The waltz ("El vals") arrived in Cuba by 1814. It was the first dance in which couples were not linked by a communal sequence pattern. It was, and still is, danced in 3/4 time with the accent on the first beat. It was originally thought scandalous because couples faced each other, held each other in the 'closed' hold, and, so to speak, ignored the surrounding community. The waltz entered all countries in the Americas. The walz has another characteristic: it is a 'travelling' dance, with couples moving round the arena. In Latin dances, progressive movement of dancers is unusual, but does occur in some.
A typical dance of the Cuban "campesino" or "guajiro" A dance of pairs, involving tapping of the feet, mostly by the man. Illustrations exist from previous centuries, but the dance is now defunct.
In the 19th century here grew up in Santiago de Cuba a group of itinerant musicians, troubadors, who moved around earning their living by singing and playing the guitar. They were of great importance as composers, and their songs have been used in all types of Cuban music
Pepe Sánchez (1856–1918), was the father of the "trova" and the creator of the Cuban bolero. He had no formal training in music. With remarkable natural talent, he composed numbers in his head and never wrote them down. As a result, most of these numbers are now lost for ever, though some two dozen or so survive because friends and disciples transcribed them. He also created advertisement jingles before radio was born. He was the model and teacher for the great trovadores who followed him.
The first, and one of the longest-lived, was Sindo Garay (1867–1968). He was an outstanding composer of songs, and his best have been sung and recorded many times. Garay was also musically illiterate – in fact, he only taught himself the alphabet at 16 – but in his case not only were scores recorded by others, but there are recordings. He broadcast on radio, made recordings and survived into modern times. He used to say "Not many men have shaken hands with both José Martí and Fidel Castro!"
Chicho Ibáñez (1875–1981) was even longer-lived than Garay. Ibáñez was the first trovador to specialize in the Cuban "son"; he also sung guaguancos and pieces from the abakuá (a black secret society).
Many of the early trovadores, such as Manuel Corona (who worked in a brothel area of Havana), composed and sung guarachas as a balance for the slower boleros.
This is a song and dance form quite different from its Spanish namesake. It originated in the last quarter of the 19th century with the founder of the traditional trova, Pepe Sánchez. He wrote the first bolero, "Tristezas", which is still sung today. The bolero has always been a staple part of the trova muusician's repertoire. The bolero proved to be exceptionally adaptable, and led to many variants. Typical was the introduction of syncopation. leading to the bolero-son, bolero-mambo and bolero-cha. The bolero-son became for several decades the most popular rhythm for dancing in Cuba, and it was this rhythm that the international dance community picked up and taught as the wrongly-named 'rumba'.
The European influence on Cuba's later musical development is represented by danzón, an elegant musical form that was once the most popular music in Cuba. It is a descendent of the creollized Cuban contradanza. The danzón marks the change which took place from the communal sequence dance style of the late eighteenth century to the couple dances of later times. The stimulus for this was the success of the once-scandalous walz, where couples danced facing each other and independently from other couples, not as part of a pre-set structure. The danzón was the first Cuban dance to adopt such methods, though there is a difference between the two dances. The walz is a progressive ballroom dance where couples move round the floor in an anti-clockwise direction; the danzón is a 'pocket-handkerchief' dance where a couple stays within a small area of the floor.
The danzón was exported to popular acclaim throughout Latin America, especially Mexico. It is now a relic, both in music and in dance, but its highly orchestrated descendents live on.
The "son", said Cristóbal Díaz, is the most important genre of Cuban music, and the least studied. It can fairly be said that "son" is to Cuba what the tango is to Argentina, or the samba to Brazil. In addition, it is perhaps the most flexible of all forms of Latin-American music. Its great strength is its fusion between European and African musical traditions. Its most characteristic instruments are the Cuban guitar known as the "tres", and the well-known double-headed "bongó"; these are present from the start to the present day. Also typical are the claves, the Spanish guitar, the double bass, and early on, the cornet or trumpet and finally the piano.
The "son" arose in Oriente, the eastern part of the island, merging the Spanish guitar and lyrical traditions with African percussion and rhythms. We now know that its history as a distinct form is relatively recent. There is no evidence that it goes back further than the end of the nineteenth century. It moved from Oriente to Havana in about 1909, carried by members of the "Permanente" (the Army), who were sent out of their areas of origin as a matter of policy. The first recordings were in 1918.
There are many types of "son". Odilio Urfé recognised these variants:
and one can certainly add
In addition, the son has again and again changed the older danzón to make it more syncopated and creole in style, starting in 1910 through the danzón-mambo and the cha-cha-cha to complex modern arrangements which are almost impossible to categorize.
The son varies widely today, with the defining characteristic a syncopated bass pulse that comes before the downbeat, giving son its distinctive rhythm; this is known as the "anticipated bass".
The history of jazz in Cuba was obscured for many years; however it has become clear that its history in Cuba is virtually as long as its history in the USA.
Much more is now known about early Cuban jazz bands, though a full assessment is plagued by the lack of recordings. Migrations and visits to and from the USA and the mutual exchange of recordings and sheet music kept musicians in the two countries in touch. In the first part of the 20th century there were close relations between musicians in Cuba and those in New Orleans. The orchestra leader in the famous Tropicana Club, Armando Romeu Jr, was a leading figure in the post-WWII development of Cuban jazz. The phenomenon of cubop, and jam sessions in Havana and New York, created genuine fusions which still influence musicians today.
World-wide interest in Cuban music was rekindled by a remarkable CD album entitled the "Buena Vista Social Club". An American guitarist, Ry Cooder, a British music producer, Nick Gold, and a Cuban musician, Juan Marcos Gonzáles, worked together on a new venture. They put together a group, mostly of older Cuban musicians, with the idea of recreating the Cuban music of the golden era of the 1950s. The first album, released in 1997, became a huge hit, selling over five million copies, and winning a Grammy in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by "Rolling Stone" magazine as #260 in their list of "The 500 Greatest Hits of All Time". A dozen more CDs have followed the first one, mostly issued by "Nonesuch Records" or "World Circuit".
A documentary movie, "Buena Vista Social Club", directed by Wim Wenders, was released in 1999. It grossed $23 million worldwide by 2007. A younger generation had discovered why Cuban music was so popular.
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