Cuban music of several styles [a network, not a tree]

Shannon Sims (text), Discovering Cuba, an Island of Music, NYTimes, Sept 29, 2019:

Just an hour’s flight from the United States, Cuba is drenched in music. You hear it everywhere, emanating from bars or homes or religious ceremonies. For many visitors, Cuban music is defined by the traditional sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club or Celia Cruz. But Cuban music stretches far beyond those sounds; its roots draw on Africa and Haiti, France and Spain. Genres come together and break apart, like flocks of starlings at dusk, endlessly forming new shapes and sounds.

In an effort to better understand Cuba through its music, Todd and I traveled east from the capital city of Havana toward Santiago de Cuba, in the southeast. For 12 days, past potholes and beach towns and rolling green hills, we went in search of Cuba’s musical roots. We waited in the rain for midnight shows, ran out to central plazas to hear local orchestras, and tried not to creak the floorboards during intimate recording sessions.

With enough time we could have included salsa, son, hip-hop and other genres, and stopped in other spots famous for music — like Pinar del Río or Baracoa.

A network of styles and influences, not a tree:

Cuban music is often described as a tree, with various primary roots that supply life for many branches. But separating the island’s music into distinct genres is an inherently flawed task — they intertwine and cross. And it’s become trickier in recent years: Styles shift with increasing speed as Cubans dive into the possibilities provided by the internet. Across the island, we met musicians taking traditional sounds and twisting them, and finding new ways to reach an audience. Cuban music is in turbo mode.

“I wish you luck in trying to describe Cuban music with words,” Claudio laughed at me as we headed home that night in Gibara, after a stop for a pork sandwich. “The way to know Cuban music is to hear it for yourself.”

Admittedly, this account is informal, but it is consistent with what I know of musical styles in complex modern societies.

One musician's story:

Cimafunk’s story is typical of the musicians who come to Havana to try and make it. He grew up in western Cuba singing in the church and intended to become a doctor. After moving to Havana in 2011, he quickly fell into the lifestyle of a struggling artist, washing cars during the day and sleeping on friends’ couches at night. “Sometimes I’d play music in the park from 8 at night until 6 in the morning and then sleep on the Malecón,” he told me with a laugh. In 2014 he finally landed a spot in Interactivo, and sang with them before forming his own band; he still joins them for jam sessions from time to time.

The response was almost immediate. The band’s 2017 album, Terapia, with celebratory songs like “Ponte Pa’ Lo Tuyo” and “Me Voy,” won the biggest music awards on the island. Ned Sublette, a musician and Cuban music scholar who leads music tours of the island, says Cimafunk had “the hit of the year in Havana” with “Me Voy”: “It was just an absolutely irresistible song and inescapable.”

The band found a global audience by streaming its music; it has been signed by a Miami record label, and Billboard named Cimafunk one of the “10 Latin Artists to Watch in 2019.” Music critics often compare Cimafunk to James Brown.

Cimafunk's advice:

To really discover Cuban music, he said, you need to head to the countryside. “In Havana you can see a lot of people from a lot of places in Cuba making interesting stuff, but what you miss are the roots.”

For example, Los Muñequitos (notice the children):

Moving on:

The core of rumba is the clave, an instrument that to an outsider looks like two wooden sticks about the width and length of carrots. But the clave, in the hands of rumba musicians like Los Muñequitos, becomes a through-line from Africa to Cuba, and acts as the maestro of rumba, setting the pace and the tone of all other instruments, like the maraca shaker, or the batá drum, a Yoruba drum that stands upright on the ground and is slapped on the top.

Other percussion elements are usually added into a rumba composition, and soon it becomes a crowd of sounds, almost like a cascade of beats. Because rumba is polyrhythmic, with multiple rhythms happening at the same time in one song, to an outsider it can sound cacophonous and disorganized. But if you let your mind give up trying to find the rhythm, you have a better chance of actually finding it.

And not only the rumba, the clave is at the core of a lot of Afro-Cuban music, if not quite all. That's the clave that enters at about 00:43, the first thing in addition to the vocal. That same rhythm is ubiquitous.

And so on for several more musical styes. There are photos and videos with the article (by Todd Heisler).