The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer

omitted, starting right at the montuno.¹⁷ Arsenio’s innovations on the Cuban son were adapted in Puerto Rico and became the basis for the ensemble Cortijo y su Combo, which performed original and traditional bombas and plenas in this format. Later, the heavier percussive sound and rhythmic drive of Arsenio’s style became the model for several New York salsa bands in the late 1960s and 1970s.

      Figure 1.3 Basic rhythmic patterns in Cuban son and salsa

      A lighter and faster-paced variant of son called guaracha (derived from the nineteenth-century topical song form of the same name) was also very popular, especially for their picaresque lyrics, which often related typical anecdotes of daily life. The guaracha numbers of the Sonora Matancera were particular favorites. It is probable that the popularity of guaracha in Colombia is related to its light rhythmic touch, similar to that of música tropical—especially in the quarter note-two eighths rhythmic pattern played by the maracas.

      Parallel to son’s rise in the lower classes, the flute-and-violin charanga ensembles performed a genre known as danzón, developed from the colonial Spanish contradanza for the middle and upper class. Despite the danzón’s Europeanized melodic and harmonic structure, however, principles of repeated interlocking rhythmic, melodic, and timbral patterns also prevailed, especially in the habanera bass line and the cinquillo pattern

performed on two mounted tom-toms known as timbales. By the late 1930s the charangas had become popular among the working classes and had also absorbed elements of son. Most important was the addition of an improvisatory montunolike section—called the mambo—to the end of the danzón structure. By 1943 a conga was added to the charanga ensemble to create extra rhythmic drive in this section. The mambo section was subsequently separated and adapted to big-band formats in New York, where it flowered into a highly popular genre of its own. The mambo big bands were the first to consolidate the combination of congas, timbal, and bongo that is now standard for all salsa bands. The Cuban musician Dámaso Pérez Prado also established a mambo big band in 1947, which helped to popularize the mambo from his base in Mexico City. The charangas, meanwhile, continued in popularity, developing the chachachá rhythm in the early 1950s. (See Waxer 1994 for a detailed history of these developments.)

      In Puerto Rico the two most important genres to be incorporated into música antillana have been bomba and plena. Bomba is a traditional Afro-Puerto Rican dance style similar to the Afro-Cuban rumba. Performed on drums made from rum barrels, bomba is associated with colonial slave plantation culture. Like Cuban rumba, it features heightened interaction between drummers and dancers and is categorized into subgenres according to tempo, meter, and polyrhythmic patterns (see Dufrasne-González 1994). Adaptations of bomba by groups such as Cortijo y su Combo and later salsa bands highlighted the basic patterns of the common 4/4 bomba sicá rhythm (Figure 1.4).

      Plena, on the other hand, emerged at the turn of the last century among Afro-Puerto Rican migrant laborers living in the city of Ponce. It is less rhythmically complex than bomba and is performed on frame hand drums known as panderetas. Its characteristic pattern is notated in Figure 1.5. Plena’s principal attraction lies in its topical lyrics, which, as with the Trinidadian calypso, Jamaican mento, and other Caribbean genres, have earned it the sobriquet “the singing newspaper.” Although still widely performed in its traditional instrumentation, plena underwent several transformations during the first half of the twentieth century, when it was adapted to cosmopolitan dance band formats (see Glasser 1995 for details).

      Figure 1.4 Basic bomba rhythm

      Figure 1.5 Basic plena rhythm

       The Cuban Predominance in Música Antillana

      The predominance of Cuban artists and styles in música antillana is related to the strong political and economic ties between Cuba and the United States in the first half of this century. This led to the diffusion of Cuban sounds over and above other Latin American styles—including the Argentine tango, internationally popular during the first two decades of the century (Savigliano 1995), though it never had the long-lasting commercial impact of Cuban styles. Cuba’s strategic position in the Caribbean made it a prime center of economic activity under Spanish colonialism, which it continued to enjoy under a reign of virtual economic domination by U.S. business interests from the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898 until the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

      The development of improved transportation and communications links between Cuba and the United States facilitated travel, especially between Havana and New York. Buoyed by American dollars and unhampered by Prohibition, Cuba became a tropical playground for Americans from the 1920s through the 1950s.¹⁸ The popularization of the Cuban son during the 1930s, introduced to U.S. audiences in the watered-down form known as rhumba, usurped tango’s position as the most popular Latin American dance in North America and Europe (Roberts 1979). The popularity of Cuban rhumba in North America during the 1930s, followed by the widespread mambo dance craze of the late 1940s and 1950s, served to reinforce North America’s affinity for the island.

      Havana became the “Paris of the Caribbean,” an exotic and cosmopolitan city scarcely ninety miles from Miami. This glittering image spread to other Latin American centers, especially through films, reinforcing the growing popularity of Cuban music throughout Mexico, South America and the Caribbean.

      In the meantime, U.S. recording companies such as RCA Victor and Columbia began recording an unprecedented number of Cuban artists and groups, first bringing musicians to their studios in New York and later setting up recording facilities in Havana. Between 1925 and 1928 alone, hundreds of son, guaracha, and bolero compositions were recorded by such important groups as the Sexteto Boloña, the Sexteto Habanero, the Sexteto and Septeto Nacional, the Trio Matamoros, and María Teresa Vera. The number of artists and recordings increased throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950, and recordings were distributed not only throughout the Americas, but also in Europe and even Africa.¹⁹ Although these companies also recorded a number of other Latin American musical styles, many of these recordings received limited production and distribution runs, confined to specific “ethnic” series. Cuban artists, however, were placed both in specialized series and in the general mainstream catalog (Spottswood 1990). Recordings of Cuban music also entered the cities of Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Lima, Peru, on South America’s Pacific coast—brought by sailors traveling through the Panama Canal who docked regularly at these major ports. Local radio stations throughout Latin America featured these records, and in countries or regions situated on the Caribbean, Cuban radio could be picked up via shortwave radio sets. Since live-to-air musical broadcasts were a mainstay of Cuban radio programming, the nightly performances of groups such as the Sonora Matancera, Arcaño y sus Maravillas, the Orquesta Aragón, and Benny Moré were heard simultaneously by listeners not only in Havana, but also those in points as far-flung as San Juan, Veracruz, Panama City, Caracas, and Barranquilla.

      Concert tours and movie appearances strengthened the popularity of Cuban artists. Groups such as the Trio Matamoros visited several Latin American countries in tours that lasted months. Musical films in the 1940s and 1950s—most of them made in Mexico City—further increased the presence of Cuban musicians in Latin America. Stars such as Daniel Santos gained tremendous international popularity not only through live appearances but also through movie musicals such as El angel caido (1948). In the circular loop characteristic of twentieth-century mass popular culture, Cuban musicians were popularized through record promotion,