Cuba: Song and dance.

If the Jazz Age produced some of Havana’s most striking architecture, it was also one of the most artistic and culturally fertile periods in Cuban History. It was during this time when the rumba was born.
Cuban music is yet another example of “transculturation”, containing ingredients as diverse as Yoruba drumming rituals and songs of the Spanish student ensembles called tunas. What became the known as the son probably began as street music played in Havana’s poor black neighbourhoods, such as La Vibora or Jesus del Monte. Before the 1920s, son musicians were often persecuted by the police confiscated their bongos and maracas. But the infectious rhythm and bawdy lyrics caught on. Many of the early bands played in the degraded underworld like the Havana Sport, but by 1926, the Sepeto Habanero and others performed at the upmarket Hotel Plaza.
The legitimization of son coincided with the rise of a powerful new medium: radio. The first national radio broadcast in Cuba took place on October 10, 1922, when staion PWX transmitted the inaugural speech of President Zayas. Within a few years, radio was ubiquitous in Havana and transmitters could be found in bodegas, barber shops, and cafes, even catering to the cigar rollers in the factories. Radio stations multiplied, often with U.S. backing. By 1933, there were sixty two on the island, surprassing any other country in Latin America. Although radio stations initially played classical music, they soon catered to popular taste and the son was rapidly disseminated to middle-class listeners.
Cuban musicians played in New York, often in Harlem. Since there was no Cuban recording industry, the first son recordings were made there such as a 78-record cut the Septeto Habanero in 1920. The breakthrough came in 1930, when Antonio Machin sand “El Manisero” composed by Moises Simons and first recorded by Rita Montaner in 1928. It was inspired the traditional cry of of street vendor (progonero), a familiar figure in Habana Vieja. Each with a distinctive call, progoneros sold everything from buttons to pastries, but most common were peanuts sold in tightly rolled cones of newspapers. “El Mansero” was an instant hit in New York, and Machin went on to record it with RCA Victor. It would become one of the most popular songs on twentieth century with renditions of it done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to the Beatles. It appeared in the 1931 film Cuban Love Song and sold over 1 million copies of sheet music.
The popularity of “El Manisero” launched the Rumba craze, not just in the united states but in Europe as well. Strictly speaking, the rumba is not music, but rather dance. It was started by a couple and generally accompanied by bongos. The lewd, suggestive nature of their movements led it to be banned, like the son, but a safer commercialized version was soon being performed at the 1933 World’s fair in Chicago. Rumba eventually lost its original meaning and came to stand for Cuban music in general and specifically the son, which remains unpronounceable in English (somewhere between “son” and “song”).
Bands began appearing regularly in New York, encouraged by the success of Xavier Cugat, a Cuban bandleader who opened the Waldorf-Astoria in 1932. Musicians followed the Vanguardia to Paris, where Josephine Baker was the toast of the town. There were soon rumba clubs throughout Montmartre. The peanut vendor himself, Moises Simons, performed at a cabaret called Melody’s Bar and together with Carpentier organized a concert at the Club du Faubourg.
Rumba lived on in permutations such as mambo (which enjoyed its own heyday in the 1950s) and the omnipresent salsa. But son itelf staged an unexpected comeback when musician Ry Cooder visited Havana in 1997 and discovered it. The results was an abum called the Buena Vista Social Club, a mega-hit that was the subject of an award-winning movie by German director Wim Wenders. Though the songs benefited from Cooder’s state-of-the-art production facilities, they were hardly sanitized for a mainstream audience. They range from sappy love songs to raunchy tunes full of double entendres. Together with sexual innuendos are obscure references to Santeria and lyrics from Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who visited Havana in the 1930s. Many of the musicians who hadn’t performed for years, went on tour and played to packed houses throughout the world, from New York to Amsterdam. One of them, Compay Segundo, was virtually unknown outside of Cuba until the Buena Vista Social Club. He died in 2003 at the age of ninety six, presumably a happy man.

To listen to El Manisero: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj7NfrrnaKE