single element out would make the whole far less beautiful and fascinating than it is. In future episodes, we’ll see how rock and roll played an important part in the social movements that swept through these nations during the 20th and 21st centuries.
As always, there’s a wealth of information you can dig into if you’re curious to know more about any of the topics I shared in this episode. Just visit the American Song Podcast facebook page. While you’re there, you might leave a note and let me know what you’re enjoying about this series, and whether there are any topics you’d like me discuss in future episodes – or anything else that might happen to be on your mind.
And one final thought: In the last several weeks, the world has witnessed the tragedy of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine. If you’re a person of faith, please take some time this week to ask for some divine assistance for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine.
See you next time!