page_title: Contradanza
section_title: African-American music
hierarchical_section_title: Contradanza / African-American music
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Jelly Roll Morton, cropped from group photo of musicians and entertainers in Los Angeles, California, at the Cadillac Club, c. 1917 or 1918.
context_page_description: Contradanza is the Spanish and Spanish-American version of the contradanse, which was an internationally popular style of music and dance in the 18th century, derived from the English country dance and adopted at the court of France. Contradanza was brought to America and there took on folkloric forms that still exist in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Ecuador.
  In Cuba during the 19th century, it became an important genre, the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African rhythm pattern and the first Cuban dance to gain international popularity, the progenitor of danzón, mambo and cha-cha-cha, with a characteristic "habanera rhythm" and sung lyrics.
  Outside Cuba, the Cuban contradanza became known as the habanera – the dance of Havana – and that name was adopted in Cuba itself subsequent to its international popularity in the later 19th century, though it was never so called by the people who created it.
context_section_description: African-American music began incorporating Cuban musical motifs in the 1800s. Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between those cities to perform. Whether the rhythm and its variants were directly transplanted from Cuba or merely reinforced similar rhythmic tendencies already present in New Orleans is probably impossible to determine. The habanera rhythm is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music, and there are examples of similar rhythms in some African-American folk music such as the foot-stamping patterns in ring shout and in post-Civil War drum and fife music. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre "reached the U.S. 20 years before the first rag was published".
  For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, 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. A habanera was written and published in Butte, Montanta in 1908. The song was titled "Solita" and was written by Jack Hangauer. Scott Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is considered a habanera (though it is labeled a "Mexican serenade"). "St. Louis Blues" (1914) by W. C. Handy has a habanera/tresillo bass line.  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 (which he called the Spanish tinge) an essential ingredient of jazz.  The rhythm can be heard in the left hand on songs such as "The Crave" (1910, recorded in 1938).
  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 (1938: Library of Congress Recording)
  Although the exact origins of jazz syncopation may never be known, there’s evidence that the habanera/tresillo was there at its conception. Buddy Bolden, the first known jazz musician, is credited with creating the big four, a habanera-based pattern. The big four (below) 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.
caption: Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941)
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