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Cuba and Its Music
Excerpt From
NED SUBLETTE:
Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press)
Arsenio Rodríguez started his own group in 1940. Rooted in his grandfather's Congo heritage and steeped in the multiple Afro-cultures of Matanzas province, he bridged the worlds of the jazzband and the son septet by adding to the septet a second trumpet (later he had three, then four trumpets) and a piano. They worked at places like the Edén Concert cabaret and the Sport Antillano dance academy. But there also became available a new venue, which had decided to admit blacks, partly in keeping with the Constitution of 1940, which forbade racial discrimination, and partly because it was good business: the Jardines de La Tropical, the big, lush beer garden on the banks of the Río Almendares. When Arsenio's band started to play at La Tropical, a whole new era started - the real golden age of black Cuban dance music.
Arsenio popularized the Cuban conjunto, the trumpet-driven rhythm group that later became the basic format of the salsa band. Arsenio wasn't the first in Cuba to call his group a conjunto (literally, "combined"); neither was Arsenio the first to add a piano to the son septet. But his conjunto established and defined the idea, and after Arsenio, conjuntos proliferated.
Two years previously, in 1938 - according to legend, it was at the suggestion of Mexican media monopolist Emilio Azcárraga, who thought the mariachi sound needed a more powerful timbre on the radio - bandleader Gaspar Vargas in Jalisco added trumpets to his Mariachi Vargas, redefining the sound of Mexican popular music. These Mexican conjuntos (they used the word) were being heard on Azcárraga's high-power clear-channel Mexican radio stations that were easily audible in Cuba, as well as appearing in Mexican movies, which had become the dominant Spanish-language cinema in Cuba. Whether the precedent of the Mexican trumpet conjunto directly influenced Arsenio in creating the Cuban trumpet conjunto I can't say, but it was popular and novel at the time, and it was in the air, even in Cuba. Arsenio, who definitely paid attention to what was going on, would have surely known about it.
Arsenio's first single was "El pirulero no vuelve más," a pregón which capitalized on his recent success as a composer for Casino de la Playa with another pregón, "Se va el caramelero." Following the new trend which he had helped establish with Casino de la Playa, the tune featured a ripping, percussive piano solo. To hear an exciting piano solo in the middle of a tune by a son group might seem normal now, but when Arsenio did it it was a shock.
The distinctive Cuban piano style, imitative of the tres in its use of octaves to outline sub-melodies within rhythmic arpeggios, found its expression in the playing of Arsenio's various pianists. The trumpet was no longer jamming by itself; now there were two trumpets who had to play together, necessitating arrangements, which Arsenio dictated to various of his band members. The fact that only four of the instruments (the trumpets, piano and bass) needed arrangements located the group midway between the no-charts looseness of the son septet and the arranged tightness of the Cuban jazzband.
Not only did Arsenio add the second trumpet and the piano to the son group: he introduced the conga -- apparently in 1942, though it might have been earlier. According to Eduardo Rosillo, the idea was not merely esthetic, but also practical:
Arsenio Rodríguez was blind. To get around he needed a helper, someone to take him places. That role was played to some degree by the musicians of this conjunto. But they were, like almost all musicians, bohemians, and they would go off to a fiesta and leave the blind man alone. Arsenio had a brother, whom he was very fond of - Kike - and whom he employed to help him get around, but the expenses that he incurred as a consequence came to about as much as Arsenio's share of the contract. Since the only thing Kike knew how to play was the conga, he put him on the payroll of the band, playing conga.
It might seem hard to think now that playing conga in a dance band could be daring, much less in Cuba. But the instrument had been the subject of prohibitions ever since its invention. Only now was it liberated. In the new, relatively relaxed environment, it was for the first time okay to play a tumbadora anywhere in public. This innovation happened in the early 1940s because it would have previously been illegal. Arsenio may not have been the first one to put a conga into a son group - there seem to have been isolated examples previously, and some jazzbands were already using the conga together with drum set and bongó - but he was the one who put it across, in his countless gigs at dance academies, social club events and the gardens of La Tropical. The jazzbands were using the instrument for added color; Arsenio made it the heartbeat of his band.
When the tres locked into a repeating rhythmic figure against the congas it had a new kind of physical power to it. The conga made Arsenio's rhythm heavier, slamming out more strongly the "2" and the "4" of the measure -- especially the "4." The anticipated bass was an essential tendency of the son, but when the congas, bass, tres and piano all anticipated the next chord together, hitting hard on the "4,", it was more dramatic, and pulled at the dancer harder.
Arsenio popularized the use of the campana (a big heavy cowbell). The campana, which became a standard instrument in conjuntos, redefined the role of the bongosero, who was previously the star of the son group. When Arsenio's band got to the montuno, the bongosero set down his bongó, picked up the campana, and whacked it with a thick stick at the mouth of the bell in a steady 1-2-3-4 (filling in the upbeats on the closed end of the bell, in a formula which respects the clave). It was an exciting sound: hard, loud and fat. It kicked the tune into the next gear and locked it down for the dancers. Arsenio didn't invent the idea; you can hear, for example, the bongosero switching to a campana on a Sexteto Nacional side recorded in 1930, with a lighter sound and without a tumbadora to keep the heartbeat going. But Arsenio made it a standard move.
Iron was a fundamental power element in the regions of Africa where black Cubans came from. No sacred drum ensemble was complete without an iron instrument. By adding the campana, Arsenio evoked the Abakuá bell called the ekón, and the implements of Zarabanda and Ogún, the blacksmith-sorcerers. The campana connected the piano more tightly to the rhythm, because its bell-like clang and percussive attack fused with the timbre of the dancehall piano. In Arsenio's "Sandunguera," composed by Luis Piedra and Marcelino Guerra, the pianist drops into bell-like quarter-note octaves on the piano to lock in with the cowbell. Listening to the recording today, you can still feel the thrill they were getting from making that new sound in 1943.
Arsenio made the first major changes in the son since Ignacio Piñeiro. His modification of the son septet was logical. He didn't add saxophones or a trap set. He added more of what was already there: more trumpet and more percussion. The piano reinforced what originally, back in the Congo, had been a part for thumb piano. Even the use of trumpets - whether Arsenio was conscious of it or not - echoed the Congo ensembles of Africa, which used multiple cattle-horn (or elephant-tusk, or wooden) trumpets. When a trumpeter or the pianist threw in a jazzy lick, it seemed to be something that had been absorbed into the son rather than being laid on top of it.
Arsenio's band signalled a new era of clave-consciousness in Cuban music. Arsenio's clave was at the same time deeply felt and almost an intellectual puzzle. Generally, Cuban musicians can tell at once where the clave is supposed to be with respect to a melody. But Arsenio forced people to think about the clave. Tresero Pancho Amat recalled an experience that he had listening to two of Arsenio's alumni, Félix Chappottín and Miguelito Cuní, at the Festival del Son in Guantánamo in 1979:
. . . there was someone in the audience that called out, "Hey, Cuní, sing such-and-such," asking for a number of Arsenio. I don't remember which one - something old, like a bolero-son. They had to go dig around in the trunk to find the chart and pass the papers around to the musicians. They hadn't played it for a long time . . . And Cuní was playing the clave. iCoño, when Cuní kicked it off I felt the clave was crossed. So I figured that of course I was the one who was crossed and the one who was right was Cuní. When they finished I said, "Coño, Cuní, you were playing the clave and if you had given it to me, I wouldn't have played it that way, I would have played it backwards from that, because I tend to get confused." He said, "No, you're not confused. That other clave is good. It's also good. What you don't know is that Arsenio sometimes made his tunes just to get people's goat [pa' chivar] . . ." [laughs] That sometimes Arsenio made his numbers to annoy people! Tunes that would work with the clave either way, to mess with peoples' heads . . .
Arsenio changed personnel frequently, but his sound was consistent. Since the jazzbands - or, more precisely, the venues where the jazzbands worked -- discriminated against black musicians, he had plenty of talent available. A number of singers worked with Arsenio, notably Miguelito Cuní (from Pinar del Río) and Marcelino Guerra (from Cienfuegos), and briefly René Álvarez, but the sonero most associated with Arsenio's sound was his cousin René Scull, who sang lead on many of his most famous recordings. The vocal sound of Arsenio's group, which changed little over his three decades as a bandleader, seems archaic to modern ears, because it comes from the last generation of pre-microphone singers. The vocal tone is stentorian and full, generally harmonizing in thirds, with long vowels and plenty of vibrato.
The tunes, ranging from sones to boleros to a fast conga-heavy style Arsenio called son guaguancó, were never simple. Arsenio's group was profoundly rhythmic, but they did not play rhythmic novelties. He had a great sentimental streak, and he wrote tremendous boleros; but more commonly, his tunes were salutes to one or another barrio, Afro-nationalist patriotic themes, barrio catchphrases, or cryptic bits of palero lore.
Neither the conjunto nor the charanga is particularly easy to record, and with the limited equipment of the day, it is no wonder that the recordings sound as poor as they do. Both formats suffered from piercing, high mid-range frequencies (the trumpets in the conjunto, the wooden flute in the charanga) that overloaded the equipment when they hit a particularly penetrating note. The percussion had to be kept far enough back from the single mike so that it wouldn't overpower, with the result that neither the low-end meat of the instruments nor the sharpness of the strike tones were captured; the congas and bongó instead registered as a dullish thud. It requires some imagination, then, when listening to Arsenio's recordings from the 1940s, to imagine what the groups really sounded like. The recordings sound thin and tinny. The groups didn't sound that way live.
In 1942 Arsenio had a big hit. Its name was "Como traigo la yuca," but everybody knew it by the first three words of its chorus: "Dile a Catalina." By then the appearances of Arsenio Rodríguez and his Conjunto Todos Estrellas on the daily radio program Ritmos cubanos were attracting crowds to their dances . . .
© 2004 Ned Sublette
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