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Book Review: Cuba and its Music
Cuba and its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo
Ned Sublette
Chicago Review Press, 2004
Reviewed by Banning Eyre
The hullabaloo the Buena Vista Social Club crew managed to stir up over romantic, old Cuban songs is only the most recent swoon in the long, red-hot musical love affair between America and Cuba. American music has been repeatedly altered by Cuban influences for the better part of a century, and one can argue that such fundamentally American genres as jazz and rock 'n roll could never have evolved as they did without the input of ideas taken directly from Cuban music. Of course, to make that argument, you'd need to marshal a set of facts that, according to Ned Sublette, has never been assembled in a single, English language volume. Although it is but the first of a two-volume set, Cuba and its Music, From the First Drums to the Mambo goes a long way toward filling that void. And it does so in vivid, highly readable prose that transforms centuries of history affecting this singularly important island nation into a compelling narrative, at its best, a real page-turner.
Sublette reaches back to ancient African empires, and to fateful cultural encounters in present day Spain and Portugal, even before the arrival of Muslim conquerors in 711. In his expansive vision, the decadence and vitality of Cadiz under the Romans foreshadow later life in Havana; both are places where African and European cultures mingle excitedly, to a significant extent untrammeled by oppressive church and state. In 600 pages, Sublette reaches only up to 1952, the heyday of the Benny More and the mambo craze. Fidel Castro is still an upstart political lawyer, starting to gain notoriety for his radio diatribes, but still seven years from the start of his seemingly endless presidency. Ricky Ricardo and his band are being introduced to Americans on a brand new television show called I Love Lucy. The BVSC musicians are still in their prime--not yet forgotten, and decades from being rediscovered--and the "salsa" music we've all grown up with is just taking shape. In other words what most people think of as the history of Cuban music is only beginning as this volume's amazing, multi-continental journey concludes abruptly with the promise: "To be continued…"
This is a work of radical obsession, driven by a profound love of Cuban music, but also by laudable urges to pull together parallel histories, challenge pat and lazy historical truisms, and fill in long-ignored gaps in our cultural narrative. The result is that Cuba emerges in its glorious complexity as never before, its connections to old world civilizations and new world trends explored and detailed rigorously. The reader is gradually persuaded that Cuba may well be the most significant and influential cultural crossroads in the New World.
Like all great books about popular music, this is really a story about religion, history, politics, cultural dynamics, and larger than life personalities. In between gay Cadiz and Benny More, we examine the spread of Islam, noting how the Spanish hatred of the religion led to a concentration of non-Muslim Africans in Cuba, one of many little-known contrasts with the situation in the United States, where many, and in some areas most, African slaves arrived praying to Allah. We learn a great deal about the workings of the slave trade, and as the Cuban colony begins to take shape, we learn about the exchange of culture and ideas between Havana and Spain, notably Seville. It doesn't take long before the old country starts looking to the colony for inspiration and ideas, as in the case of the sarabande, a European "classical" dance and music that Sublette traces to Zarabanda, the Congo god of iron, rendered as music in Cuba, then exported to Spain, "through the servant's entrance, of course." Later on, we learn about the fertile interplay of musical life in Havana and New Orleans, and then Havana and New York. (New York, it will surprise many to read, grew larger than Havana only in 1810.) As we come into the 20th century, Cuba whispers into the ear of Scott Joplin, kick-starting the evolution of jazz. From this point on, we appreciate as never before the transformational role of Cuban music in the first half of the 20th century, rocket fueled by its own growing incorporation of African percussion music, which actually developed, rather than declined, in Cuba.
Probably this big book's greatest contribution is its clear-eyed, patient, and probing examination of specific African cultures that have thrived in Cuba. There is a tendency to boil African stories in the New World down to nonsensical oversimplifications, but Sublette gives them full play here. He insists, for example, that "you simply cannot understand Cuban music" without familiarizing yourself with the Yoruba deities known as Orishas, whose names, themes, music and attitudes are prevalent in the music, and in the lives of its creators. Congolese Africans and those from Caledonia, source of the secretive, cultish Abakwa religion, get equally thorough consideration. Sublette clarifies the role of Africans in Cuba's long struggle for independence. No surprise, the contributions of black fighters and thinkers alike have been consistently understated or ignored.
Much of the overall Cuban story hinges on the fact that distinct African cultures--including religion, language, and music--survived in Cuba, sometimes distilled into singularly potent strains. In America, we speculate about African retentions in the blues, but no such surmise is necessary in examining Cuban forms. The sources are frequently self-evident. Sublette cites three main reasons for this: 1) sugar cultivation in Cuba literally killed slaves, requiring that new ones be brought from Africa all the time, 2) slaves could become free men and women in Cuba, again resulting in new Africans being imported to take their places, and 3) African slaves started coming to Cuba early, and kept coming "for crucial decades longer than their counterparts in the United States."
With his cultural and political stage fully set in place, Sublette takes us through the emergence of rumba (percussion and dance music that started as a violent, at times fatal, form of competitive fighting among dockworkers), tango (related to, but not the same as the Argentine variety), danzon (the elegant dance genre of the late 19th century), son (an important doorway through which African percussion music entered the urbane, orchestral music popular in Havana), also habanero, charanga, bolero, mambo, and much more. In every instance, Sublette takes the time to fill out and contextualize the story, bringing to bear both his passion and musical insight and his extensive, far flung research. In the end, for all its ambition, this is not so much the work of a diligent scholar as a stubbornly curious fan, unsatisfied with incomplete or half-baked explanations, driven to source after source because nothing short of a crystal clear picture will satisfy him. Sublette's addiction to detail and completeness might weigh his work down, but largely thanks to his irrepressible enthusiasm, it does not.
Sublette is a musician himself, and quite capable of explaining rhythmic and melodic concepts in technical terms, illustrated in notated examples. He does so judiciously, enough to clarify things for the musically literate, but not so much as to exclude the layman. As we come into the 1940s and 50s, we meed a lot of bandleaders and politicians, but Sublette wisely chooses to bring the important ones into vivid focus, even at the risk of leaving some out. His description of Dizzy Gillespie's growing infatuation with Cuban music, and the effect it had on the American jazz scene, is particularly edifying. Crucial Cuban figures like Arsenio Rodriguez, Chano Pozo, Mario Bauza, and Benny More emerge both as innovators and personalities. There is a vast amount of information here, but Sublette consistently finds ways to dramatize events and characters, preserving narrative momentum through a blizzard of names and dates.
Sublette concedes in his preface that his book may give readers more than they wanted to know, but if it does, he writes, "I'll be happy, because for years books on this subject told me less than I wanted to know." So if you really love Cuban music, take a deep breath, put aside your preconceptions about the subject, and join Sublette on his remarkable journey. There is much to chew on in these pages, and if you are one-tenth as serious a fan as he is, you will return to them often, and you'll reach the final one eager for volume two. To be continued…
Contributed by: Banning Eyre
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