CUBA AND ITS MUSIC. From the first drums to the mambo. Ned Sublette. 672pp. Chicago Review Press. $36; distributed in the UK by Gazelle. £31.50. 1 55652 516 8.
I heard Cuban music for the first time in the 1960s in New York's Central Park, played by an amateur group just standing on the grass with a crowd of listeners gathered around. It seemed to me the most wonderful approach to music -no separation of artist and audience, everyone on the same level, each individual musician contributing some little part to the whole. There was even room for one guy who did nothing but beat two sticks together. Probably the leader's brother-in-law, I thought -they gave him something harmless to do.
I learned later that the two sticks are the claves, and the musician who wields them plays the central role of setting the music's time. Ned Sublette, in his magnificent history of Cuban music (to 1952 -a projected second volume will continue the story) explains that the claves started life as hardwood pegs made to hold ships together; musicians turned them into instruments that hold music together. The metaphor works on every level: clave means key, and the claves establish the rhythmic "key" to the music: their player locks in the rhythm of the group. In talking about a rhythmic key, Sublette is saying that the music is organized in a way that is fundamentally different from traditional Western music. If you look for adventurous harmonies or difficult melodies you will be looking for complexity in the wrong places. Here, complexity resides in the layers of rhythm.
The clave, he explains, is not a beat but a key, a way to coordinate the different rhythms that are sounding simultaneously.
Philip Larkin was right: the world did change in 1963, and the Beatles' first
LP was a big part of what happened. From that moment on, any attempt to establish a canon of musical taste was doomed. A little while ago, Robert Craft, writing in these pages, saluted, I thought somewhat forlornly, the rhythmic innovations of Anton Webern. But that train has left the station, with Webern and his innovations still standing on the tracks. The rhythmic innovations that count today are the ones resulting from the tectonic collision of the African and European cultural plates. Without this collision, the Beatles' first LP would never have come into being. Without the subsequent revolution in taste, books like Sublette's could not have been written.
The cultural collision between Africa and Europe occurred largely, but not entirely, in the New World. A historian friend of mine says that if you ask a member of his profession a question, he will tell you that first you have to understand the question that precedes it, and before long you're back to the Phoenicians. I thought of this as amusing hyperbole until I read Cuba and Its Music. Sublette takes it literally: "A Semitic people whose stronghold was at Tyre, in what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians were trading people . . .". This sounds like the beginning of a tired old story, but is in fact the start of a story made fresh by a new perspective: the recognition that the influence of African music on European culture is more profound, prolonged and pervasive than most of us realize. From this perspective, the obscure fact that, owing to the Phoenicians, by the fifth century bc, black people were part of the traffic that circulated through Cadiz becomes a link in a chain of events that made Spain the first site of the seismic rumblings.
It is a difficult history to trace. Actual evidence about what past music sounded like is slim. The Roman Empire, for example, left a wonderful trail of art, architecture, drama, poetry and politics in its wake, but scarcely a scintilla of its music. Sublette relies in part on a kind of linguistic archaeology, where the Morris dance is related to the Morisca, or the Moorish, and the Sarabande, or Zarabanda, can find its roots in the Congolese Nsala-banda. Here we see another facet of his argument: from a very early period, Cuba was the portal through which African culture entered Europe -the Congolese dance came to Spain on a return voyage from the New World. Which brings us inevitably to the subject of the slave trade.
