Sounds of the Caribbean
Here's How to Bring the Best of Latin Music into
Your Home
by Larry Rother
On a torrid Friday night in Havana, a 14-piece
band plays brassy salsa riffs as sweaty but elegantly dressed couples
show off their trickiest moves on a concrete basketball court turned
dance floor. At Carnival time in Port-au-Prince, nearly a million
Haitians parade in the streets, singing and drinking throat-burning
clairin as they sway along behind gaudy floats and
horn-and-percussion ensembles pumping out scratchy ra-ra music. In
Kingston, the birthday of the late Bob Marley is marked with a
memorial concert that sends the thick, liquid rhythms of Jamaican
reggae echoing through a downtown park crowded with dreadlocked
Rastafarians.
When it comes to quality exports from the Caribbean, music ranks with
tobacco, sugar and coffee. Geographically, the region may be a string
of small islands with tangled colonial pasts, divided by culture and
language. But in musical terms, the Caribbean is a fertile superpower
that for decade after decade has captivated the rest of the world with
one irresistible rhythm after another: mambo, rhumba, cha-cha-cha and
calypso earlier on, and then, more recently, salsa, reggae, merengue,
soca and zouk.
Good music, in other words, is as essential a part of the Caribbean
experience as a fine cigar or a glass of rum. But for the outsider,
where is the best place to start? As with cigars, so with music:
Cuba's best is the very pinnacle of Caribbean music. The clave, the
one-two-three/one-two or one-two/one-two-three beat that is the heart
of modern tropical music, was born here a century ago, the mulatto
child of Spain and Africa, and spread to neighboring islands with the
advent of radio and recordings to become almost as universal as the
blues.
Today, the commercial center of Caribbean music may have shifted to
San Juan, New York and Miami, where singers such as Gloria Estefan, La
India, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Jerry Rivera and Willy Chirino reign
supreme. But for Cubans on the island, where the tradition of artistic
innovation and experimentation for its own sake remains strong, the
principal vehicle of musical expression is still the ensemble--the
larger and more polished, the better.
Some of those bands, such as Orquestra Aragón and Orquestra
Riverside, were founded long before Fidel Castro took power in 1959,
and in some cases have even outlived their founders. Others, such as
Los Van Van, Irakere, NG La Banda and Orquestra Original de
Manzanillo, are products of the Revolutionary era and the economic
policies of a socialist state, which at one time could afford the high
cost of maintaining a large ensemble, including the musicians'
salaries.
Structurally, these orchestras are reminiscent of the American big
band era, with up to 15 musicians and singers in a group. Almost
always there is a large horn section (saxophones, trumpets and
trombones), as well as several violin and percussion players,
vocalists, a guitarist and a keyboard player. But that's where the
resemblance ends: A contemporary Cuban dance band swings harder and
more rhythmically than Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller could ever have
imagined. Think of a jet-fueled Indianapolis 500 race car compared to
a Model-T Ford.
This is music that begs--or better yet, compels--the listener to get
up and move. Even though Cuban bands still can't perform in the United
States, and it remains illegal for most Americans to travel to Cuba,
several American record companies have released compilations,
available in any good, big-city record store, that are designed as an
introduction to Cuba's finest groups. The two-volume set Cuban
Gold features more than a dozen bands, while Cuban Dance
Party and A Carnival of Cuban Music include both
contemporary and classic, pre-Revolutionary orchestras. Dancing
with the Enemy also offers an excellent general survey for the
beginner.
But most connoisseurs of Cuban music agree enthusiastically that the
title of the island's top dance band belongs to Los Van Van, founded a
quarter of a century ago by bass player Juan Formell and powered for
many years by the extraordinary percussionist José Luis
"Changuito" Quintana. In the United States, the Grateful Dead and
Bruce Springsteen are famous for long shows that build to an
exhausting climax. But for sheer giddiness and sweat in a live
setting, there's nothing quite like an all-night bailable, or
dance concert, featuring Los Van Van.
For many years, Americans could only sense the prowess of Los Van
Van thirdhand: Many of the group's most torrid riffs were simply
lifted off recordings and recycled, without credit or acknowledgment,
by some of the best-known salsa performers in Miami, New York and San
Juan. But recordings of Los Van Van have begun appearing in the United
States in recent years, and the group is finally getting the
recognition it deserves. A good starting point is Dancing Wet,
which builds to a blistering finale, a 12 1/2-minute live version of
"Aqui El Que Baila Gana," or "Here He Who Dances Wins," the theme song
for a dance contest program on Cuban television.
Los Van Van's latest American release is a live recording that
attempts to transfer to disc some of the passion of the band's
concerts. Called Lo Ultimo En Vivo, it features a revamped
version of the group, with Changuito absent but the beat as strong as
ever. "The years pass and we keep on going," the group proudly
proclaims on the opening track, "What's Los Van Van Got?" "Los Van Van
have the essence of Cubanness that you want." Truer words have never
been spoken, but if you're still hungry for more of this heady brew,
you might turn to Songo, a compilation of Los Van Van's
best-known numbers, recorded with the band's classic lineup in the
late 1980s.
None of the great dance bands that have dominated Cuban music in
recent years have evolved in a vacuum, however. Their songs are
studded with admiring references to their predecessors--great
pre-Revolutionary singers such as Celia Cruz, Beny Moré and
Arsenio Rodríguez. Reincarnated as the "queen of salsa," Cruz,
possessor of one of the most penetrating voices ever put down on disc,
is alive and well, performing and recording throughout the United
States and Latin America. She even appears on the soundtrack of the
1991 film The Mambo Kings, but her groundbreaking work was done
back in the 1950s, and can be best heard on records such as Celia
Cruz con la Sonora Matancera.
Beny Moré and Arsenio Rodríguez, on the other hand, have
been dead for more than 20 years. But two American record labels
recently revived and repackaged some of their best work, as well as
that of contemporaries like Tito Puente, Pérez Prado, Machito
and Miguelito Valdés. RCA's "Tropical" series and Tumbao
Records' "Cuban Classic" series have different strengths: The RCA
collection sounds better, having been digitally remastered, but the
Tumbao series is more informative, with each disc being accompanied by
an essay on the artist. With both series running to more than 50
discs, it's hard to single out an individual recording, but a good
starting point might be Moré's The Most from Beny
Moré and Rodríguez's Como Se Goza en el
Barrio.
Among the more than one million Cubans and Cuban-Americans who have
settled in the United States, there have been efforts to mix the music
of their homeland with American pop. The primary exponent of that
style, and the only one to cross over to a mass English-speaking
audience, is the singer Gloria Estefan. But a couple of years ago, the
Miami-based diva began to feel the tug of her Cuban roots, and the
result was Mi Tierra, a collection of newly written songs that
had a deliberately traditional sound, as if they had been taken from
her parents' collection of old 78 rpm records.
That record proved so successful, selling well in both the Latino and
Anglo markets, that Estefan has now broadened her scope. Her latest
recording is called Abriendo Puertas, which means "opening
doors," and focuses on a variety of musical styles popular along the
Caribbean coast of Colombia: vallenato, cumbia, chande and
curralao. This tropical hillbilly music is driven by accordions
(rather than percussion, horns and guitar as in standard salsa), but
if that summons up unpleasant memories of polkas or Lawrence Welk,
just relax, because this is music that has a deep, eminently danceable
groove. Though Estefan sings here in Spanish, she gives each of the 10
songs an illuminating explanation, in English, in a very useful set of
liner notes.
Estefan is not the only one taking a mix-and-match approach to
tropical music. The Dominican Republic is renowned throughout the
Caribbean as the home of classic merengue, which differs from standard
salsa in that it has a more rapid, galloping beat, punctuated by
stuttering horns. But the big innovator in Dominican music this
decade, Juan Luis Guerra, and his group, known as 440 (the frequency
of an A note that is perfectly tuned), have made their mark by
allowing the beat to become less insistent and more elastic, adding
lilting vocal harmonies and writing sophisticated lyrics that can be
humorous, romantic or pointed, depending on the purpose of the song.
That approach has made Guerra, who studied music at Berklee College of
Music in Boston and is well acquainted with American rock and jazz,
one of the most popular artists in the Spanish-speaking world, as
capable of filling every seat at Madison Square Garden as in soccer
stadiums from Santiago to Madrid. His breakthrough record, called
Ojalá Que Llueva Café, has a humid, dreamy
quality, like the tropics after a heavy rain, and critics have praised
its lyrics as recalling the magical realism of the novels of
Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez--no small feat.
Three subsequent records have maintained that high standard and
burnished Guerra's reputation. On the 1993 record Areito, for
instance, a humorously trenchant piece of social satire whose title
translates as "The Cost of Living" is followed by one of the most
erotic love songs ever written in any language, "Signs of Smoke." Yes,
it helps to understand the words he sings. But even for those who
don't speak Spanish, the sheer beauty of Juan Luis Guerra's music
gives it an irresistible power and attraction.
Since the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with
Haiti, it should come as no surprise to find that its Creole-speaking
neighbors have developed their own, more ethereal version of
merengue. That seems to be the defining characteristic of the music of
Haiti and the French Antilles, in fact: an almost lighter-than-air
sensation that comes from its reliance on layers and layers of
electric guitars and keyboards floating above African polyrhythms.
That sound was initially developed in the 1950s by bandleaders such
as Nemours Jean-Baptiste and came to be known as "compas," or "beat,"
music. As an introduction to the evolution of compas, it would be hard
to top Konbit: Burning Rhythms of Haiti, which begins and ends
with a pair of songs by Nemours Jean-Baptiste but also features
several of his musical and spiritual heirs, such as the group Tabou
Combo. The music of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which has evolved over
the last decade into a style called zouk, tends to be even more bubbly
and breezy, as shown on the compilation disc called Zouk
Attack.
But the Haitian sound has been updated and fortified for the '90s
by groups such as Boukman Eksperyans and its offshoot band, Boukan
Guinen, practitioners of what has come to be called, for lack of a
better term, "voodoo rock." The Boukman group draws heavily on
traditional voodoo drumming for its strong rhythmic base, stirs in
rock-style electric guitar and synthesizers and tops the brew off with
a dash of ra-ra, an energetic style of Haitian Carnival music. They
have recorded three albums since 1990, the best of which is probably
Kalfou Danjere: Dangerous Crossroads, and the band now tours
regularly in the United States and Europe.
It's safe to say, however, that no musician from the Caribbean has
found a larger international audience over the past 25 years than the
late Bob Marley. He didn't invent reggae, but he did refine and
popularize a style that fused indigenous Jamaican elements with
flourishes derived from American rhythm and blues, taking the
resulting mélange to a worldwide audience and becoming one of
the best-known musicians in the world before dying of cancer in 1981.
One of the reasons reggae has caught on with non-Jamaican listeners is
that its rhythms are unforgettable. At first hearing, everything seems
backwards: The accents fall on the offbeat, contrary to what the ear
and the body expect. Chattering guitars and swelling organs or
growling clavinets emphasize the unusual rhythm, which is more often
than not set off by socially conscious lyrics that address issues such
as racism, poverty or the legalization of marijuana, the "sacred herb"
of the Rastafarian cult. Marley perfected that formula, and its
evolution can be traced in a four-CD set called Songs of
Freedom that combines the best of his many recordings. The 1972
movie, The Harder They Come, also helped introduce many
Americans to reggae, and the soundtrack album, with recordings by his
contemporaries, remains fresh and enticing.
Yet, as great as Bob Marley was, Fred "Toots" Hibbert of The Maytals
may be an even better singer. Check out The Maytals' Reggae Got
Soul or Funky Kingston, with vocals that rival Otis Redding
and Sam Cooke in their primes, and decide for yourself.
By far, however, the most comprehensive overview of reggae and its
many forerunners and variants (ska, rock steady, dub, dancehall) is
contained in a marvelous four-CD set called Tougher than Tough: The
Story of Jamaican Music. Bob Marley is here, of course, but so are
some other wonderful singers and groups, ranging from pioneers Desmond
Dekker and Jimmy Cliff to current stars such as the ever-bawdy Shabba
Ranks and Buju Banton. Of special interest to rock 'n' roll fans may
be the original versions of songs later recorded by the Rolling Stones
and The Clash, among others.
Reggae's ascension in recent years has robbed a bit of the luster from
the lilting calypso music of Trinidad and its more driving descendant,
soca (short for soul calypso). But that doesn't mean calypso
recordings aren't accessible in the United States or that the music
has stopped evolving at home. The great calypso singers, with their
wonderfully descriptive stage names and fondness for satiric or
risqué lyrics written for Carnival celebrations each year, are
all available on disc. Start with The Mighty Sparrow, undisputed king
of contemporary calypso, and then work your way back through his
predecessors: Atilla the Hun, Lord Executor, The Roaring Lion,
Houdini, King Radio, The Caresser and Lord Invader, best known for the
song "Rum and Coca Cola."
Purists may argue that the infusion of American rhythm and blues and
French Caribbean influences over the last two decades has changed
calypso for the worse. But others are likely to conclude that those
outside forces have only enriched the calypso tradition by making it
more animated. Say What? Double Entendre Soca from Trinidad is
guaranteed to liven up any party with its powerful dance groove and
humorously suggestive lyrics. An equally infectious companion
compilation is entitled Heat in de Place: Soca Music from
Trinidad, and highlights the same propulsive beat, powered by
horns, drum machines, synthesizers and guitars.
Larry Rother is the Caribbean bureau chief for The New York
Times and a former music critic for The Washington Post.
Caribbean Music: A Discography
Compilations:
A Carnival of Cuban Music--Rounder
(CD-5049)
Cuban Dance Party--Rounder (CD-5050)
Cuban
Gold--Qbadisc (QB-9006/9016)
Dancing with the Enemy--Luaka
Bop/Warner Brothers (9 26580-2)
Heat in de Place: Soca Music
from Trinidad--Rounder (CD 5041)
Konbit: Burning Rhythms of
Haiti--A&M< (CS 5281)
Say What? Double Entendre Soca from
Trinidad--Rounder (CD 5042)
Tougher than Tough: The Story of
Jamaican Music--Mango/Island (162-539 935 -2)
Zouk
Attack--Rounder (CD 5037)
Boukman Eksperyans
Kalfou Danjere: Dangerous
Crossroads--Mango/Island (162-539 927-2)
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz con la Sonora Matancera--Rodven
(CD-122)
Gloria Estefan
Mi Tierra--Epic (EK 53807)
Abriendo
Puertas--Epic (EK 67284)
Juan Luis Guerra
Ojalá Que Llueva Café--Karen
(CDK 126)
Areito--BMG (3456)/Karen (CD 146)
Bob Marley
The Harder They Come--Mango/Island (162-539
220-2)
Songs of Freedom--Island/Tuff Gong (TGCBX 512 282-2)
The Maytals
Funky Kingston--Mango/Island (162-539
330-2)
Reggae Got Soul--Mango/Island (162-539 374-2)
Beny Moré
The Most from Beny Moré--RCA/BMG
(2445-2-RL)
Arsenio Rodriguez
Como Se Goza en el Barrio--Tumbao
(TCD-22)
Los Van Van
Dancing Wet--World Pacific (CDP 0777 7 80600 2
4)
Lo Ultimo En Vivo--Qbadisc (QB 9020)
Songo--Mango (CCD
9825)
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