AMAZING EXPERIENCE - Week of November 15th to the 21st, 2009
Last week I went to Cuba on Monday night and I had such a great time I went again on Thursday night. How's that you say? Well, maybe I should be a little more specific. Read on.
Actually, Cuba came to me - Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñeiro was here all week and I had the extreme pleasure of not only watching them play but I also got to spend time with them, some old mutual friends and some new ones back stage on both nights that I saw them ( -- thanks and a shout-out to "mi consorte", Gabe Romero who piloted my flight down... stairs that is!) . It was an experience I will never forget.
Many of my contemporary Latin music colleages where in attendance as well as a few Latin music All-stars and celebs including Johnny Pacheco, Ismael Miranda and even that Cuban music fan and record collector, the actor Matt Dillon.
Hanging out one-on-one with your heroes is always an enlightening experience. This was by no means an exception to the rule. Later I was recalling the experience and thought to myself "wait, here is the band that not only first coined the word Salsa in relation to this music (they wrote the quintessential tune "Echale Salsita") but they also spearheaded many other milestones in traditional Cuban Son and was one of the three or four main bands that invented the genre from the ground up". -- Since Cuban music in turn influenced everything in popular music from North American Jazz to the Beatles and Stones to Reggae to Rock and on and on, one can surmise that this original handfull of Cuban pioneers influenced virtualy all the popular music we hear today in a very profound and long lasting way.
Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñeiro was founded in 1927 on the heals of Septeto Habanero who made the very first recordings of a Son in October of the previous year for Victor Records. At this point these early Son ensembles relied merely on the bongo as their main percussion instrument. Clave, güiro and maracas where also in the mix as far as the minor percussion was concerned, but the bongosero alone really drove the music with that familiar thrust of a steady locomotive (the inclusion of the tumbadora [conga drum] was still more than two decades away!). At this point bongo players in Son ensembles had no main rhythm pattern, rather, they would riff independently throughout the entire song.
It was only after percusionist Agustin Gutierrez, who in 1929 joined Piñeiro's septet, divised the "martillo" pattern (pronounced mar-TI-yo and meaning "hammer" - Gutierez was a brick layer in his day job) that the bongo had a fixed rhythmic pattern associated to it. The martillo pattern consists of a steady driving patter or ostinato of eigth notes woven around the clave with only some riffing here and there within the pattern itself. It is at this very point that the genras of Changui and Son separate. By definition, Changui uses the pre-Martillo independant style of playing only.
Gutierrez invented this pattern because, due to the public's insatiable demand for this new musical genre in the days of the Fox Trot and Ragtime Jazz, the fledgling Son bands of the day still had a small repertoir and so they started to include Bolero's in their repertoirs to satisfy the public's insatiabe desire for anything they had to offer. Such a rhythmic pattern was more appropriate for the format of the slow and sultry Bolero than all the riffing the bongo did in the more piqaunt Son Montuno tunes. In time the martillo pattern became permenantly associated with the Bolero genre as it eventualy did later with Son Montuno. Soon all the other bongo players in Cuba followed suit. Today, many decades later, it is considered the traditional method for playing bongo and the basic from which a bongosero's rhythmic vocabulary stems.
Ignacio Piñeiro also wrote numerous tunes that today are not only considered the most basic songs in the repertoire of the Son genre but also familiar to any Cuban or Latin American person young and old alike. Some of the tunes Piñeiro made famous and most of which he wrote include Mayeya No Juegues Con Los Santos, Bardo, Guanajo Relleno, Suavecito, Esas No Son Cubanas and many other standards. It is said he wrote over 600 songs in all.
Today, more than 84 years after it's inception, the band is in it's fourth generation and sounds like it stepped out of a time machine with "El Raspa" Eugenio Rodriguez as the lead singer -- previously the main singer was none other than Carlos Embale who was, as Juan de Marcos of Afro-Cuban Allstars fame once said, one of the very finest voices to come out of Cuba in the Twentieth Century and one of my all-time favorite vocalists.
One of the reasons I enjoyed this experience so much is because when you rub elbows with cats like this, you receive, as they say in the martial arts world, "secret teachings", that you can't get from a book, record or even music school. These teachings can only be gained when cats like this take you under their wing and decide to share with you. Among so many other things, they told me to listen to the old bands and do as they do and just give it my own flavor when I'm the one playing. "...that's how you do this music."
Frank Oropesa "El Matador" who is a mutual friend of my good friend Roman Diaz was especialy warm and had much advice to offer me in my musical endeavors. Please check out the blog at a later date for more as frank was kind enough to offer me his contact information in Havana and asked me to stay in touch.
See
www.septetonacional.com for more on this legendary band
