Music
and Change
by
Don Skoog
New World it is, for those
who became its peoples remade it, and in the process, they remade
themselves
Sidney
W. Mintz and Richard Price
The Birth of African-American Culture
One
bright February morning, I stood high on the ramparts of Morro Castle,
the sixteenth century guardian of Havana
Harbor. Leaning on the cold parapet, I gazed out to the clear waters
of the Caribbean,
then back across the channel to the crumbling buildings of Old Havana. In
my mind, the city was young again and I was a Spanish soldier nervously
watching
a British frigate closing to fire––I was a Cuban merchant relieved
to see one of my slave ships safely sailing into the canal, laden with black
gold––I was a passerby stopping at the dock to assess a group of
slaves who had chains on their wrists and fear in the eyes––I
was an African man, alone, with no words on my tongue to tell others of the
wonder
in my heart at this new and unfamiliar world.
I have been told I have an overactive and somewhat romantic imagination.
This is an asset for a novelist and a hindrance for a journalist. But flights
of
fancy, when clearly labeled, obscure the subject less than do well-meaning
but biased
scientific assumptions. Anthropology suffers, at least historically, from
two underlying presuppositions that alter the way it collects and views information.
The first is a nineteenth century concept, conceived by misreading Rousseau,
that the 'native' is a pure, and consequently static, being, and that the
search
for data on this indigenous being is actually a quest for truth. And, of
course, truth is eternal, so some older ethnographic studies read like stone
tablets
from the mount: "This is how they act. This is what they believe." But
in fact there is no eternal ethnographic truth. People change. After hearing
Cuban batá drummers play, an old Yoruban man living in New York said
that the rhythms were of his grandfather's time and could no longer be heard
in his
country. Traditional African drumming is evolving, as is Cuban.
But the ethnographer often writes his findings as distinct from the continuum
that created them. The danger is that it implies a static truth––“This
is the way the santeros play. This is the way the paleros sing"––when
in reality all culture is in constant adaptation. This is the way they played
that day.
The other assumption, which goes hand in hand with the first, is that these
pure societies are being destroyed by the soulless cultural imperialism of
the West,
and that they must be recorded before the flood of Western contamination
extinguishes their natural goodness. One of the positive results of cultural
relativism,
now that Western culture is no longer considered as the paradigm by which
others are measured, is that it can no longer be perceived as meritless either.
All
cultures can be seen as equal. The new televisions that alter traditional
ways of life in Native American communities cannot be seen as cultural imperialism
because TV altered Western culture as much as it did Native American. Both
cultures
change and both are now victims or victors, depending on your point of view.
This is true in Cuba as well. The process of transculturation that created
the various meta-ethnic traditions, black and white, continues today. While
some
traditions are being weakened or extinguished, they are also being translated
into evolving contributions of contemporary art and thought. Roberto Vizcaino
says that Pedro Izquerdo (Pello el Afrokán) created mozambique by adapting
Obanlá from batá to congas. José Quintana (Changuito)
borrowed from mozambique to develop songo, and the funky feel of songo can
still be felt
in the timba grooves of Charanga Habanera. Instead of looking back towards
the Garden of Eden, we might well look forward. Entropy is balanced by creativity,
and the only way to gain insight into its dynamic is to try and view the
process
from a less angled perspective.
Cultural loss is inevitable if society is to continue growing. When the phonograph
was invented, those specific musics that were not recorded were lost (writing
them down or teaching them to another does not save the originals). More was
lost when 78 rpm became standard, and much of that vanished when they were
transferred to 33 rpm. And thousands of vinyl albums are not available on CD.
I once came
across a dumpster filled with old 78s and have been haunted ever since by the
possibility that a rare performance was lost to humanity when that dumpster
was hauled off. Today on that site there is a school that teaches recording
engineering.
It seems to me that we need dumpster pickers as much as we need engineering
students, if for no other reason than so that we can show them the roots of
the art they
hope to augment. Those records were not in that dumpster because they were
trash, but because they were perceived as being economically useless. By the
time their
value is recognized they will have been lost in the landfill for many years.
You can't know where you are if you don't know where you've been, and it is
painful to realize that not everything can be saved. I have gleaned as much
information
as I could from my sources, as they did from theirs, and all of it is a handful
of sand on a very long beach. Others, far more thoroughly than I, are doing
the same. And musicians, beneficiaries of a rich tradition, are using these
rhythms
as part of the foundation for new musics that express yesterday's cultural
roots in tomorrow's musical styles.
Two of the main currents in Cuban music were the folkloric Afro-Cuban traditions
that developed into rumba and comparsa, and the son tradition that evolved
into contemporary popular music. Each had some traits in common with the other
(and
with other genres as well), and both continually borrowed, sharing until they
were transformed, fusing together to create new styles while still retaining
their own identities. Contemporary Cuban music also absorbs aspects of jazz,
funk, rock, and rap, but its sophisticated harmonies and home-boy vocal stylings
are built on an Afro-Cuban rhythmic foundation that evolved from within while
embracing European harmonic and melodic structures, then later, the chord progressions,
orchestrations, and song forms of jazz, as well as the back beat that so dominates
North American popular music. But to say that the African, European, and American
influences have contributed more or less equally to Cuban music, while possibly
true, completely ignores the fact that the stylistic hand on the wheel, the
driving force in its evolution, the collective artistic will that molded the
sound, is
Cuban.
So in the end, much of the original African dance, language, and music have
been lost in the creation of new artistic expressions. What the folkloric
traditions have lost has been replaced, transculturated into forms that are
intrinsically
part of Cuban music and dance: rumba and comparsa, and newer forms, not so
traditional
perhaps, but at the edge of the music's evolution. Yet much remains that
can be traced back to these roots. One can see the function of the katá in
Palo evolving into the guagua of rumba then into the cáscara of timbales.
The rich harmonic structures of jazz have brought a new aspect to the complicated
rhythms that revolve around the clave. The original African call and response
can be found in the montunos of songo and timba, creating new musics from traditional
ones. And groups such as Irakere have reversed the process by starting with a
contemporary jazz framework and bringing folkloric elements like batá and
orisha song into a modern musical architecture. Anyone who wishes to unravel
this complicated tangle of modern and traditional, innovative and folkloric,
sacred and sacrilegious, must pick a place and make a start, sorting and
resorting to achieve small victories of understanding in a sea of noncomprehension.
For a non-Latino musician attempting to gain
some proficiency in the vast, confusing world of Cuban music, the quest becomes
one of time and place, and
of people.
By traveling back historically and out geographically, first over a little
strait then across a fathomless ocean, one is immersed in the stories of
millions of
people, a rainbow of skin color, and a roaring flood of uprooted lives. It
is a history movie run in reverse, a slowly rethreading spool of film that,
for
me, began on the walls of Morro Castle and ended on the beach with
Columbus as the first natives walked down to the shore to greet him. And
so the circle
is
complete.
