Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo - Softcover

Sublette, Ned

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556526326 ISBN 13: 9781556526329

Verlag: Chicago Review Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valdés, Arsenio Rodríguez, Benny Moré, and Pérez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. The ways in which the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the claves appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues are revealed. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucía, the Congo, the Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade; Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political traditions; the music of Santería, Palo, Abakuá, and Vodú; and much more.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ned Sublette is the cofounder of the Qbadisc record label. He has coproduced the public radio program Afropop Worldwide for seven years and travels frequently to Cuba.

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Cuba and Its Music

From the First Drums to the Mambo

By Ned Sublette

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2004 Ned Sublette
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55652-632-9

Contents

Preface, 
About the Terminology, and More, 
Part I Before Cuba, 
1 The Highest-Priced Slaves, 
2 Drums of War, 
3 "We Have Always Had the Drum", 
4 Zarabanda's Mambo, 
Part II Colonial Cuba, 
5 The Areíto and the Romance, 
6 By Post from the Indies, 
7 The Shipyard, 
8 The Fertile Crescent, 
9 The Atlantis of the Caribbean, 
10 Buying Whites and Selling Blacks: A Contradanza., 
11 La Nuit des Tropiques, 
Part III Afro-Cuba, 
12 The Western and Central Sudanic Blues, 
13 The Congo That Was Cuba, 
14 A Secret Language, for Men Only, 
15 Hiding in Plain Sight, 
Part IV Insurgent Cuba, 
16 The Romance of Revolution, 
17 Rumba, 
18 Fire, 
Part V The Plattist Republic, 
19 Martí's Monster, 
20 Guitar and Piano, 
21 If He Bathes, He Splashes You, 
22 The Tango Age, 
23 Tres and Bongó, 
24 The Dance of the Millions, 
25 The Son Boom, 
26 The Mulata Love Triangles, 
27 The Peanut Vendor, 
28 The Fall, 
Part VI Batista in Power, 
29 The Revolution of 1933, 
30 The Liberation of the Drum, 
31 Nag"e, Nag"e, Nag"e, Nag"e, 
32 Mano a Mano, 
Part VII The Auténtico Years, 
33 Diablo!, 
34 Life Is a Dream, 
35 Mambo Number Five, 
36 Television, 
Coda, 
Suggested Listening, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Highest-Priced Slaves

... Tyre will become like the whore in the song:
Take your lyre, walk the town,
forgotten whore.
Play your sweetest, sing your songs again,
to make them remember you.

— Isaiah 23:15–16

An accomplished singing-girl has a repertoire of upwards of four thousand songs, each of them two to four verses long, so that the total amount of poetry contained in it, if one multiplies one figure by the other, comes to ten thousand verses ... They are all founded on references to fornication, pimping, passion, yearning, desire and lust.

— al-Gahiz (776–869)

Separated from Europe by the Pyrenees on the northeast and from North Africa by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar to the south — through each of which gateways it has been invaded various times — the Iberian peninsula's physical isolation created its identity. The drainage of its rivers toward the southwest and the mountains of its central area suggest that the peninsula, as Barry Cunliffe put it, "turns its back on the Mediterranean and faces the Atlantic." In ancient times, then, from the Iberian point of view, Europe was inaccessible, there was an endless ocean of water to the west, mountains separated the Mediterranean coast from the rich southern Iberian basin, and to the south was Africa, an ocean of land.

Spaniards visiting Havana today sometimes remark that it reminds them of Cádiz. The oldest city in western Europe, Gadir, or Cádiz, was established on an island off the southern (Atlantic) coast of the Iberian peninsula as a silver-mining center by the people who called themselves can'ani (Canaanites), and who are more commonly known by their Greek name: Phoenicians. Evidence in Greek literature dates Cádiz's founding at or around 1104 B.C., though that date may refer only to early maritime contacts, since the earliest archaeological evidence for a permanent settlement suggests a date somewhere around 760 B.C.

A Semitic people whose stronghold was at Tyre, in what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians were trading people. Known for their purple-dyed textiles, they created the first seagoing merchant empire. Their language was mutually intelligible with that of the Israelites; they are depicted in the Bible as commercial partners of the Israelites (with Tyre the more commercially powerful of the two) but more often as immortal enemies. The king of Tyre sent builders and sold wood from the cedars and firs of Lebanon to King David for his palace and to King Solomon for his temple; on the other hand, the wicked idolatress Jezebel was a Phoenician, and the Tyreans committed "fornication with all the peoples of the earth" and trafficked in Israelite slaves.

The Phoenicians' greatest legacy to the world was disseminating the alphabet; variants of their names for the letters (alef, bet ...) survive today. In pulling the southern part of the Iberian peninsula into the orbit of the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians brought their literate, mercantile, urban culture to Iberia, along with their religion.

The world at this time was polytheistic. In the time of King Solomon and later, Israelites worshipped the Phoenician gods Baal-Shamem (known to the Greeks as Zeus), Baal-Melqart (Herakles), and Astarte (Aphrodite). The Phoenicians practiced child sacrifice, which, the Bible tells us, Israelites also did at times: "They disregarded all the commandments of the Lord, their God ... and served Baal. They immolated their sons and daughters by fire."

The silver from Cádiz supplied much of the Phoenicians' wealth, and the town was an important port, in continual use from the time of its founding until today. The Phoenicians must have brought a variety of peoples with them at one time or another, almost certainly including the people we now call Jews. They soon established other coastal settlements along southern Iberia, which historians refer to, at that time, as Tartessos; they also established trading posts along the northern coast of Africa, across the Mediterranean from Iberia.

* * *

There seems to be no definitive explanation of the origins of the early Iberians. Since Iberia and North Africa are separated by only thirteen kilometers at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibraltar, it seems plausible that Africans might have arrived in remote times from the south (as refugees on wretched rafts do today). If so, coming directly from Africa, they might have been the first homo sapiens to enter Europe.

The skillfully executed cave paintings at Altamira in northern Spain are approximately eighteen thousand years old. Whether the Paleolithic people who made those paintings vanished, or whether they were ancestral to the people whom the Phoenicians found when they arrived, it is clear that the Iberian peninsula has been densely occupied for thousands of years — except for the cold, dry, rocky Central Plateau, which was barely settled in prehistoric times, and which effectively divides Iberia into northern and southern regions.

A wave of aboriginal Iberians might have come to the peninsula at some point across the Pyrenees from the northeast; conceivably, they might even have arrived via the Mediterranean. In the north, the Basques, whose origin is unknown, seem to be Europe's oldest extant culture, and their language seems to predate the spread of Indo-European languages. But, certainly, there was contact with Africa from early on: in the south, ivory from North Africa is known to have been imported into, and worked locally in, the present area of La Mancha about 1700–1600 B.C.

To live in a coastal town in the ancient world was to be cosmopolitan, in frequent, prolonged contact with people from other civilizations. Through the port of Cádiz, the Phoenicians' jewel at the western end of the known world, passed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Chicago Review Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1556526326
• ISBN 13: 9781556526329
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 688
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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