“Cuba Libre”

This chapter explores musical and political evolution of Cuba in the early 20th century. Cuba provides an interesting condensation of the history of the Caribbean region where sugar and slavery were the dominating and defining features of society. Musical developments in Cuba demonstrate this history on a cultural plane, and by examining the music of the Rumba and the Son in the pre-revolutionary Cuban context and their confluence and cross-fertilization in the 20th century, we can glimpse dynamics of national and regional consciousness, ethnic and cultural identification, class formations and power, slave culture, experience and expression, the transitions of emancipation and urbanization, and the different rhythms of industrial production and modern labor-discipline. The Cuban counterpoint of the Rumba/Son complex reveals the complex interrelations between modes of production and musical formations and the polyrhythmic tensions of race, class, and nation.

Introduction1

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. —Ralph Ellison Black music has always been a tremendous source of information and inspiration for musicians, dancers, and music lovers. Listening to the music opens new worlds and windows onto the rich history of black music, society, and struggle in the circum-Caribbean, and provides a rich archive of the creative musical genius of the African diaspora. Music always expresses the interrelationships of movement, memory, and history, but this is preeminently true of the music of the African diaspora. This book uses music as both optic and focus, to examine and rethink both the modes of black cultural production and social formations in the African diaspora. The music has always been both an expression of “black” life and part of the philosophy that developed and emerged with that life, “as history and as art” (...

“Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse”

This chapter examines the rise and development of calypso in Trinidad. Trinidad is a rich site to explore issues of diaspora and historical development in the Caribbean since the island has the dubious distinction of being subject to all the major imperial powers in the region. Calypso is quintessentially urban, developed in the late 19th century through the intermingling of the largely once-rural proletariat, unemployed and under-employed ex-slaves, and formerly indentured Africans and other Creoles in the burgeoning city of Port-of-Spain. The music emerged from and was developed in the barrack yards, stick-fights, carnival tents, and city streets, and became a national music and symbol. This period is also one in which the economic penetration of the British into the island was transformed into formal political and ideological control, thus illuminating inter-imperialist rivalries and transformations, and the complications of political transition in a “plural society.”

Conclusion

What is funky is history, what comes goes. —Amiri Baraka The popular musics of the circum-Caribbean present us with a rich mosaic of the expressions and experiences of the people of the African diaspora. The music articulates history, memory, myth, and contemporary reality; its feelingfulness derives from its ability to simultaneously re-present the past and the present, and through rootwork and polyrhythm, the continuous innovation of the tradition. The music remembers Africa in diaspora, and listening to black music informs us of the dialectics of history and cultural memory, as well as the interpenetrations of sound, sentiment, movement, and pleasure: the politics of participation. “Because participation models style, reinforces the feel of the groove, strengthens the naturalness of it, keeps it from the realm of abstraction and keeps it in practice” (...

“Cosa Nuestra”

This chapter explores the history of Salsa in New York City. In the late 1960’s Salsa became the vehicle for the cultural expressions of community, aesthetics, and identity for the Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans, and other Latinos. Salsa was a musical celebration and valorization of Nuyorican identity and became the voice of the alienated and disenfranchised barrio youth in New York City and beyond. Though in the main, its practitioners heralded from the Puerto Rican diaspora: from its very inception “salsa” has been a pan-Caribbean creation. With the Cuban Revolution, the subsequent recording ban of 1961 and the embargo of 1962, New York City displaced Havana as the center of Latin music. After the brief but rich Boogaloo explosion of the mid-Sixties, salsa took over the airwaves and dance-floors. If Boogaloo can be seen as an anticipation of and response to the Civil Rights movement, salsa was “Black Power.”

Dedicated to the Struggle

This chapter examines the transformations in Black creative music in the post-World War II period. This period is particularly rich politically and musically, and this chapter explores some of the conversations and connections between musical ideas and visions of liberation. The changing configurations of post-war geopolitics (symbolized by the Bandung Conference), the heightened tenor of the Civil Rights struggle in the US (particularly after the Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling), and the beginnings of the long politics of decolonization in the Caribbean and on the African continent conjoined to open up a critical, conceptual, and geographic space for the articulation of new political identities, as well as musical sensibilities. By focusing on a group of musicians including Max Roach, Art Blakey, Abbey Lincoln, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Yusef Lateef, and Randy Weston, this chapter investigates some of the creative linkages and artistic ties that were formed and forged.