THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
26 July 2008
The Latin American Stream
Caribbean, South American, and Mexican traditions shape American music
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
As in the United States, musicians in Latin America developed a wide range of styles blending African music with the traditions of Europe. Caribbean, South American, and Mexican traditions have long influenced popular music in the United States.
The first Latin American style to have a major international impact was the Cuban habanera. The characteristic habanera rhythm (eight beat pattern divided 3-3-2) influenced late 19th-century ragtime music, and was an important part of what the great New Orleans pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton called the “Latin tinge” in American jazz.
The next wave of Latin American influence on the music of the United States came from Argentina. The tango was influenced by the habanera, Italian and Spanish songs, and the songs of gauchos (cowboys). In the United States the ballroom version of the tango, a couple dance featuring close contact between partners and an insistent rhythm, was popularized around 1914 by dance stars Irene and Vernon Castle.
A subsequent Latin American musical influence was the rumba. The roots of the ballroom rumba style that became popular in the United States lie in 1920s Cuba. The rural son – a Cuban parallel of “country music” – moved to Havana, where it was played by professional dance bands. These musicians created a more exciting style by adding rhythms from the rumba, an urban street drumming style strongly rooted in African traditions.
A “refined” version of rumba was introduced to the world by Don Azpiazú and his Havana Casino Orchestra. Azpiazú’s 1929 recording of “El Manicero” (“The Peanut Vendor”) became a huge international hit. Within a few months of its release many dance orchestras in the United States had recorded their own versions of the song. The rumba reached a height of popularity in the United States during the 1930s and was succeeded by a series of Cuban-based ballroom dance fads, including the mambo (1940s) and cha-cha-chá (1950s).
Variants of Cuban-based music in the United States ranged from the exciting blend of modern jazz and rumba pioneered by Machito and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s to the tourist-oriented style performed by Desi Arnaz’s orchestra on the I Love Lucy television show. The 1960s saw the emergence of salsa, a rumba-based style pioneered by Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. The stars of salsa music include the great singer Celia Cruz and bandleader Tito Puente. In the 1980s Miami Sound Machine created a commercially successful blend of salsa and disco music, and “world beat” musicians such as Paul Simon and David Byrne began to experiment with traditional Afro-Cuban rhythms.
The Brazilian samba is another dance style strongly rooted in African music. The variant of samba that had the biggest influence in the United States was the carioca, a smooth style developed in Rio de Janeiro and boosted in the 1940s by Carmen Miranda, who appeared in a series of popular musical films. A cool, sophisticated style of Brazilian music called the bossa nova became popular in United States during the early 1960s, eventually spawning hit songs such as “The Girl from Ipanema” (1964).
Mexican music has long had a symbiotic relationship with styles north of the Rio Grande. At the end of the 19th century Mexican musicians visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and later toured throughout the United States. The two best-known Mexican-derived styles today are conjunto acordeón (“accordion band”) music, played in northern Mexico and Texas; and mariachi (“marriage”) music, performed by ensembles made up of guitars, violins, and trumpets. Country and western music has been influenced by Mexican styles since at least the 1930s. Mexican immigrants in California have also played an important role developing rock music. This continuing influence is exemplified by Ritchie Valens’s 1959 hit “La Bamba,” based on a folk tune from Veracruz; the mixture of salsa and guitar-based rock music developed in the late 1960s by guitarist Carlos Santana; recordings of traditional Mexican songs by Linda Ronstadt; and the hard-rocking style of the Los Angeles-based band Los Lobos.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
