Eddie Palmieri on Cuban music
“There is no other rhythm on the planet that excites me like the structures that came out of Cuba. I learned them intuitively and then I learned them scientifically.”
– Eddie Palmieri
Abakuá
Recommended resource: Ivor Miller’s Youtube channel
At the root of Cuban music is the culture Africans created to adapt, survive and thrive in the brutal circumstances they found themselves in the New World.
One of these Afro-Cuban spiritual systems is Abakuá.
Like everything African and Afro-Cuban, it’s not just music, it’s not just dance, it’s not just a religious service.
This event was filmed in 2008 on Epiphany which is twelve days after Christmas and marks the start of Carnival season. Traditionally, it’s the day the Three Kings paid a visit on newborn Jesus.
On this day, enslaved Africans were permitted to openly celebrate and parade.
Needless to say, their celebration had and has nothing to do with the Christian church.
What is Abakuá?
First, of all it is a living tradition. Though it is sometimes referred to and treated as “folkloric” this designation is a great understatement.
Abakuá is a men’s secret society founded in the port districts of Havana and Matanzas and found nowhere else in the Americas.
It has a direct connection to the Egbo (or Ekpe) leopard society that operated as a form of government in the area now in western Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria.
We went into this history in some detail here previously.
In Cuba, Abakuá has a elaborate and abundant repertoire of stories, songs, costumes, and drums and even its own pictographic writing system and language understood only by initiated members.
Abakuá’s existence was first recorded in 1836 as the importation of kidnapped Africans was accelerating to accommodate the exploding needs of the rapacious sugar industry.
Ivor Miller, who you can learn more about at the link above and appears in the last video below, estimated in the year 2000 that there were 117 Abakuá societies active in Cuba with approximately 20,000 initiated members total.
Militant, defiant, proud and taking no s*** from anybody, in Cuba the Abakuá were about self-preservation via mutual aid and protected their operations and culture with a secrecy that is still impenetrable to outsiders
Not unlike the Sicilian Mafia, the Abakuá controlled one of the roughest places in Cuba (or any country): the docks and as we mentioned in a previous post Cuba’s docks gave birth to rumba.
Quoting New Sublette from “Cuba and Its Music”:
“In those same warehouses worked many rumberos, dancers, drummers, and singers.
Most of the hardest-core rumberos of Matanazas, Havana, and Cádenas were and are Abakuá…
Abakuá-themed material has always been part of the repertoire of rumba. Certain Abakuá dance moves show up in rumba dancing, like the shimmy the male dancer does, reminiscent of the diablito shaking his hips to rattle his string of bells.”
Here’s a short film of an Abakuá performance staged for documentation made in 1962 by Bernabé Hernández and presented by El Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematografico.
Here’s a short video made in Havana in 2016 documenting an Abakuá event hosted by Reinaldo Brito del Valle of the Uriabón Efí lodge of Havana.
Brito, born in 1930, is the composer of many rumbas, including “El Niño Rey” and “Protesta Carabalí”. The video was directed by Mayckell Pedrero and includes an appearance by the scholar Ivor Miller.
Recommended resource: Ivor Miller’s Youtube channel
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
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Los Muñequitos De Matanzas
We’ve been focusing on the golden age of Cuban big bands which means we’ve looked at Cuban musicians who left Cuba and “colonized” places like Mexico City and New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.
It makes sense because, after all, Jazz on the Tube is a jazz site.
Also, as for every subject, there are certain foundational musicians you just have to know.
In a world as rich as Cuban music, we haven’t cover them all, but we’ve made a start.
But now we’re going to focus on Cuba and Cuba today.
Introducing Los Muñequitos de Matanzas…
This video introduces us to a number of important topics:
Rumba – Not to be confused with the popular American dance rhumba
Matanzas – An historically important cultural center of Cuba, sixty-three miles east of Havana by car. It’s been called “The Athens of Cuba.”
Los Muñequitos De Matanzas – One of the great rumba groups of Cuba which has been recording continuously since 1956.
The group is actually a full blown cultural institution as this video shows. It not only performs and records, it also has an active education and training program for young people.
Congahead – This particular video came from the YouTube channel of Latin Percussion, the world’s leading maker of Latin percussion instruments. It is a treasure trove of content.
The roots of rumba
It’s often said that “rumba” means “party.” Robert Farris Thompson says it comes from a verb meaning to “to work it.” I think Thompson’s definition is much closer to the mark.
Rumba is singing, drumming and dancing. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “rhumba” style of ballroom dancing that was invented to cash in on the Cuban music craze of the 1920 and 30s.
Rumba was developed by the dock workers of Havana and Matanzas.
In our age of container shipping, forklifts and modern cranes, it’s easy to forget that until fairly recently everything shipped had to be personally hauled by a human being. This created a huge work force of dockworkers all over the world (now massively reduced by the modern technology.)
In the long slavery era, this work was done in Cuba by enslaved people from Africa. As best as we understand, the rumba was created in the mid 19th century when Cuba was experiencing a particularly virulent form of slavery built around the brutal sugar trade. Mantazas was one of the main centers of this trade.
Who are Los Muñequitos De Matanzas?
Like all great art, you’ll get far more from Los Muñequitos by experiencing them than from hearing someone talk about them, but they do have a fascinating history.
Muñequitos means “little dolls” but it can also mean comic book superheroes and that’s the meaning behind the group’s name .
We pinched this from wikipedia because it tells the story of the groups origins so well.
On October 9, 1952 in the barrio of La Marina, city of Matanzas, Cuba, a group of young rumberos stopped off at their local tavern El Gallo after work. While unwinding over drinks, a song by Arsenio Rodríguez came on the bar’s record player. The drummers began accompanying the song by playing on the counter, on glasses and bottles, using whatever items were at hand. Their performance so impressed the other customers, as well as passers-by, that the men received applause when the song and their accompaniment concluded. It was at that moment when one of the men suggested they form a rumba group to perform at local venues. It was agreed and the rumberos walked over to the house of singer and composer Florencio Calle “Catalino” to enlist his help. After hearing the men’s proposition Catalino told them to return the next day to discuss the matter.
At the meeting the following day, Grupo Guaguancó Matancero was formed. The men agreed that the group would perform rumba and each member would be responsible for bringing his own respective instrument. The original members of Guaguancó Matancero were Florencio Calle “Catalino” (director, guagua), Esteban Lantri “Saldiguera” (vocalist), Juan Bosco (vocalist, claves), Hortensio Alfonso “Virulilla” (vocalist, maraca), Gregorio Díaz “Goyo” (tumba or salidor), Pablo Mesa “Papi” (segundo or tres dos) and Angel Pellado “Pelladito” (quinto). Later that year the great batalero (‘batá drummer’) and quintero (‘quinto drummer’) Esteban Vega “Chachá” joined the group.
Although the members were all genuine “street” rumberos, they began performing on stage from the group’s inception. Saldiguera and Virulilla who had sung in son septetos (‘septets’), brought that genre’s style of harmony singing to the group. The percussion was of a very high quality, with the drums carrying on “conversations” of unprecedented inventiveness and virtuosity. The drums were tuned much lower back then, sounding like funky bass lines, with the rhythmically elusive singing “floating” on top. Initially, the group only performed guaguancó, but in ensuing years they interpreted yambú, columbia and abakuá as well.
If you’re curious about the little girl – and who wouldn’t be? – she was four years old at the time of this filming and is a family member of one of the group’s founding members.
Will Afro-Cuban culture will survive in Cuba? She is a partial answer.
When touring western Cuba with Ned Sublette in March of 2016, we got to see Los Muñequitos perform in their home town, on their home street, right in front of their school.
It was pure magic and if that had been the only thing that happened on the trip, the whole trip would have been worthwhile.
The very first short segment of this “highlights reel” clip shows members of the dance school performing that evening.
Archival footage of Los Muñequitos
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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A night at the Palladium Ballroom
The clip starts out with the recollections of two Palladium Ballroom dancers. Then we go into a short film made about the place in 1955.
Some perspective for younger people:
1. Film was still an expensive and unwieldy technology back in the 1950s so rough as this footage is, it’s great someone made this film of the place in its prime.
2. If everyone looks overly dressed up, this is how people put themselves together in those days when they went out. The jeans and t-shirt, ditch-digger-on-a-break look was still a decade away.
What was the Palladium Ballroom?
Like CBGBs for punk rock and the Birdland for bebop, the Palladium was THE place for Latin music in New York City in the 1950s.
It was a second-floor dance hall at the corner of 53rd Street and it was huge. It could fit one thousand dancing couples.
How it started
Latin orchestras shared the bill with mainstream jazz orchestras throughout New York City in the 40s and 50s, but “Latin” places were all uptown in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
In 1948, event promoter Federico Pagani approached the Palladium’s owners Max and Helen Hyman with an idea to bring new energy to the place which at that point was in commercial decline.
The idea was a Sunday matinee featuring Latin music exclusively. At that time, this was the first club to try this “downtown.”
From the opening night, it was a huge success with dancers, but there was an initial glitch. Max Hyman was worried about the number of black and Latino dancers who were showing up.
While New York did not have the same kind of Jim Crow laws of the south, there was an informal segregation especially downtown.
Pagani reportedly said to Hyman words to the effect: “What do you care more about black or green?”
Hyman chose the green and New York City’s (perhaps America’s) fully first integrated dance hall came into being and Latin music took over the Palladium seven days a week.
What it was like
The music was non-stop and off-the-hook starting with the orchestras of the “Big Three”: Machito, Tito Rodríguez, and Tito Puente.
Arsenio Rodríguez performed there as did Celia Cruz, Beny Moré, Pérez Prado, La Lupe, and countless others.
Mass dance classes were given to the crowds that attended.
Jazz cats loved the place and sometimes sat in with the featured bands.
A short list of those seen there: Dizzy Gillespie, George Shearing, Cal Tjader, Buddy Rich, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Krupa, Dave Brubeck. Paul Desmond and Joe Morello.
Celebrities loved it too: Marlon Brando, who occasionally sat in on bongos; Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, George Hamilton and Jerry Lewis.
The only people who didn’t like it were the top brass at the NYPD who, in their role as the scourge of black culture in NYC, harassed the place constantly.
A huge drug raid in 1961 led to the Palladium losing its liquor license, a financially crippling blow. That and cultural shifts brought in by rock and roll led the its closing in 1966.
The feature length film, The Mambo Kings, recreates the Palladium’s golden years Hollywood style.
Bronx-born Orlando Marin, a Palladium orchestra leader still performs regularly in the New York City area. If you get a chance to see him, do not miss it.
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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Machito and his Afro-Cuban Orchestra
Where and when he was be born isn’t clear. Some scholars say he was born in Tampa. Others day Havana. Some put the year at 1909, others say 1912. Still others day 1915.
What isn’t a mystery is that he was raised in the Jesús María district of Havana and his foster sister Graciela (featured below) was born August 23, 1915.
What also isn’t a mystery is the impact he and his band had on world music.
Like so many accomplished musicians of that era, Machito moved to New York City (in his case in 1937) to take advantage of the opportunities in the Big Apple.
In 1940, he started his own orchestra The Afro-Cubans, one of the most important units in jazz and Cuban music history.
First, the band’s name: The Afro-Cubans.
This was a radical name for the time.
From a perspective, the term “Afro-American” was not accepted as common usage by the New York Times until 1990. So Machito and his musicians were fifty years ahead of the social curve.
Racism and the accompanying failure to acknowledge the power and virtue of African culture was as common and virulent in the Cuba of the 1930s as it was in the US.
Calling his band The Afro-Cubans was the 1940 equivalent of “We’re black and we’re proud” at a time when making such statements were rare at best and dangerous as worst.
Second, Machito’s orchestra was extraordinary by every conceivable standard and moved the art forward not only for Cuban music but for American jazz as well.
Though Dizzy Gillespie is rightly credited with helping the cause of Latin music in the US jazz world, “Manteca” wasn’t recorded until 1947 and New York City jazz musicians had been digging Machito’s music for years by then.
Also, the introduction of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo was made by another giant of Cuban music, the incomparable Mario Bauzá who was Machito’s musical partner and music director.
We’re just scratching the surface here (as we do with all these brief profiles.)
Start with these clips and dig deeper with your own research and you’ll surely be richly rewarded.
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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Benny Moré
So many great musicians, so little time.
Are you getting the sense that Cuba has produced a lot of great musicians?
Keep in mind that in this series we’re only able to show the tip of the tip of the iceberg and we’re still nowhere near covering all the ABCs.
Today we focus on the incomparable Benny Moré: singer, bandleader, composer.
Let’s start with the end: When Moré passed away at the too-early age of 43 in 1963 in Havana, over 100,000 fans attended his funeral.
Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré started life in a rural town in central Cuba. Family lore says his maternal great-great grandfather was the son of the king of a Congo tribe.
At 17, he cut sugar cane and sold fruit and medicinal herbs and used his earnings to buy his first real guitar.
Rising slowly up the show business ladder in Havana, a gig brought him to Mexico City where he changed his name to “Benny” and decide to stay awhile. In time he hooked up with Pérez Prado and appeared on 22 recordings as the singer for Prado’s orchestra.
As we’ve pointed out in the bio of Prado those were heady, prosperous days for Cuban musicians in Mexico City which in addition to being a big market unto itself was an ideal launching pad into the greater Latin American music market.
In 1952, after establishing his fame throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, Moré returned home to Cuba where, surprisingly, he was not well known. Radio appearance and public performances helped change that.
When Moré put together his legendary Banda Gigante (Big Band) it was a near-instant hit. It was so popular that in addition to playing to sold out crowds throughout Cuba, he toured Latin America and the US where the band was invited to play at the Oscars. At home in Havana, the band dominated two of the city’s key music spots: La Tropical and El Sierra.
Though he never learned to read or write music, Moré was able to convey what he wanted to his arrangers by singing the parts to them.
After the Revolution, Moré unwilling to leave “mi gente” (my people), remained in Cuba until his death in 1963.
Note: There are a wide variety of opinions as to who the piano player is in this clip. If anyone knows for sure (fact, not opinion please), we’d love to know and will publish it here.
Playlist:
1. “Me Voy Pa’ Moron”
2. “Bemberen”
3. “Tuñare”
4. “El Baile del Sillon”
5. “Montura y Caballo”
6. “Cienfuegos”
7. “Baila Mi Son”
8. “Bonito y Sabrosa”
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Thelonious Monk