Afro-Cuban jazz
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban music has deep roots in African ritual and rhythm. The genre emerged in the early 1940s with the Cuban musicians Mario Bauzá and Frank Grillo "Machito" in the band Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. In 1947, the collaborations of bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and percussionist Chano Pozo brought Afro-Cuban rhythms and instruments, such as the tumbadora and the bongo, into the East Coast jazz scene. Early combinations of jazz with Cuban music, such as "Manteca" and "Mangó Mangüé", were commonly referred to as "Cubop" for Cuban bebop.
During its first decades, the Afro-Cuban jazz movement was stronger in the United States than in Cuba. In the early 1970s, Kenny Dorham and his Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, and later Irakere, brought Afro-Cuban jazz into the Cuban music scene, influencing styles such as songo.
History
"Spanish tinge"—the Cuban influence in early jazz
Although clave-based Afro-Cuban jazz did not appear until the mid-20th century, the Cuban influence was present at the birth of jazz. African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban musical motifs in the 19th century when the habanera gained international popularity. The habanera was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif. The habanera rhythm can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.Musicians from Havana and New Orleans took the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, and the habanera took root. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S. 20 years before the first rag was published". For more than a quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and jazz were forming, the habanera was a consistent part of African-American popular music. Early New Orleans jazz bands had habaneras in their repertoire, and the tresillo/habanera figure was a rhythmic staple of jazz at the turn of the 20th century. Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis said that the tresillo is the New Orleans clave. "St. Louis Blues" by W. C. Handy has a habanera/tresillo bass line. The first measures are shown below.
Handy noted a reaction to the habanera rhythm included in Will H. Tyler's "Maori": "I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction to the rhythm...White dancers, as I had observed them, took the number in stride. I began to suspect that there was something Negroid in that beat." After noting a similar reaction to the same rhythm in "La Paloma", Handy included this rhythm in his "St. Louis Blues," the instrumental copy of "Memphis Blues," the chorus of "Beale Street Blues," and other compositions."
Jelly Roll Morton considered the tresillo/habanera to be an essential ingredient of jazz. Morton stated, "Now in one of my earliest tunes, 'New Orleans Blues', you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz—Morton." An excerpt of "New Orleans Blues" is shown below. In the excerpt, the left hand plays the tresillo rhythm, while the right hand plays variations on cinquillo.
Although the origin of jazz syncopation may never be known, there's evidence that the habanera/tresillo existed at its conception. Buddy Bolden, the first known jazz musician, is credited with creating the big four, a habanera-based pattern. The big four was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.
In Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, Gunther Schuller states,
The Cuban influence is evident in many pre-1940s jazz tunes, but rhythmically they are all based on single-celled motifs such as tresillo, and do not contain an overt two-celled, clave-based structure. "Caravan", written by Juan Tizol and first performed in 1936, is an example of an early pre-Latin jazz composition. It is not clave-based. On the other hand, jazzy renditions of Don Azpiazú's "The Peanut Vendor" by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Stan Kenton, are all firmly in-clave since the 2-3 guajeo provides the primary counterpoint to the melody throughout the entire song.
Mario Bauzá and Machito
The consensus among musicians and musicologists is that the first jazz piece to be based in-clave was "Tanga" composed by Cuban-born Mario Bauza and recorded by Machito and his Afro-Cubans. "Tanga" began humbly as a spontaneous descarga with jazz solos superimposed on top.The right hand of the "Tanga" piano guajeo is in the style known as ponchando, a type of non-arpeggiated guajeo using block chords. The sequence of attack-points is emphasized, rather than a sequence of different pitches. As a form of accompaniment it can be played in a strictly repetitive fashion or as a varied motif akin to jazz comping.
The following example is in the style of a 1949 recording by Machito, with René Hernández on piano.
Ten innovations by Machito's Afro-Cubans
Written by Bobby Sanabria, published on November 28, 2007 on a blog called latinjazz@yahoogroups- The first band to make congas, bongo, and timbales the standard percussion in Afro-Cuban based dance music. The use of broken bell patterns by the bongocero in mambo horn sections, the increased rhythmic vocabulary of the conga drum and its function in a band setting, the increased importance of the timbales in setting up figures played by the horns and accenting them as a jazz drummer would do in a big band. e.g. "Nagüe," also the first recorded example of all three percussion instruments playing as a section.
- The first band to explore jazz arranging techniques with Afro-Cuban rhythms on a consistent basis, giving it an identifiable sound. Cuban big band arranger Chico O'Farill stated, "This was a new concept in interpreting Cuban music with as much richness as possible. You have to understand how important this was. It made every other band that came after, followers."
- The first band to explore modal harmony from a jazz arranging perspective through the recording of "Tanga". Of note is the 'sheet of sound' effect in the arrangement through the use of multiple layering.
- The first big band to explore, from an Afro-Cuban rhythmic perspective, large-scale extended compositional works. e.g. "The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite" by Chico O'Farill.
- The first band to combine big band arranging techniques within an original composition with jazz oriented soloists using an Afro-Cuban based rhythm section, e.g. Gene Johnson – alto, Brew Moore – tenor, composition – "Tanga".
- The first multi-racial band in the United States.
- The first band in the United States to use the term "Afro-Cuban" in its name, alluding to the West African roots of their music. This was an overlooked contribution by the orchestra to the burgeoning civil rights movement which compelled the Latin and African-American communities of New York to deal with their West African musical roots.
- The first Afro-Cuban dance band to explore clave conterpoint from an arranging standpoint. The ability to weave seamlessly from one side of the clave to the other without breaking its rhythmic integrity within the structure of a musical arrangement.
- Music director Mario Bauzá and lead vocalist Machito promoted a standard of excellence for subsequent band leaders, such as José Curbelo, Tito Puente, Marcelino Guerra, Tito Rodriguez, and Elmo Garcia. Although it could be argued that Xavier Cugat established such a standard much earlier with his orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the sound emulated by bandleaders in New York City was different from Cugat's. Cugat performed for the high society of New York City, not the Latino community in East Harlem and the South Bronx. Cugat's music was one they may have heard on the radio, but this community had little access to it.
- The Machito Afro-Cubans provided a forum for progressive musical ideas, compositions, and arrangements. They explored the fusion of Afro Cuban music with jazz arranging and jazz-oriented soloists in a multiracial framework.
In North America, salsa and Latin jazz charts commonly represent clave in two measures of cut-time ; this is most likely the influence of jazz conventions.
When clave is written in two measures, changing from one clave sequence to the other is a matter of reversing the order of the measures. Bauzá balanced Latin and jazz musicians in Machito's band to realize his vision of Afro-Cuban jazz. He mastered both types of music, but it took time for him to teach the jazz musicians in Machito's band about clave. When trumpeter Doc Cheatham joined the band, Machito fired him after two nights because he could not cope with clave.
Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo
introduced bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie to the Cuban conga drummer, dancer, composer, and choreographer Chano Pozo. The brief collaboration of Gillespie and Pozo produced some of the most enduring Afro-Cuban jazz standards."Manteca", co-written by Gillespie and Pozo, is the first jazz standard to be rhythmically based on clave. According to Gillespie, Pozo composed the layered, contrapuntal guajeos of the A section and the introduction, while Gillespie wrote the bridge. Gillespie recounted: "If I'd let it go like wanted it, it would've been strictly Afro-Cuban, all the way. There wouldn't have been a bridge.... I... thought I was writing an eight-bar bridge. But after eight bars I hadn't resolved back to B-flat, so I had to keep on going and ended up writing a sixteen-bar bridge." It was the bridge that gave "Manteca" a typical jazz harmonic structure, setting the piece apart from Bauzá's modal "Tanga" of a few years earlier. Arrangements with a "Latin" A section and a swung B section, with all choruses swung during solos, became common practice with many "Latin tunes" of the jazz standard repertoire. This approach can be heard on pre-1980 recordings of "Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia", "Tin Tin Deo," and "On Green Dolphin Street."
Gillespie's collaboration with Pozo brought African-based rhythms into bebop, a post-modernist art form. While pushing the boundaries of harmonic improvisation, cu-bop as it was called, also drew more directly from Africa, rhythmically.
Early performances of "Manteca" reveal that despite their enthusiasm for collaborating, Gillespie and Pozo were not very familiar with each other's music. The members of Gillespie's band were unaccustomed to guajeos, overly swinging and accenting them in an atypical fashion. Thomas Owens observes: "Once the theme ends and the improvisation begins,... Gillespie and the full band continue the bebop mood, using swing eighths in spite of Pozo's continuing even eighths, until the final A section of the theme returns. Complete assimilation of Afro-Cuban rhythms and improvisations on a harmonic ostinato was still a few years away for the beboppers in 1947." On a live 1948 recording of "Manteca," someone is heard playing the 3-2 son clave pattern on claves throughout a good portion of this 2-3 song.
The rhythm of the melody of the A section is identical to a common mambo bell pattern: