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ONE

Kora(son)

Africa and Afro-Cuban Music

When I listen to Cuban music, I feel there is a part of me in that music. I think I’m right because when Orquesta Aragón came here, the chef d’orchestre said they had to come back to Africa because that is where the music is from, especially Senegal. Every time I hear that music (hums a song), I hear “El Manisero.” You see—it’s the same culture.

Pape Fall, leader of the group African Salsa ¹

Though Cuba has a population of less than twelve million, its cultural and political prominence in the twentieth century has far exceeded its modest size. Its impact has been particularly pronounced in the realm of music. Cuban music throughout its history has absorbed elements from numerous cultures and in turn has helped shape popular culture in many parts of the world, including the rest of Latin America and the United States. However, its influence has been most pronounced in twentieth-century Africa. Cuban music, with its variety and complexity and its profusion of genres, encouraged Africans to imagine new cultural identities and experiment with innovative forms of leisure. Indeed, it provided a template for modern popular music for most of Africa, from Guinea to the Congo to Tanzania. The guitar bands of Conakry, the rumba orchestras of Kinshasa, and even the Taarab ensembles of the Swahili coast and Zanzibar all found some of their musical roots in this small island nation. To understand why Cuban music has held sway so far from its shores, it is useful to explore its origins and examine its development. This chapter analyzes some of the most conspicuous features of the Cuban style and looks at the factors shaping the development of the Cuban genres that have had the most appeal in Africa in general and Senegal in particular.²

ROUTES OF ROOTS

Many New World musics incorporated African features as a result of the forced migration of tens of millions of Africans to North America, the Caribbean, and Central and South America during the era of plantation slavery. However, what makes Cuban music so unusual is its range of African influences, their intensity, and their revitalization through African migration throughout most of the nineteenth century. Cuba’s African population arrived in waves from different parts of the continent, starting in the sixteenth century. Each of these unwilling African immigrants brought with him or her techniques, beliefs, aesthetic preferences, linguistic practices, and types of knowledge from the “home” culture. The immigrants found themselves in a situation in which they encountered other Africans who came to Cuba with related but sometimes significantly dissimilar conceptual “tool kits.” In their struggle for survival, Afro-Cubans had to construct a culture out of bits and pieces from the “Old World,” mostly African but sometimes Spanish, using shared organizing principles.³

It is probable that creating a common musical tradition was one of the first tasks undertaken by the uprooted migrants. “Music has no frontiers” is an expression often heard in contemporary Senegal, and given the commonalties that exist among many African musical cultures, fashioning a music for their oppressive existence in colonial Cuba must have been one of the less daunting tasks facing the black Cuban community. In the process of undertaking this cultural project, the first black Cubans made one of the hallmarks of their emerging musical tradition an aesthetic conservatism that maintains aspects of the old while layering on the new.⁴ This tendency made the inclusion of unfamiliar musical cultures from incoming populations a much easier proposition. Because of this aesthetic conservatism, Afro-Cuban musicians frequently have staged conversations between the established and the innovative in their work, rather than submerging or eliminating older ways of playing music in the name of novelty or “progress” as is done in many other parts of the world. They may play old rhythms on new instruments; have a chorus sing in a “traditional” nasal timbre while the soloist performs in a more modern melodious style; or incorporate old instruments in new settings, as the bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez did in the 1940s when he brought conga drums previously exclusively used in religious observances into a popular music ensemble.⁵ This practice has meant that informed listeners from Africa can hear the many separate elements that comprise Cuban music much more distinctly than in other more streamlined New World musics. Afro-Cuban music is not only part of Cuban history; it seeks to contain as much of that history as possible within many of its compositions. As a result, the sound of Africa insistently comes through.

There is some debate about whether Central or West Africa supplied the bulk of the first forced migrants to Cuba in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ned Sublette, a musician, music producer, and writer who is a respected expert on Cuban music, insists that most of the first Afro-Cubans were from what is now the Congo and Angola. His argument relies more on negative evidence than on substantial proof. Sublette cites a cédula (royal edict) issued by the Spanish king Carlos in 1526 barring the importation of Muslim Wolof speakers (Geofes in the original document) from present-day Senegal to the New World.⁶ However, it was common for settlers in the Hispanic Caribbean to flout royal decrees because these edicts were difficult to enforce under even the best of circumstances. Moreover, the cédula only banned the Muslim Wolof from being sold as slaves. That left the Portuguese and later French traders considerable latitude to traffic in Serer, Mandinka, Diola, and other captives from Senegambian regions immediately to the south of the zone of the Wolof speakers. It is likely that following the usual pattern in the Caribbean, the first Spanish settlers in Cuba filled their slave quarters with both Senegambians and Congolese/Angolans. The slaveholders believed, with good cause, that a slave population of only one language group was more prone to rebellion than a mixed group, which would find mounting a unified insurrection more challenging.

Musically, it is possible to hear traces of both Congolese and Senegalese music deeply embedded in Cuban song. The sanza/likembe, a Congolese instrument on which metal prongs are mounted above a sound box and plucked, took root on the island, and its descendant, the marímbula, supplied the bass lines for the earliest recorded son groups, like Septeto Habanero in the 1920s.⁷ Soon the contrabass replaced the marímbulas, and bass players have retained their prominent position in Cuban popular music ensembles ever since. It is their role to articulate the basic beat of any piece so that the dancers know which rhythm to follow. Their crucial musical role led Cuban bassists to become some of the first virtuosos on their instruments in the twentieth century.⁸

Though conclusive proof is lacking, the Senegambia region might have provided one of the basic building blocks of Cuban music, the clave. The clave is both an instrument (two wooden sticks) and a syncopated rhythm that has become the bedrock of the Cuban sound. Lucy Duran, an ethnomusicologist who has studied both Cuban and West African music, argues that the clave rhythm originated in the Mandinka/Maninka area of West Africa.⁹ The Mandinka, one of the major population groups in the Gambia River valley, were among the first to supply captives to the Caribbean. Since the Mandinka were forced to migrate to other areas of the Caribbean and the Caribbean Basin, a significant number must have ended up in Cuba, perhaps bringing the clave with them. Certainly the clave abounds in the contemporary Mandinka kora repertoire, although modern Mandinka musicians actually may be borrowing this rhythm from Cuban records.¹⁰

In the centuries that followed the initial forced migration of Congolese/Angolans and Senegalese to Cuba, other regions of Africa supplied numerous captives. The peoples of the Calabar River valley in Nigeria (who were called Carabali, Ñáñigo, or Abakuá in Cuba) were one important source of enslaved manpower,¹¹ as were those from the Fon- and Ewe-speaking areas of present-day Dahomey and Togo (who were called the Arará in Cuba).¹² In addition, Akan speakers from present-day Ghana (called the Mina); groups from present-day Côte D’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone (called the Gangá); and even some captives from Mozambique in Southern Africa were forced to migrate to Cuba. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was another influx of captives from the Senegambian region, mostly Mande speakers, as well as a huge wave of Yoruba speakers (called Lucumí) from what is now Nigeria.¹³ By the nineteenth century Cubans with links to Yoruba-speaking areas of Nigeria comprised the largest percentage of black Cubans, followed by the Congolese and the Cross River peoples.¹⁴ Not surprisingly, the influence of these three groups became dominant in Afro-Cuban music by the dawn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, reflecting the aesthetic conservatism of Afro-Cuban culture, elements from other African traditions like the clave remained an important part of the “mix.”

The diverse origins of Cuba’s African population were not historically unusual. However, what was remarkable was how the Spanish allowed their African captives to preserve aspects of their culture like drumming and even encouraged them to organize themselves into ethnic mutual help organizations, called cabildos.¹⁵ This limited cultural accommodation by the Spanish helped keep African musical expression alive in Cuba. What was even more extraordinary, though, was how Cuba drastically expanded its African population in the nineteenth century with new enslaved laborers. Elsewhere in the New World, with the conspicuous exception of Brazil, direct African cultural influence largely subsided during this period, as first the importation of captives from Africa and then slavery itself ended.¹⁶ In Cuba the opposite occurred. The incoming migrants re-Africanized aspects of Cuban music making, especially drumming and dancing. This revitalization of the African roots of many Afro-Cuban cultural forms only two generations before the first recordings of Cuban songs served to make Cuban music especially appealing to African listeners in the twentieth century. The sound of Africa came through loud and clear to them.

Africa, of course, was not the only force molding Afro-Cuban music. Other global influences were at work. Many of the original Spanish settlers of Cuba, for example, were from Andalusia, a part of Spain deeply effected by its interactions with Arabs, Berbers, and sub-Saharan Africans. They brought with them such song forms as the décima, which can still be heard in Cuba. Black Cubans appropriated such song forms and made them part of their cultural repertoire. After the Haitian revolution in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, large numbers of French planters migrated to eastern Cuba with their enslaved Africans. The Haitian captives introduced black Cubans to their rhythms, many of which derived from Fon culture.¹⁷ The French planters popularized the French contradanse in Cuba and introduced Cubans to their flute and violin ensembles, which were embraced by both criollos and black Cubans.

Another new musical element came to Cuba from Europe. One of the little known cultural repercussions of the Napoleonic age was the revamping of the European military marching band. The bands started to have better trained musicians and grew larger, with more varied instrumentation such as cymbals, adapted from Ottoman military orchestras. The new style military bands caught on with the Cuban public, and many towns formed their own brass ensembles, which exist to this day. Black Cubans were as fascinated with these new musical groups as were other Cubans. Indeed, a number of the early major black and mulatto Cuban musicians and composers had had experience playing in such ensembles.¹⁸

MI GUAJIRA: CUBAN MUSIC GENRES AND SENEGALESE MUSICAL TASTE

By the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these disparate musical elements from Africa and Europe had coalesced into five major Cuban music genres—rumba, bolero, guajira, son, and danzón—which either alone or in combination with one another organized Afro-Cuban musical expression in the twentieth century. The boundaries between these genres have not been rigid, and Cuban musicians have moved freely from one to the other. Africans have found some of these genres more appealing than others. Indeed, they have shown no interest in perhaps the most African of all Afro-Cuban musical forms, the rumba. The rumba has been the music of black Cuban “street people” and other marginalized Afro-Cuban groups in Cuban society since the nineteenth century. Its instrumentation is exclusively percussion. Most of its rhythms have their origin in Afro-Cuban religious ritual. Euro-Cubans until recently regarded the rumba as disreputable and not worthy of serious attention. Recordings of it were extremely rare until after the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959), when the Castro regime designated it as “folklore” and an important part of the national cultural patrimony.¹⁹ Because of this neglect, other than a few cognoscenti, African listeners outside had little opportunity to hear authentic rumba recordings throughout most of the twentieth century. When many Senegalese finally did encounter the rumba in the 1980s, their aloof response to it mirrored that of Euro-Cubans in the prerevolutionary era. Both musicians and the listening public found the music too atavistic and unrefined for their taste.²⁰ In Senegal, a nation of exceptional percussionists, the drumming of the rumberos failed to impress listeners. Along with most Africans, the Senegalese mostly ignored this form of Cuban musical expression.

The bolero has been the most popular genre of Cuban music in Cuba itself and in the rest of Latin America. Mexicans particularly have an affinity for it. Boleros are romantic songs, performed with smooth intensity by mostly male performers. In most instances melody trumps rhythm, and the musical arrangements tend to be lush. The main public for this type of music in Latin America has always been women, with a significant cohort of gay men.²¹ Paradoxically, this type of Cuban ballad has not especially resonated with African audiences. African listeners have preferred to embrace the term and the concept (languorous beats, romantic lyrics) rather than the genre itself. A well-paced evening of Latin dancing at a social gathering always includes slow ballads, which Africans, following practice elsewhere, label boleros, even if these numbers are stylistically far from the original Cuban model.²² A number of factors account for Africans’ relative lack of interest in this variety of Cuban music. Classic Cuban boleros usually lack an obvious African tinge.²³ Moreover, French music has its own tradition of sentimental love songs. From the 1930s through the 1960s such French performers as the Corsican Tino Rossi (1907–1983) were beloved in Africa.²⁴ The Cuban bolero was not sufficiently different from the French romantic song to wean African audiences away from a musical tradition that already had entranced them. Perhaps the emphatic feminine orientation of bolero also made young African men uncomfortable before the sexual revolution of the1960s. Even as African tastes have shifted in the last twenty years, African audiences of Cuban music have yet to explore this deep well of Cubanidad.²⁵

A greater number of African listeners have been attracted to rural Cuban genres like tonados and puntos. Cubans associate these cultural forms with the peasants and small ranchers of the Cuban interior, los guajiros, who have been mostly descendants of migrants from Spain. Guajira musicians like the guitarist, tresero, and singer Eliades Ochoa like to stress their rural background, sometimes wearing the Cuban equivalent of cowboy hats.²⁶ The unadorned but powerful style of guajira singers like Guillermo Portabales appealed to African sensibilities much more than the exaggerated fervor of bolero crooners.²⁷ The instrumentation of a typical guajiro group, with guitar, tres, bongos, and sometimes a bass, combined for many Africans listeners the best of African and European musical traditions. “Guantanamera,” the most famous guajira song, became an anthem of African Latin musicians as early as the 1960s and is still extensively performed.²⁸ While in Cuba guajiro music resonates with nostalgia for an idyllic rural past, in Senegal it has been associated it with elegance and urbanity. Indeed, guajiro rhythms have become one of the bedrocks of Senegalese salsa and remain extremely popular today.²⁹

Son is the most expansive of all Afro-Cuban musical genres. Musicians have found it malleable and easy to combine with foreign music like jazz. It also has worked well in a wide array of musical settings, from guitar trios to small ensembles to large brass orchestras. An intricate interweaving of African rhythms and vocal styles with European melodies and harmonies, son is a celebrated example of méttisage. The Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, who was among the genre’s first champions, described it as “Cuban counterpoint” and argued that it was a perfect metaphor for Cuban history and culture.³⁰ In a similar vein, the ethnomusicologist Robin Moore pointed out that son was able to link “the culture of the Afrocuban underclasses with that of mainstream society … [widening] the syncretic sphere mediating between realms of African- and Iberian-derived culture.”³¹ This adaptability and cultural inclusiveness enabled son to have the greatest international impact of all Cuban musical forms.

Arriving at a definition of the son form is difficult because of its protean nature. However, Moore has successfully managed to describe its main elements. According to him, a basic son piece has seven musical characteristics. It is in duple meter and employs simple European-derived harmonic patterns (I-V-I-IV-V). It alternates between verse and chorus sections, and it usually contains short instrumental segments, often played on either a tres or trumpet. The three most distinctive features of the son are the use of African-type percussion instruments, the montuno section, and the clave. From the time of the earliest son conjuntos, ensembles used bongo drums to provide propulsive syncopation. Though there doesn’t seem to be any African antecedent for the two small high-pitched drums that make up bongos, black Cuban musicians played them in a style derived directly from African drumming traditions.³² The montuno is the final section of a son, in which the accompanying musicians start playing at a brisker tempo, and the chorus and the sonero take turns rapidly singing strongly rhythmic improvisations. The clave is the heart of the son. Musicians playing in clave emphasize the fourth beat of the 4/4 measure more strongly than the first and lay down a unique bass rhythm, emphasizing the “and-of-2” (the upbeat falling between beats 2 and 3) and “4,” which is generally described as an “anticipated bass.”³³

Son emerged as a cultural form sometime in the nineteenth century in eastern Cuba. Its early history remains obscure. By the first decades of the twentieth century it began to spread to other parts of Cuba, including Havana. Dislocations in the sugar economy in the last part of the nineteenth century and political turmoil spurred the migration of rural black Cubans from the eastern end of the island to the capital. In their new home the migrants introduced their Havana neighbors to the music from their part of Cuba. Isabelle Leymarie, a French writer on Cuban music, suggests that the shifting of Cuban troops in 1909 by then president José M. Gómez was another factor in the diffusion of this regional musical form. Afraid of a coup, Gómez switched the companies stationed in Havana and Oriente (Eastern Cuba). Some of the soldiers who had been garrisoned in Oriente played son; once in Havana, they introduced their music to a whole new audience.³⁴ Initially, the only audience for son music was the poor people living in the roughest Havana barrios. Gradually, however, it gained acceptance from other Cuban social classes and enlarged its listenership. The advent of recording in the first decades of the twentieth century and the rapid growth of Cuban radio in the 1920s were crucial to bringing son to groups who otherwise never would have been exposed to it on a regular basis. By the 1930s it had become one of the national musics of Cuba.

Son’s success in serving as an artistic bridge between black and white Cubans helps explain some of its appeal to Africans in the 1920s and 1930s. They, too, were trying to reconcile the universalist ethos of the colonial European regimes with their more locally based cultures. Just as significantly, by the 1920s son music had become a sign of modernity in avant-garde circles, first in Havana and then in Europe. Though many in the United States have regarded Afro-Cuban music as an inconsequential folkloric style, produced by marginalized Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean, by the late 1920s increasing numbers of European listeners regarded son music as an important art form, on the same level as other distinguished types of popular music like jazz. In 1929, for example, one of the first famous son groups, Septeto Nacional, won a major prize for a performance at the Exposición Ibero-Americana in Seville, Spain. This European embracing of son music as a prestigious cultural form was not only gratifying for black Cubans. Many Africans also took pride in an Africanized modern form of cultural expression’s being equated in the colonial metropole with sophistication and advanced artistic taste.

However, the attraction of son went beyond its lofty role as a mediator between civilizations. The structure of a son piece resembled many African musical traditions, and the montuno, with its improvised call and response between a chorus and a leader, has counterparts in many types of African musical expression. The rhythms of sons also encouraged dance styles compatible with African practice. The clave encouraged the shifting of weight from one leg to another in such a way as to generate a gentle swaying of the hips. While in many African dance traditions hip movements are more accentuated, the dance styles associated with son music clearly had their origins in Africa, not Europe. Because of such shared cultural characteristics, according to the Malian/Nigerien flutist Boncana Maïga, son music provided a mirror for Africans and gave them the aesthetic jolt of hearing familiar rhythms from a new perspective.³⁵ Hearing and dancing to this music that straddled Europe and Africa became a pleasurable way to be at home in the modern world.

On first hearing it, one would think that danzón, the fifth Cuban popular music genre, would hold little interest for African listeners. The style appears to be a by-product of the European ballroom culture: demure, dignified, and slightly formal. Although a connection with an African musical tradition is not immediately apparent, it is there. For at least three decades, starting in the 1950s, a variation of this musical form captivated the Senegalese public, who considered it a fount of sophistication. Even in the twenty-first century there is still a sizable audience for this style of music in Dakar and St.-Louis, where crowds pack the concerts given by touring ensembles, such as Cuba’s Orquesta Aragón, that still include danzones in their repertoire.

To better understand the allure of danzón for the Senegalese, it is useful to analyze the development of the form.³⁶ A closer look reveals that danzón for much of its history has been a distinctly Africanized and Gallicized form of musical expression, as popular with black Cubans as with Iberian Cubans. Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, African and French influences have shaped its evolution. Given the abiding impact of these influences, it is not surprising that Senegalese listeners (and other Francophone audiences in places like the Congo) have felt so comfortable with this genre. Moreover, the fact that Cubans for two centuries have associated this type of music with sociality and respectability has heightened its appeal for Senegalese. It has provided a model for forging a modernity that incorporates pleasure, civility, and embracing global cultural connections.

The origins of danzón lie in the Haitian revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century. With the dismantling of the plantation system there, a number of French planters took refuge in Cuba. They brought with them many of their slaves and their French cultural practices. Included in their cultural baggage was a dance music form, the contradanza (in the Spanish spelling). In some respects similar to US square dances, the contradanza was performed in a fast-paced 2/4 meter. The accompanying musicians often were of African ancestry and, according to Ned Sublette, gradually syncopated the European-derived music by adding such features as the tango rhythmic cell.³⁷ The contradanza quickly found favor with well-born Ibero-Cubans. It became a fashionable leisure time activity, even though it meant that the Cuban elite began dancing in between the beat in African fashion rather than on the beat, which was more characteristic of European ballroom music.

By the 1830s Cubans had indigenized the contradanza by creating a related dance music, danza. The danza had an ABAB form and was danced by couples facing but not touching one another. It began with a paseo, a repeated 8 measure that was good for chatting or resting. A section in 2/4 followed the paseo, and a danza piece would conclude with a section in 6/8. Perhaps in recognition of the humid Cuban climate, the pace of the danza was significantly slower than the contradanza’s. By the 1880s the danza had grown into an immensely popular cultural form, the danzón, which many Cubans in the twentieth century regarded as the true national music of Cuba. The danzón has an ABACAD form (rondo) and is danced by couples, which was a daring innovation for socially conservative nineteenth-century Cuba. Traditionally, it was played at an even more majestic pace than the danza, allowing for a full evening of dancing without exhaustion.³⁸

Originally the instrumentation for danzónes involved woodwinds, brass, and violins, with clarinets and trombones dominating. However, in the first decades of the twentieth century a different kind of orchestra, the charanga francesa, gradually became the preferred ensemble format for playing this genre of Cuban music.³⁹ In these musical groups, led by artists such as Antonio María Romeu (1876–1955), brass instruments disappeared, with their part being taken by the violin section. The woodwinds contracted to just a couple of five-key wooden flutes, and the orchestras featured pianos for the first time.

There is some debate over why Cubans considered this new type of musical organization more French than that of other types of ensembles. The great Cuban flutist José Fajardo maintained that charangas francesas were characteristic of prerevolutionary Haiti and were brought to eastern Cuba by fleeing French planters. Others have pointed out that the addition of a piano made danzón groups more refined, with refinement being associated by Cubans with anything French. Still others have argued that the new emphasis on flutes and violins led to an elegant lightness, qualities the Cubans also connected with the French.⁴⁰ All these hypotheses are equally plausible. Certainly when Senegalese listeners discovered this Cuban musical tradition after World War II, they found this music as elegant, light, and refined as had the Cubans half a century earlier, and they, too, connected these qualities, in part, with French culture.⁴¹ Moreover, they associated the prominence of pianos, flutes, and violins in this type of Cuban music with the prestige of classical music.⁴²

The rise of son music in the 1920s posed a challenge to danzón’s popularity. Faced with diminishing audiences, the leaders of the danzón orchestras began to experiment with modernizing their nineteenth-century sound. In 1929, for example, Aniceto Díaz (1887–1964) devised the danzonete, which deemphasized such traditional rhythms as the cinquillo and added singers to what previously had been an overwhelmingly instrumental form. Most important, however, is that Díaz added a montuno in the danzón’s final section that allowed his musicians to improvise. By so doing, Díaz broke down some of the barriers separating danzón and son and prepared the way for even more important departures from tradition in the 1940s.

In 1937 the flutist Antonio Arcaño (1911–1994) formed a charanga orchestra that was destined to permanently change Cuban music. The musical advances pioneered by Arcaño’s ensemble created a more fluid and percussive sound that was especially appealing to African listeners. Arcaño’s orchestra was path-breaking in a number of respects. It allowed its players, especially its flutists, to improvise much more freely than was the custom during that period. Most of the charanga’s musicians were dark-skinned Cubans, and Arcaño made it a band policy to play frequent engagements at Afro-Cuban social clubs for low fees, or, occasionally, even for no fee at all. Arcaño further grounded his charanga in Afro-Cuban culture by being among the first charangueros to add conga drums to his percussion section.

This immersion in Afro-Cubanismo endowed his ensemble’s music with textures and timbres that were new to Cuban music (the combination of congas, strings, and flutes) but that Senegalese audiences later found familiar and satisfying. Among the many language communities existing within present-day Senegal’s borders, there have been widespread string and flute traditions. A number of groups, especially within the last one hundred years, have given a prominent musical role to the kora, a twenty-one-stringed African harp. The riti, a one-string bowed instrument with a violin-like sound, has also been musically significant in many areas. The xalam/hoddu, a plucked string instrument, has occupied a central place in Wolof and Pulaar/Tukolor musical culture. The Pulaar/Tukolor, who mainly reside in northern Senegal, are also famous for their wooden flutes. In all regions a diverse array of drumming styles continues to flourish. Though Arcaño’s music does not seem to have reached Senegal while he was alive, his influence on other Cuban string and flute orchestras was profound. Unwittingly, by augmenting the instrumental mix of danzón ensembles he paved the way for the vast popularity of Cuban charanga music in Senegal and other parts of Africa in the 1950s.

Arcaño’s revamping of the danzón genre was only one revolution among several that occurred in the 1940s in Cuban music. The blind tres player Arsenio Rodríguez (1911–1970) was similarly transforming son. Other Cuban musicians, like the conguero Chano Pozo (1915–1948), helped initiate bebop jazz in the United States.⁴³ Reveling in their instrumental virtuosity, Cuban musicians delighted in intricate rhythms, dense sonic textures, and dissonant key changes. The music that grew out of this creative ferment, like the mambo, was artistically distinguished but increasingly difficult for Cubans to dance to, not to mention the tourists from the United States who were becoming big consumers of Cuban music. This may have been the reason that the mambo never became hugely popular in Senegal, although its brass-heavy arrangements also may not have been as appealing to Senegalese listeners as the string and flute charangas.⁴⁴

The violinist Enrique Jorrín (1926–1987), who briefly played in Arcaño’s ensemble before becoming musical director of the charanga Orquesta America, noticed that dancers were having trouble adjusting to the complicated new syncopation of music like the mambos of Beny Moré. Rather than shifting their weight between the beat, they were moving on the second and fourth beats of the bar, out of sync with the music. Jorrín resolved to create a new offshoot of the danzón tradition that would be easier for dancers to master but that would still preserve some of the rich sonority and rhythmic complexity of the 1940s style.⁴⁵ His nuevo ritmo came to be called cha-cha-chá, supposedly from the sound of dancer’s feet shuffling on the dance floor and the rhythmic accompaniment of the güiro and the timbales.⁴⁶ In 1950 Jorrín wrote “La engañadora,” which became the first big cha-cha-chá hit. The song initiated a global boom for Cuban music similar to what had transpired with “El manisero” when it became a worldwide hit in 1930.⁴⁷ The cha-cha-chá became a sensation in New York, Paris, London, and Dakar, where its popularity continues to this today.

For many Senegalese who came of age in the 1950s, the cha-cha-chá and later its variant, the pachanga, exemplified modernity. The musical forms sounded sleek and smooth, the aural equivalent of the smartly tailored uniforms the Cuban charanga musicians wore on their record covers. Even the dance attached to the music was streamlined, shorn of extraneous movement (and easy to learn). More than listeners elsewhere, the Senegalese were aware that the cha-cha-chá and the pachanga were the result of a centuries-long interaction among Spanish, French, and African music. It was a global cultural “movement” wherein African culture met European “civilization” on equal terms, without being peripheralized or exoticized. In the words of the noted Dakar recording engineer Aziz Dieng, the cha-cha-chá “is a mix of African music and classical music. It has the ambience of classical music.”⁴⁸

Just as significantly, the cha-cha-chá / pachanga phenomenon combined contemporaneity with decorum. In so doing, it inspired young Senegalese to create a “local” modernity that allowed them to be polished, worldly, and resolutely African.⁴⁹ In subsequent eras, first US soul music and funk and then hip-hop similarly created spaces where African publics could explore new ways of being in the world. However, none of the subsequent waves of popular music had the enduring influence of Afro-Cuban music. It ultimately constituted a foundation that other musical genres could build on but never totally displace.