African and Spanish Roots of Cuban Music Explained

African and Spanish Foundations of Cuban Music

Cuban music is mainly a mixture of influences from both Africa and Spain. The Spanish conquistadors introduced their own European styles into the region, and the Atlantic slave trade left its mark as well. Looking more closely at this mixture, one can focus on the rhythms and melodies that reveal how these influences operate. In Cuban music, for instance, the drums are effectively speaking to one another — a practice rooted in the African tradition. Arabs from the Middle East spread into both Africa and Spain, serving as a further influence while simultaneously connecting these different cultures. Berber culture took root in Andalusia, Spain, and both Roman and Germanic influences also shaped the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Afro-Cuban culture was a rich blend of Catholicism, African heritage, and Spanish customs, and the music that poured out of that mix was built on this intersection of traditions, cultures, and influences.

The intermixing of African beats and Spanish music is essentially what produced the Cuban style. The Spanish preferred the guitar — it was their favorite instrument, portable and accessible to the average person in the field. Other instruments, such as wind instruments and the violin, were common as well. By the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, these influences became more and more pronounced as the popularity of jazz, blues, and swing grew in America.

How Cuban Music Differs from American Blues and Swing

Cuban music is sometimes confused with the styles that emerged in New Orleans and spread across the United States, but it is in fact quite different. As Sublette (2007) points out, "Cuban music has something else: clave (a rhythmic key) and those undulating, repeating, melodic-rhythmic loops of fixed pitches called (with different shades of meaning) guajeo, montuno, or tumbao. These appear in American music, but in Cuban music they dominate, and they largely entered the American musical vocabulary from Cuba" (p. 159). Moreover, the blues was more distinctly an Afro-American phenomenon — unique to the tradition of the African-American experience in the United States. The Cuban experience was not the same, and as Sublette (2007) notes quite simply, "Cuban musicians don't have the blues. They don't feel those minute pitch distinctions that a blues musician makes automatically, and they tend to sound a little stiff playing against swing time" (p. 166).

Cuban musicians are more upbeat, using multiple rhythms and melodies to channel a spirit that is neither oppressed nor constrained — it is dynamic, expressive, flowing, and rhythmic. The beat of blues and swing musicians in America was, by comparison, "basic" — as Dizzy Gillespie put it (Sublette, 2007, p. 170). The beats that informed Cuban music came mainly from the Congo and the Yoruba peoples: the Congo, "with its deep culture of magic, music, and dance, must be reckoned one of the most important influences" of Cuban music (Sublette, 2007, p. 175).

The Buena Vista Social Club as a Living Example

Today, Cuban artists like the Buena Vista Social Club provide a vivid example of what the mixture of African beats and Spanish melodies on stringed instruments sounds like. The lyrics are in Spanish, the twangy guitar and the polyphonic beats combine with a Hispanic melody to create a sound that is intoxicating and moving — though not in the same way that a blues song is. When the horns enter, they send the sounds soaring even higher, making the music transcendent in a way that is soulful, colorful, and eloquent. There is a hint of the Spanish Spaghetti Western sound to it — one can hear Ennio Morricone coming out of the horns and strings.

Conclusion: A Distinct Musical Tradition

Cuban music is something quite distinct from the African-American blues and swing that emerged in the United States. Cuban music retained a great deal of Old World Spanish-Catholic influence, which mixed with the African tribal customs and beats of the Yoruba and Congo peoples to bring a new musical style into existence. This style grew out of the experiences of slaves and conquistadors in the region, and emerged from struggles for independence and survival. It was deeply religious in tone and sensual in style — alive and upbeat while capable of sorrow, mixing the sorrowful and the joyful, and even the miraculous, in a way that touched multiple cultures and reflected several dynamic influences.

References

Buena Vista Social Club. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNYOVEXJBBM

Farr, J. (2003). Rites of rhythm: The music of Cuba. Regan Books.

Ortiz, F. (2001). The Afro-Cuban festival Day of the Kings. In J. Bettelheim (Ed.), Cuban festivals: A century of Afro-Cuban culture. Markus Wiener Publishers. (Original work published 1925)

Sublette, N. (2007). Cuba and its music: From the first drums to the mambo. Chicago Review Press.