Music by Ruben Sindo Acosta - “Como lo veo yo” or “the way I see it” from his short film Lending The Machete.

My love of Cuban music truly began at family parties. In the 70% Cuban city of Hialeah, FL, we would clear all the furniture out of our living room for the dance floor. My dad would play record after record on the turntable, keeping our huge Cuban family dancing in their nicest dress clothes. Myself and all my cousins had to stay on the dance floor where our parents could see us and much to our dismay, we had to dance. After the party, my mom and I would mop all the black marks, from everyone’s dress shoes, off the tile and put the furniture back. We’d mop in silence mostly. Often I had a small section of a song stuck in my head. I was young enough that my musical development had just begun to progress out of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, these songs became like extended nursery rhymes to me. Decades later, I find myself often making playlists for curious friends of all my favorite Cuban music. There are hundreds of incredible artists I love, but three always make the cut on these playlists. Maria Teresa Vera, Cachao and Arsenio Rodriguez.

The granddaughter of formerly enslaved plantation workers, Maria Teresa Vera was born in 1895 in Guanajay, Cuba. Having lost her father before her birth, she was baptized with her mother’s maiden name. She would get in trouble with the nuns at her Catholic school for singing African Yoruba songs instead of praying. Maria played a Cuban style of music called Trova, a rural folk style named after the troubadours who would travel with their guitars singing songs to earn a living, mostly in Santiago de Cuba. She was a complete anachronism, an independent unmarried woman who insisted on playing guitar and leading her own band. To me, her style feels like a mix of French singer Edith Piaf’s melancholic righteousness and American Blues legend Robert Johnson’s earnest grit. She predates both of these artists. Becoming popular at the dawn of gramophone records, her duo with Rafael Zaguiera recorded hundreds of songs together between 1916 until Rafael’s death in 1924. She formed the incredibly influential Sexteto Occidente from 1926-1933, exploring the Son Cubano style,  a mixture of Spanish vocal style, lyrical meter and Tres guitar with a prominent clave rhythm and African percussion. With a distinctly Caribbean fee, ghostly group singing, a bed of bass, 2 guitars, clave and shaker with impassioned bongos. It’s psychedelic music. In 1935 she formed a duo with Lorenzo Hierrezuelo that would last until her retirement in 1962. In that time she would record her most renowned composition, “Viente Anos”  a heartbreaking ballad about faded love that has become a standard. She is known as the mother of Cuban song.

The tune that grabbed my teenage attention the most was “Sobre Una Tumba, Una Rumba” ( “Rumba on a Tomb”). The opening guitar riffs sounded exactly like the newest Mars Volta album that had dropped and the lyrics were just as twisted. Maria and Lorenzo open the song playing complimentary guitar melodies. In a tender and morose two part harmony, they sing of a woman who betrayed her heart and she asks the gravedigger to plant a sharp and prickly thistle tree to “remember her as she was”. Then Maria insists that  “instead of wishing her rest in requiem, hope she goes to hell and the devil does her well”. She suggests they inscribe the music of this song in place of her epitaph and finally, she implores the gravedigger not to cry for her betrayer insisting she’s in hell. The vocal refrain of “Don’t cry for her” vamps as the full percussion comes in with a swagger that is as biting as the lyrical content.

Before I learned to appreciate the lyricism of Maria Teresa Vera, at 8 years old I got four simple bass notes stuck in my head for about a week. The opening riff to Cachao’s 1957 musical diamond “Descarga Cubana”. I’ve always viewed Cachao as the Cuban version of American Jazz behemoth Charles Mingus, a monstrous and passionate upright bass player and composer.  Israel “Cachao” Lopez was born in the same house as Cuban poet and national treasure, Jose Marti in 1918. Raised among a family of conservatory-trained classical musicians, he began playing bongos at 8 and moved to his primary instrument, the bass, a year later. He performed with the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra at age 10 where he needed to stand on a box to play his bass. From 1937 to 1949, Cachao and his brother, pianist Orestes Lopez, were composing an average of 14 songs a week, literally thousands of songs, with the group Arcaño y Sus Maravillas. Danzón was the popular style at the time, a hybrid of European classical music with subtle African percussion. In 1938, they composed an accelerated version of Danzón with a syncopated closing section left open to solos from the players where rhythmic innovation elevated the music. The song title was “Mambo” a word meaning “story” or “tale” used by Lucumís, Cubans of West African descent. By the 1950’s Cachao became a respected bandleader in his own right. As an upright bass player, he brought the rhythm section to the forefront. His band would play at popular casinos in Havana from 7pm until 4am, 6 nights a week. After their sets, Cachao would have the band go into the studio before the sun would come up to record extended jam sessions called “Descargas” where the band would vamp on a theme while band members played expressive percussive solos.

You can feel the walls breathe on “Redencion” from the stellar 1962 album “Jam Session with Feeling”. Recorded in Havana in 1958, you can hear the size of the wooden room as the instruments slowly come in. The song opens with bass and timbales’ shells setting the tempo before the Tres guitar comes in with a hypnotic octave riff resembling an India raga. Piano chords enter, cutting the groove in half-time as double time guiro, bongos and congas join in lifting the music and revealing the full groove of the song. Trumpets weave through complimentary melodies like two friends telling the same story at the same time, each in their own words. A quick and effortless rhythmic break leads to a series of solos announced by the vocalist like a variety show. The band drops back into the hypnotic octave refrain and the tight two part vocal harmonies sing the song’s only lyric. A line that feels both playful and stoic to me, “Redemption is for you to enjoy”.

In 1958, Cachao’s wife fled Cuba with their daughter as the Cuban revolution was at its violent peak. Four years later, he joined them and began performing around the world with legends like Tito Puente, Perez Prado, Machito and Tito Rodriguez. Cachao was heavily in demand as he was practically worshipped by these younger players. The greatest of these collaborations was the 1967 album “Patato y Totico” where he played alongside another massively influential figure, Arsenio Rodriguez. This session marks the only collaboration between Arsenio and Cachao.

The small ensemble of congas, percussion, bass, tres and vocals recorded in New York City for Verve. That same year Verve released both The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa’s debut albums.

Arsenio Rodriguez was born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1911. His parents had Kongo origins and were practitioners of Palo Monte, an Afro-Cuban religion like Abacua and Santeria, whose music is deeply ingrained in Latin rhythms. He was the third of fifteen children. Arsenio lost his eyesight when a horse kicked him in the head at age 7. Shortly after the accident, he took an interest in music. He and his brother played various drums at rural parties as well as Palo Monte and Santeria ceremonies. Here he was exposed to Son Cubano. When a hurricane destroyed their family home in 1926, Arsenio’s family moved to Havana where he began playing in various bands. For all his innovations as a composer and bandleader, his personal style on the Tres cannot go unmentioned. Heavy set, and short in both stature and temper, Arsenio Rodriguez would often start fights at bars and jam sessions and his solo style reflects his caustic genius. In 1952, Arsenio moved to the US, tired of the blatant racism and corruption of the mob-run casinos in Cuba. While in New York he played on sessions with legends like Machito, Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie. His playing on the 1957 Blue Note album “Palo Congo” by Sabu Martinez is a perfect showcase of his playing in its savage yet sage prime. His solo on the song “Choferito” effortlessly melts time with spastic bursts that land in just the right spot and usually not where you expect.

Arsenio developed a style of Son Cubano that incorporated the rhythms of Palo Monte, complex unison of breaks, contrapuntal horn melodies, dance music minded instrumental climaxes and a deconstructed song structure based on cycles rather than verse or chorus. He repurposed the name for mountain songs and called his style, Son Montuno. In the 1940’s Arsenio band was the most successful and critically acclaimed in Cuba. His addition of multiple horn players, as well as the conga drum set the template for Cuban music and eventually Salsa. Just as Daptone Records respectfully revisited Soul music from decades prior, New York Salsa legends Fania Records emulated and contemporarily adapted Arsenio Rodriguez’s Son Montuno.

Maria Teresa Vera, Cachao and Arsenio Rodriguez are only a fraction of the amazing music from Cuba, but I feel they are each an excellent entry point for beginners and an endless source of new sounds for music explorers. I’ve been obsessed with this music for over 3 decades and still find new recordings that blow me away. I can’t recommend it enough.