The bolero has been the most popular genre of Cuban music in Cuba itself and in the rest of Latin America. Mexicans particularly have an affinity for it. Boleros are romantic songs, performed with smooth intensity by mostly male performers. In most instances melody trumps rhythm, and the musical arrangements tend to be lush. The main public for this type of music in Latin America has always been women, with a significant cohort of gay men.21 Paradoxically, this type of Cuban ballad has not especially resonated with African audiences. African listeners have preferred to embrace the term and the concept (languorous beats, romantic lyrics) rather than the genre itself. A well-paced evening of Latin dancing at a social gathering always includes slow ballads, which Africans, following practice elsewhere, label boleros, even if these numbers are stylistically far from the original Cuban model.22 A number of factors account for Africans’ relative lack of interest in this variety of Cuban music. Classic Cuban boleros usually lack an obvious African tinge.23 Moreover, French music has its own tradition of sentimental love songs. From the 1930s through the 1960s such French performers as the Corsican Tino Rossi (1907–1983) were beloved in Africa.24 The Cuban bolero was not sufficiently different from the French romantic song to wean African audiences away from a musical tradition that already had entranced them. Perhaps the emphatic feminine orientation of bolero also made young African men uncomfortable before the sexual revolution of the1960s. Even as African tastes have shifted in the last twenty years, African audiences of Cuban music have yet to explore this deep well of Cubanidad.25
A greater number of African listeners have been attracted to rural Cuban genres like tonados and puntos. Cubans associate these cultural forms with the peasants and small ranchers of the Cuban interior, los guajiros, who have been mostly descendants of migrants from Spain. Guajira musicians like the guitarist, tresero, and singer Eliades Ochoa like to stress their rural background, sometimes wearing the Cuban equivalent of cowboy hats.26 The unadorned but powerful style of guajira singers like Guillermo Portabales appealed to African sensibilities much more than the exaggerated fervor of bolero crooners.27 The instrumentation of a typical guajiro group, with guitar, tres, bongos, and sometimes a bass, combined for many Africans listeners the best of African and European musical traditions. “Guantanamera,” the most famous guajira song, became an anthem of African Latin musicians as early as the 1960s and is still extensively performed.28 While in Cuba guajiro music resonates with nostalgia for an idyllic rural past, in Senegal it has been associated it with elegance and urbanity. Indeed, guajiro rhythms have become one of the bedrocks of Senegalese salsa and remain extremely popular today.29
Son is the most expansive of all Afro-Cuban musical genres. Musicians have found it malleable and easy to combine with foreign music like jazz. It also has worked well in a wide array of musical settings, from guitar trios to small ensembles to large brass orchestras. An intricate interweaving of African rhythms and vocal styles with European melodies and harmonies, son is a celebrated example of méttisage. The Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, who was among the genre’s first champions, described it as “Cuban counterpoint” and argued that it was a perfect metaphor for Cuban history and culture.30 In a similar vein, the ethnomusicologist Robin Moore pointed out that son was able to link “the culture of the Afrocuban underclasses with that of mainstream society … [widening] the syncretic sphere mediating between realms of African- and Iberian-derived culture.”31 This adaptability and cultural inclusiveness enabled son to have the greatest international impact of all Cuban musical forms.
Arriving at a definition of the son form is difficult because of its protean nature. However, Moore has successfully managed to describe its main elements. According to him, a basic son piece has seven musical characteristics. It is in duple meter and employs simple European-derived harmonic patterns (I-V-I-IV-V). It alternates between verse and chorus sections, and it usually contains short instrumental segments, often played on either a tres or trumpet. The three most distinctive features of the son are the use of African-type percussion instruments, the montuno section, and the clave. From the time of the earliest son conjuntos, ensembles used bongo drums to provide propulsive syncopation. Though there doesn’t seem to be any African antecedent for the two small high-pitched drums that make up bongos, black Cuban musicians played them in a style derived directly from African drumming traditions.32 The montuno is the final section of a son, in which the accompanying musicians start playing at a brisker tempo, and the chorus and the sonero take turns rapidly singing strongly rhythmic improvisations. The clave is the heart of the son. Musicians playing in clave emphasize the fourth beat of the 4/4 measure more strongly than the first and lay down a unique bass rhythm, emphasizing the “and-of-2” (the upbeat falling between beats 2 and 3) and “4,” which is generally described as an “anticipated bass.”33
Son emerged as a cultural form sometime in the nineteenth century in eastern Cuba. Its early history remains obscure. By the first decades of the twentieth century it began to spread to other parts of Cuba, including Havana. Dislocations in the sugar economy in the last part of the nineteenth century and political turmoil spurred the migration of rural black Cubans from the eastern end of the island to the capital. In their new home the migrants introduced their Havana neighbors to the music from their part of Cuba. Isabelle Leymarie, a French writer on Cuban music, suggests that the shifting of Cuban troops in 1909 by then president José M. Gómez was another factor in the diffusion of this regional musical form. Afraid of a coup, Gómez switched the companies stationed in Havana and Oriente (Eastern Cuba). Some of the soldiers who had been garrisoned in Oriente played son; once in Havana, they introduced their music to a whole new audience.34 Initially, the only audience for son music was the poor people living in the roughest Havana barrios. Gradually, however, it gained acceptance from other Cuban social classes and enlarged its listenership. The advent of recording in the first decades of the twentieth century and the rapid growth of Cuban radio in the 1920s were crucial to bringing son to groups who otherwise never would have been exposed to it on a regular basis. By the 1930s it had become one of the national musics of Cuba.
Son’s success in serving as an artistic bridge between black and white Cubans helps explain some of its appeal to Africans in the 1920s and 1930s. They, too, were trying to reconcile the universalist ethos of the colonial European regimes with their more locally based cultures. Just as significantly, by the 1920s son music had become a sign of modernity in avant-garde circles, first in Havana and then in Europe. Though many in the United States have regarded Afro-Cuban music as an inconsequential folkloric style, produced by marginalized Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean, by the late 1920s increasing numbers of European listeners regarded son music as an important art form, on the same level as other distinguished types of popular music like jazz. In 1929, for example, one of the first famous son groups, Septeto Nacional, won a major prize for a performance at the Exposición Ibero-Americana in Seville, Spain. This European embracing of son music as a prestigious cultural form was not only gratifying for black Cubans. Many Africans also took pride in an Africanized modern form of cultural expression’s being equated in the colonial metropole with sophistication and advanced artistic taste.
However, the attraction of son went beyond its lofty role as a mediator between civilizations. The structure of a son piece resembled many African musical traditions, and the montuno, with its improvised call and response between a chorus and a leader, has counterparts in many types of African musical expression. The rhythms of sons also encouraged dance styles compatible with African practice. The clave encouraged the shifting of weight from one leg to another in such a way as to generate a gentle swaying of the hips. While in many African dance traditions hip movements are more accentuated, the dance styles associated with son music clearly had their origins in Africa, not Europe. Because of such shared cultural characteristics, according to the Malian/Nigerien flutist Boncana Maïga, son music provided a mirror for Africans and gave them the aesthetic jolt of hearing familiar rhythms from a new perspective.35 Hearing and dancing to this music that straddled Europe and Africa became a pleasurable way to be at home in the modern world.
On first hearing it, one would think that danzón, the fifth Cuban popular music genre, would hold little interest for African listeners.