The “Other Great Tradition” Of Cuban Music

It’s not often one gets to spend a morning with a world authority on anything. Nevertheless, this was the case recently when I visited Ned Sublette and his wife Constance at their rented Irish Channel home ’round the corner from Parasol’s. Ned wears many hats: journalist, singer, songwriter, record-label executive. He would probably not add world authority to that list. But I will, based on his massive (672 page) new book, Cuba and Its Music.

I wanted to talk about the book (which only goes to 1952, with volume two in the works), but I also brought a box of 30 Cuban CDs I’d acquired over the years, hoping for commentary on all of them. Like many people, I really enjoy Cuban music but am fairly mystified by it. What makes a mambo a mambo, a rumba a rumba? What about guaguanco and cha cha cha? Between trips to the kitchen to feed my coffee jones and asides to Constance, who seems resigned to Ned’s role as illuminator to the bewildered, Ned commented on almost all the discs. Even better, he pulled out records of his own to zealously illustrate points, sometimes two or three discs at a time (“Well, to understand that you have to need to hear these two guys first…”).

As someone who’s spent 20 years in New Orleans studying, admiring and playing its music, I’d come to accept certain ideas, particularly the one that New Orleans is the root of most good American music. Or at least the fountainhead of African-American music. Sublette’s book has made me rethink this idea: New Orleans may be the birthplace of the USA’s music, but Cuba is the birthplace of this hemisphere’s music. In Sublette’s words, “Cuban music has to be regarded as the Other Great Tradition, a fundamental music of the New World. You can hear its influence in classical music, ragtime, tango, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, rock ‘n’ roll, funk, and hip-hop, to say nothing of salsa.” Africans and Europeans were creating new music in Cuba 200 years before New Orleans was founded, and the music was bouncing back and forth between Spain, Africa and Cuba practically from the days of Columbus, with no “American” input for decades. The rhythm of the tango, made most famous by Argentina, comes from Cuba (where it is also sometimes called habanera). The bolero, which many people think of as Mexican, originated in Cuba. The cinquillo rhythm, the basis of the Dominican merengue and much American ragtime, comes from Haitian emigres who created it in Cuba. The tresillo pattern of much early rock ‘n’ roll (think of the bass note rhythms in “Hound Dog,” or Professor Longhair’s Afro-Cubanism), while not exclusive to Cuba, came to American music though Cuba. The two-measure “Bo Diddley” beat is a variant of the Cuban clave. And on and on.

From now until June Sublette will be a Tulane Rockefeller Humanites Fellow, doing archival research on the links between Cuba, Haiti and Louisiana. He is one of a growing number of historians addressing the “pre-history” of jazz and other 20th-century music, trying to explain our time by digging back into the 19th-century and beyond. His book is the best I’ve read on the African component of New World music, artfully exploring why different African peoples arriving as slaves in different parts of the Americas created new musics. I told Ned how I knew, for instance, that New Orleans music turned out differently than other black music of the South because the slaves were allowed to keep their drums. He replied, “Yeah, that’s the part everyone knows. The fallacy is when you assume that’s the only controlling factor, as if Africa were a big undifferentiated mass and the only thing that made a difference were the different European cultures the Africans came in contact with.”

In a nutshell, Sublette suggests in his book that Afro-Cuban music sounds different from African-American music in part because the slaves who went to Cuba came from the drum cultures of the Congo, whereas slaves bound for the colonies that became the United States came from the string-playing “griot” cultures of the Sudan. New Orleans had a mix of the two, but the bambara, a “griot” culture came first, and established the template. Drumming was allowed for a while however, and there was much contact between the ports of New Orleans and Havana. It’s confusing, but that’s one reason Sublette is here, to try and sort things out.

After three hours of listening to records, we called it quits: there was a rare autumn second line rolling Uptown, and Ned had to see it. We drove around, floundering, then finally found it. Ned walked around a bit and said, “The only thing more compelling in this city than the music is the architecture it takes place in.” He then went off to check out the brass band, looking for African and Cuban retentions, perhaps, and maybe a couple beers.