American Popular Music

Lesson 5 - The Latin American Stream - Page 2

Latin American Musical Influences

Music from Latin America has been a constant presence in American popular music, even if it rarely seems to dominate the mainstream like music from the Anglo-American and African-American streams. But in just about every decade we can find music that shows its influence in one way or another.

When we look at music from the Latin American stream, we are faced with an impressive variety of music, from the Argentine tango, to the Cuban rhumba, to Mexican mariachi music. We can note a few general characteristics, however.  Music from the Caribbean and South America tends to feature a much more extensive percussion section than music from the Anglo or African streams. The rhythm section of a band playing Latin music will likely have at least one percussionist in addition to the drum kit, if not two or three! This density of percussion is in no small part due to the fact that the sugar plantations in Latin America did not suppress the drums and African traditions among their slave populations to the extent that slaveowners in the American south did. Thus, the African musical and religious traditions we read about in Unit 4 remained more or less intact, even if the African deities were essentially replaced by the Christian God and various Catholic saints and combined with rituals from Africa. The Brazilian candomblé religion, along with the Haitian voodoo and other traditions, are a result of this combination. The dense percussion of West African music likewise remained an important part of Latin American music. As an example, compare these two video clips and note the strong similarities:

• West African Ceremony
  Pay attention to the sheer density of the sound, how there are many different percussion instruments…which sometimes work against each other in polyrhythm. The singing and melodic components are in short melodic phrases, and there is some call and response. The dancing is in a ring, and it’s also worth noting that *everybody* seems to be participating. There is not really a sense of an audience and a performer, but rather a communal experience.
• Puerto Rican “Bomba”
  Note how the dense, polyrhythmic percussion is overlaid with short call-and-response phrases. The ring around the central dancing area here marks off the space for individual dancers to enter.  Also, check out how the dancers interact with the lead drummer in a sort of improvisational game.

Although this kind of rhythmic density can seem quite overwhelming and “busy,” there are a number of rhythmic ideas that keep it all together.  Much West African music relies on a bell cycle, a repeating rhythmic pattern usually played on a bell. It keeps the beat, but also introduces a certain complexity right off the bat. Here is a bell cycle demonstrated by Jerry Leake, a percussion instructor at the New England Conservatory of Music. Notice how the pattern interacts with the beat but also provides a lot of syncopation (try to clap along with it for a better idea!). Here is the same concept in a drum ensemble, here played literally on a pair of cow bells.

In Latin America, a very similar concept underpins numerous genres of music, particularly dance styles. The practice with the most obvious roots in the bell cycle is the clave rhythm, a similarly syncopated pattern one finds over and over again in Latin American music. In some ways it is a good bit simpler than the African bell cycle we just saw, but it still introduces an awful lot of syncopation right off the bat.

In this short clip, the lead drummer in the middle introduces the rhythm before the gentleman to the left wearing a ball cap picks it up and plays it on the claves, a pair of resonant wooden rods.  Try to clap along while tapping your foot to the beat. Note how some of the clave notes line up with the beat while others do not.

The clave rhythm or a variant of it is pervasive in many different types of Latin American and Latin-influenced music. Here are just a few examples, but they’ll also give us an idea of the wide influence Latin music has had in the U.S.A. In each one, try to clap or tap your finger along with the clave while keeping the beat with your foot!

• Don Azpiazu, “El Manicero” (1930)
  This was one of the first authentically Cuban songs to really break through in the United States, and Don Azpiazu’s version was a phenomenon.
• Fats Domino, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” (1953)
  Because of its proximity to the Caribbean and its unique mix of African, Anglo, and French culture, New Orleans was a hot bed of Latin-influenced music in the USA.
• Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley” (1955)
  Here the clave rhythm makes its way into rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and its influence only grew from here. There are likely a number of folks out there who associate the rhythm primarily with this song!
• Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive” (1958)
• The Strangeloves, “I Want Candy” (1965)       
  Our final example here has been covered by the 80s faux-punk one-hit-wonders Bow Wow Wow, teen idol Aaron Carter, and former Spice Girl Melanie C.

Music from Brazil also made its way to the United States, particularly the samba. Listen to the song “Brazil” on your CDs but also check out this Disney cartoon “Aqualera do Brazil,” in which Donald Duck meets a Brazilian parrot named Jose Carioca (“carioca” is a term for Brazilian urbanites in Rio de Janiero). It contains an excellent demonstration of the percussion-driven polyrhythm underlying samba and many other Latin styles.  As your text notes, “Brazil” is also particularly interesting because of the differences between its original Portuguese lyrics and the English lyrics that were put onto it later. In this side-by-side comparison, we can see that the original lyrics are full of references to local Brazilian culture and the candomblé religion. These were purged from the English version in favor of lyrics about nostalgic love, which certainly makes the song more universally relatable even as it effectively bleaches out some of its “Brazilian-ness”