His beaded, dreadlocked hair stuffed under a rainbow-colored hat, his tres strapped across his shoulders, he picked out fast, heavily syncopated leads that conjured everything from gypsy flamenco to fat-back funk.
He played so hard he snapped a string and -- no mean feat -- danced furiously as he played until, seemingly overcome by the rhythms, he shook his head from side to side and sank to his knees, rolling on his back, tongue lolling out like some Afro-Cuban Jimi Hendrix.
At Salon Rosado de la Tropicale, where thousands had gathered to dance, the effect was electrifying. Groups of young mulatta girls shook convulsively as if stricken with palsy.
"Before I owned a tres I used to go to the railway station near my home and sit there playing a yagua -- a long hard leaf which I attached nylon strings to," Coto, drenched in sweat, says afterwards. "I grew up in the Easternmost part of Cuba -- in Guantanamo, near an old sugar mill. My father was a great tresero. He died when I was 8 years old, and he never had the chance to teach me. But the sound of the tres was left engraved in my soul."
"The tres was invented in Oriente -- specifically in the hills of Barracoa," says Helio Orovio, an Havana-based ethnomusicologist and author of Diccionario de la Musica Cubana. "The musicians there wanted to make an instrument with a unique sound that couldn't be created by the guitar. So they made the first tres from boxes used to carry bottles of rum, and strung it with metal wire."
With its three sets of double steel strings -- two tuned in octaves -- and ringing, high-pitched sound, the tres was an orchestra unto itself. Played at the mouth of the sound hole, it could create a sensation of musical free fall; played near the bridge, it conjured the scraping rhythm of the notched guiro. A descendant of the guitar and the Egyptian oud, it developed under the influence of melodic and rhythmic concepts that originated in Africa and Haiti as well as Spain.
As early as 1870, on a farm near Santiago, treseros were playing changui, a dance music that had a five-beat rhythmic pattern called cinquillo, and used such Cuban instruments as maracas, marimbula, bongo and the guiro. Whites and blacks played changui, which some claim is the grandfather of Cuba's popular music, called son. But this much is known: son crystallized near the turn of the century in Oriente and started arriving in Havana around 1909, just as rumba was traveling in the opposite direction.
At first, son was popularized by small combos that included guitars, bongos and harmonicas, as well as by large choral groups. But when the Sexteto Habanero formed in 1920 with tres, guitar, bongo, bass and two vocalists who also doubled on the wooden clave sticks and maracas, a classic sound was forged.
The tres was the heart of son, an art from that would conquer the world and come to stand for much more than music. Just as American blues and jazz transcended their musical boundaries to describe a state of mind, so son came to embody Cuban culture. A shout of defiance, a style of movement, a lament of the soul or a ritual display of dancing bodies, son was national identity distilled into melody, harmony and rhythm. And while Afro-Spanish music erupted all over the Caribbean, none of it, from Puerto Rican bomba to West Indian steel band music, had the musical depth of son.
"Cuban son is the most influential element in Latin American music. And that's because of Cuba's unique history," says John Santos, a San Francisco-based musicologist, teacher, bandleader and percussionist who's studied the evolution and influence of Afro-Cuban music. "Because of the Moorish influence in Spain, Cuba received Islamic music of a spiritual nature. That music came into Spain and then traveled to the New World and blended with other African spiritual music from West and Central Africa, some of which also has Islamic roots. Son is Afro-Hispanic. But not all of its rhythms are African, and not all of its melodies and lyrics are Spanish."
"When son came to Havana, it became more urban, and the five-beat cinquillo disappeared altogether. Son was played in 2/4 and 4/4 time, and it had a three-two clave," Helio Orovio says, sitting on the terrace of his rooftop apartment in Havana, tapping out the pattern on a wooden table: pa-PA pause -- PA-pa-pa. "In Oriente, it was the music of mulattoes. But now, in 1920s, Havana son became blacker as it mixed with rumba."
Rumba was the other astonishing Afro-Cuban creation of the 19th century, forged by slaves improvising rhythms on wooden boxes called cajons: a re-imagining, not a replication, of African rhythm. Musicians and scholars still debate whether rumba originated in Matanzas, a major slave port, or Havana. Matanzas, home still to the greatest rumba groups and a more ingenious variant of the rhythm, has the better claim. But in both cities it evolved as a powerful dance, played in three principal styles and sung over drums and claves.
Ironically, son's success came because middle- and upper-class whites embraced its sensuality and hired black musicians to perform at parties, Robin Moore writes in his recent book, "Nationalizing Blackness: AfroCubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940." But son also ignited a racial backlash. Havana's white power elite denounced the music as the work of savages. And the early history of son is rife with tales of harassment, of police destroying "African" instruments and even jailing son musicians.
Likewise, Cubans who dared to play the "lascivious" rumba often found themselves persecuted or prosecuted. The mayor of Havana went so far as to ban all performances on African instruments in the year 1900. But stopping rumba was like stopping rock 'n' roll. Improvised anywhere and everywhere -- in ghetto tenements and sugar cane fields -- rumba didn't even require a drum. A door, a chest drawer or a kitchen pot would do nicely. Old codfish crates generated a thumping bass sound. And smaller crates, used for packing candles and flour, approximated the quinto, or highest pitched drum, which talked to the dancers.
Just as blues and RB, the expression of Africans in America, overpowered the sentimental pop of the era, so son and rumba, the expressions of a despised minority of largely illiterate blacks and mulattos, triumphed over more European dance forms. And like blues, gospel and jazz, son and rumba were rooted in the African-style call-and-response, with a lead singer shouting phrases answered by a chorus.
Nor was the music static. Listen to the first recordings of the legendary Sexteto Habanero, founded in 1920, and you hear son played slowly, paced by a three-two clave (see sidebar) that has its third beat delayed a half beat. Most of the songs are nothing more than choruses. But less than a decade later, after Ignacio Pineiro's National Septet formed in 1927, a trumpet has been added and the songs have both a poetic intensity and a compositional cohesion from beginning to end.
According to Orovio, the first musician to play the conga drum in a son band was Santo Ramirez, who performed around Havana with Septeto La Llave. And in Matanzas, Valentin Caney also began experimenting with the conga's deep-toned rhythms in Septeto Sonora Matancera. But it was Arsenio Rodriguez, a blind tresero, composer and bandleader, who tapped the true potential of the conga drum and reformulated the son montuno, becoming the father of the modern Afro-Cuban sound.
Born in 1911 in the village of Guira de Majicures in Matanzas, steeped in the Congolese traditions of his African-born grandfather, Rodriguez was one of 17 children. As an 8-year-old he had his vision destroyed when a horse kicked him in the face. By age 15, he mastered tres, maracas, bass and bongo - the main instruments of son. But in his head swam visions of where the music should be going.
Powered by the peerless singer Miguelito Cuni and the extraordinary trumpeter Felix Chapottin, Rodriguez set up a conjunto that included two trumpets and a conguero who took over the role formerly taken by the bongo. Now the conga and bass were a team, contributing riffs known as tumbao underneath the improvising tres.
"Arsenio used Congolese music, drums and polyrhythms normally played solely on percussion instruments and wrote that into horn parts," says John Santos. "That is, he arranged ensemble parts for the trumpets and the rest of the instruments based on these polyrhythms. Arsenio brought Congolese conceptions directly into his conjunto. This was the beginning of son montuno and salsa."
"Arsenio's conjunto increased the importance of clave and expanded the structure of the montuno section -- the final part of a son featuring extended improvisation and call-and-response -- often shortening the opening melodic part or dropping it completely," says ethnomusicologist Morton Marks. "He reinvented the way the son montuno was played, which had a far-reaching impact on all Latin American and even African music."
Throughout Cuba, musicians were constantly evolving the music. Felix Chapottin, who had honed his trumpet mastery with Sexteto Habanero, created a whole new vocabulary for trumpeters, a style that began to incorporate elements of jazz. Meanwhile, the legendary Tata Guines was expanding the role of the conga drum, turning it into a solo instrument comparable to piano.
By the 1950s, Cuba son attained a sublime balance and power epitomized in the music of Beny More, the country's greatest singer. Born in 1919, More was the eldest son of a descendant of Congolese slaves who had arrived in Cuba in the 19th century to work the sugar plantations. On the streets of his native Santa Isabel de las Lajas he heard all the rhythms of Cuba, from son and rumba to changui and bolero; even as a small child he staged imaginary concerts.
But it was only after he left Cuba and sang in Mexico with Miguel Matamoros' conjunto and Damaso Perez Prado's mambo band that he began to gain acclaim. He returned home in 1953 and played with Bebo Valdes' great band and then delivered a legendary concert heard across the Cuba on national radio that instantly propelled him to stardom.
"Beny was our greatest singer," says Jesus Alemany, the acclaimed Cuban trumpeter and founder of Cubanismo! "He would use his voice as a solo instrument, and everything was totally fluid. He could stretch words and phrases without changing the rhythm. And he knew all the rhythms of Cuba. He had them inside him."
"Maybe the most significant thing Beny More did was to unite the riffs of son montuno with the riff structure of the mambo bands, derived in turn from American swing bands," says Marks. "He transferred those son montuno riffs to the big band's saxophone section and bass, over which the trumpets and trombones piled up contrasting riffs."
Though Cuban-inspired dance fads came and went, son and rumba, the cornerstones of Afro-Cuban music, set in motion multiple revolutions. From a beginning blending of son, rumba and guaracha would come salsa. And from a marriage of jazz, son, rumba and Yoruba and Congolese rhythms Irakere would forge a revolutionary sound that both shaped the future of Afro-Latin jazz and influenced a whole generation of Cuban musicians.
Published 8/29/1999