Piece Description

Ned Sublette, in his irresistible, virtually danceable history of Cuba and Its Music, makes the argument that Cuba was, and remains, the locus of the “tectonic collision” of the deepest plates of African and European musical expression. 

Listen to Ned Sublette count the ways in which our music comes from Cuba, and let your ears decide. Jazz drum kits, he says, added hi-hats to simulate Cuban polyrhythms. He makes it clear that Richard Berry’s rock’n'roll classic “Louie Louie” and Richie Valens’ “La Bamba” were straight steals. All rock’n'roll, Ned Sublette likes to say, is derived from the Cuban cha-cha-cha. 

Texas born in 1951, Ned Sublette was a singer-songwriter in the country mode until a visit to Cuba in 1990 changed everything. Twenty-some visits since then made him an aficionado and then a scholar of the scene and its very long history. Cuba turned him into a record producer, a photographer and prolific writer. As he says: “My life is divided into before and after that first trip to Cuba.”

In the 3rd segment of the show:

I asked Robero Zurbano for the impossible: a short course on Cuban music today. Teacher, critic, sometime radio deejay and music historian — Roberto Zurbano graciously insisted that Cuba — fabulously fertile in genres, rhythms, virtuoso (and village) performers — is one musical jurisdiction in the world where Desert Island Discs and the pruning it requires might be illegal.

And still he gave it a shot. In a single conversation here at the Casa de Las Americas in Havana, we are trying to justify Zurbano’s premise that, as he says,”the most important thing about Cuban music is the indirect way musicians are always talking about what’s going on in Cuba,” and also to account for the waves that Cuban music has never stopped making in the US, Europe, Africa and Japan.

 Also to make some mention of Cuban rock music and a hit rap group like Ogguere; younger stars like Goza Pepillo emerging from the Interactivo band; the social criticism of feminist rappers; the jazz innovations in rumba sounds by Maraca, for example; and the adaptation of conga drumming to symphonic music by Grupo Sur Caribe.