Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave

by russell

Last Friday, Joe put up a post about Bad Bunny. That led to a discussion of reggaeton, which took a side trip into rhumba, which sent me off down a rabbit hole about clave.

Joe very kindly asked if he could use my comment as this week’s music post, which was more than cool with me. But I thought it might be good to expand it a bit, and in particular to include something that would let you all hear the rhythms involved.

So, here we go.

Clave refers to a family of rhythms that provide the organizing principle of the music of the African Diaspora, and in particular in the Caribbean basin. Cuba, Puerto Rico, a lot of South America, Brazil, New Orleans. The music is constructed by multiple interlocking parts that all stand in some rhythmic relation to the underlying clave rhythm. They aren’t necessarily the same as the clave, but they relate to the clave rhythm in some audible way. These various parts may come and go, may shift and change, but the clave DOES NOT CHANGE.

This idea – the concept of a small rhythmic cell as the organizing principle of a piece of music – is ubiquitous in the musics of sub-Saharan Africa. The particular clave rhythms found in Afro-Cuban music are largely derived from a common African bell pattern typically known as bembe. Here is a short-ish video of me yapping away and walking through the evolution of bembe to the son and rhumba claves in Cuba with some stream of consciousness side trips.

And yeah, I pretty much talk like that. Tie my hands down and I am mute.

As I mention in the video, the rhythms that are used in this way – whether in Africa or the Caribbean – are examples of Euclidean rhythms. Very very briefly, a Euclidean rhythm is one in which the beats are distributed as evenly as possible across the underlying grid or pulse, in ways which can be analyzed in terms of the greatest common divisor between the number of cells in the grid and the number of strokes played.

Math nerds represent! Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm

An excellent video explanation, except for the… musical mistakes (smh):

The analysis has given rise to a plethora of software modules that will algorithmically generate “world music rhythms”, but humans have been playing these for thousands of years. Bang two sticks together, and Bob’s your uncle. But I digress…

So here is what this stuff sounds like in actual music.

Bembe, as it shows up in Abakua, a folkloric music and dance style. Listen to the bell:

A very folkloric version of guaguanco, one of the three traditional rhumba styles. The guy hitting two sticks (the sticks are also called “claves”) together at the beginning is playing the clave, which at first sounds (to me) like son, but then seems to turn into rhumba. This is a pretty good example of the time feel being in the cracks between duple and triple meter. Sounds “sloppy” in a way, but these guys know exactly what they’re doing. Listen to how the rhythm played on the bamboo tube (the “guagua”) locks in with clave:

A less folkloric but still pretty rootsy guaguano featuring the great Orlanda “Puntilla” Rios, a commanding figure in the Caribbean / New York nexus. Rios is also known for his mastery of bata oro seco, the magisterial drums-and-voice-only liturgical music of santeria. Guaguanco is also a dance, where the man tries to win over the woman with his skillful hip thrusts and steal her hankie. Don’t ask me, I’m just reporting the facts. I love this video, and when they break into the call-and-answer stuff at about 4:30 and the dancers get up, it gotta say it lifts my heart, no matter how many times I watch this.

A rhumba Yambu, another of the traditional rhumba styles. Yambu is another couples dance, but slower, more fluid and graceful, and with no stealing of hankies.

Rhumba Columbia, the third of the traditional rhumba styles. Faster, rhumba clave, more of a triple feel. The dance for Columbia is basically the guys showing off. Yes, it’s a macho culture.

A straight up salsa classic, “Pedro Navaja” by the great Ruben Blades. You’ll hear a very clear son clave played by the keyboard player starting about 16 seconds in. At about 1:15 you’ll see the bass player and timbale player clap out the clave to basically school somebody who has the clave backward, i.e., they’re playing the 2 part where the 3 part should be and vice versa. That is THE CARDINAL SIN of Latin music performance, basically the equivalent of clapping on 1 and 3. The “Mack The Knife” thing Blades does at the beginning is because “Pedro Navaja” is basically the Mack The Knife story in Spanish. “Pedro Navaja” translates to “Peter the Blade”.

I pretty much love Latin music.

https://www.cubanet.org/htdocs/CNews/y00/jun00/12e9.htm#:~:text=Cuba%20News-,NY%20Times,June%2011%2C%202000