CUBA'S TIN PAN ALLEY
1947
[LIFE
magazine 6 October 1947 pp. 145-48, 151-57]
CUBA'S TIN PAN ALLEY
From Havana's shabbiest cabarets and voodoo lodges pours
an endless
flood of sultry rhythms, which are danced to all over the
world
By: WINTHROP SARGEANT
Page 145
In 1930, on the heels of the stock-market crash, a wailing,
bombilating
Cuban tune called The Peanut Vendor hit Broadway and set
America's feet
and hips squirming in the intricacies of a new dance-the
rumba.
The significance of this event in the history of U.S. mores
at first
seemed slight. Prognosticators noted the trend,
attributed it to
depression-frayed nerves and gave it a year or so to peter
out.
But in the course of a decade the rhumba had not only shown
that it was
here to stay, it had become the basis of a huge American
industry. Latin-American dance bands equipped
with
maracas
and
bongos
elbowed U.S. jazz bands in nightclubs and ballrooms from New
York to San Francisco. Rumba specialists like
Xavier Cugat
made
fortunes in Afro-Latin rhythm. In one year (1946)
Americans paid
Arthur Murray nearly $14 million to teach them the
dance. Rumba
enthusiasts still account for more than 60% of his enormous
business.
The Peanut Vendor, which started it all, was followed by a
steady
stream of similar Cuban song hits, which began nosing the
conventional
American fox trots from their top positions on Tin Pan
Alley's
best-seller lists. Small Cuban farmers neglected sugar
cane and
tobacco to raise gourds that could be manufactured into
maracas.
Music began to rival sugar, cigars and rum as one of Cuba's
leading
exports, and the American man in the street, buying it in
vast
quantities every time he got near a juke box, became its
leading
consumer. Of all the popular music played today over
the U.S. air
waves, on juke boxes and in Hollywood movies, approximately
20% is
Latin-American, and nearly all of that 20% comes from the
small island
of Cuba.
Though Cubans are gratified by this increasing demand, they
are quick
to point out that there is nothing new about their trade in
musical
exports. Economically Cuba may be just another
Page 146
so-called
banana
republic. Politically it may be a hotbed of
tropical instability. But musically it has rivaled New
York as
the popular musical capital of the Western Hemisphere for
nearly a
hundred years. Little Cuba's amazing influence on the
world's
popular music started in the early 19th Century when an
itinerant
Spaniard named Sebastian Yradier settled in Havana, listened
to the
languid, cajoling tunes of the natives and wrote a tune
called El
Areglito. El Areglito became the first habanera.
Imported
to Spain, the habanera became a standard feature of Spanish
folk music,
and a generation later Georges Bizet wrote one that would up
as the
most popular tune in France's most popular opera,
Carmen. Yradier
followed up El Areglito with the old Cuban favorite La
Paloma, which
was commissioned by Mexico's Emperor Maximilian and has
served as a
model for Latin-American tunes for three generations.
Somewhere
in the 19th Century, according to scholars, Cubans also
invented the
tango, which they exported to Argentina, giving the
Argentinians what
has since become their most characteristic form of national
folk
music. The rumba and the conga came later. But
these are
merely the most notable of Cuba's recent musical
contributions to the
world. For home consumption Cubans produce a
clattering
assortment of sons, guarachas, danzons, puntos and boleros
that still
keep the hot Havana nights in a continuous uproar of
melody. The
curious thing about all this Cuban music is that there is
nothing
generically Cuban about it. Its music is written and
played in a
hybrid musical language that is part Spanish and part
African
Negro. Its melodies usually echo the sultry songs that
were
brought to Cuba from Latin and Moorish Spain. Its
rhythms are
descended from the tom-tom beats of the African jungle.
It thrives on bullets and marijuana
UNLIKE sugar and tobacco Cuban music is raised in the
streets of Havana
by a swarming, polyglot underworld that sings, drinks and
starves with
impartial exuberance. It grows in brothels, taxi-dance
halls and
clandestine voodoo lodges which upper-class Cubans persist
in regarding
darkly as temples of human sacrifice. Many of its
tunes are
created on borrowed pianos, some of them by bullet-scarred,
marijuana-smoking characters who sell them for the price of
a swig of
rum. They are tried out in the ram-shackle cabarets of
Las
Fritas, a street
[To see a full size photo,
right click and VIEW IMAGE]
In Las Fritas Nightclub,
dancers Clara and Alberto Render
[dance the] traditional Cuban folk dance called "Shoeing
The Mare"
of Coney Islandlike concessions at nearby La Playa, where
Havana's
Negroes spend their nights out. From Las Fritas these
tunes sweep
into downtown Havana, where their whacking, clattering
accompaniments
are toned down for the tourist trade in expensive cabarets
like the
Chanflan and the Faraon. With luck and promotion by
the music
publishers of Havana's chaotic Tin Pan Alley, they may reach
the ears
of American bandleaders and catapult their authors into
international
fame. More often, however, they lose themselves in the
seething
uproar of Havana's night life, sinking downward
Page 148
like Havana's prostitutes, from high-class nightclubs to 6¢
creep
joints, and die out, making room for younger and fresher
tunes.
At Las Fritas one of the more recent hits is a jumpy little
tune known
as Penicilina (Penicillin), which celebrates the curative
properties of
what, in free and easy Havana, is a particularly useful
drug.
Penicilina's words automatically preclude widespread
international
popularity:
I carry you from limb to limb
As Tarzan carries beautiful Juana,
Because I took penicilina [Penicillin] and cured myself.
Try it and you will find out.
Chorus:
What is this, what is this?
How bad I feel.
To him who is lovesick, I say.
To him who is lovesick, I say
That penicilina can cure you.
Try it and you will see.
*1945 PEER INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION (USED BY PERMISSION)
Penicilina has several other versions, the most popular of
which has no
words at all and is sung with flashing eyes and
uncontrollable hips to
the illuminating text: "Bum-bum, bum, bum-bum, bum."
Its
repetitious six-note melody is underpinned with a thumping,
rattling
accompaniment that sounds like the forcible destruction of a
warehouse
full of cutlery. Invited to make a recording of it,
its author, a
genial Negro named Abelardo Valdes, embarrassedly included a
stanza of
Mendelssohn's Wedding March to fill it out to standard disk
length. Its local popularity finally achieved such
proportions
that Valdes was moved to turn out a second ditty called
Sulfatiasol. "My friends," he announced triumphantly,
"tell me I
should open a drugstore."
The object is not money
PENICILINA" was obviously not written with a canny eye
toward U.S.
commercial possibilities. The prevalence of tunes of
its type
causes the more enterprising of Cuba's music publishers to
throw up
their hands in horror. Although the better-known Cuban
composers
have an organization like America's ASCAP, the lamentable
fact is that
the balance of Havana's exuberant song writing industry is
carried on
not for money but for fun by its obscure and impoverished
composers. Various attempts to organize them on a
sensible,
businesslike basis have ended in abject failure.
Page 151
Such efforts at economic betterment as have occurred amid
the
prevailing aura of marijuana and indigence have been
sporadic and
highly individualistic. One of these erupted last year
when a
big, flashily dressed Negro named Chano Pozo became obsessed
with a
hunger for a new Buick convertible. Pozo, whose
masterpiece was a
ditty called El Pin Pin, had achieved some fame on the side
as a dancer
and a player of the big African conga drum. He
approached his
publisher, one Ernesto Roca, and demanded an extra thousand
dollars as
an advance on a new song. Roca refused and
Chano Pozo
assaulted
him. Like all prudent Havana music publishers, Roca
had an armed
bodyguard who promptly pumped four bullets into Chano Pozo's
midriff. Slightly inconvenienced, Pozo spent two weeks
in a
hospital, recovered and managed a down payment on the Buick
without
Roca's help. A few months later Pozo courted death
again, this
time as the breakneck driver of his new Buick. The
Buick was
wrecked, but Pozo escaped. He is still the toast of
Havana's
nightclubs and radio stations.
The homicidal musical limbo of Havana floats somewhat
indeterminately
between two other worlds. One is the heaven of
international
success, money, New York nightclubs and Hollywood fame to
which good
Cubans sometimes go in spite of themselves. The other
is the
underworld of African Cuba. And African Cuba is both
musically
and spiritually an outpost of a jungle civilization whose
headquarters
are still near the Niger and Congo rivers across the
Atlantic. In
this underworld African tribal dialects mingle curiously
with mangled
Spanish. Even today old Negroes are to be found in
Cuba who
regard themselves as temporary exiles and who, when asked
their
nationality, describe themselves not as Cubans but as
transplanted
Yorubas, or Araras. Their tribal organizations,
complete with
religious rituals, music, medicine and magic, are a mild
source of
worry to the Cuban authorities, who regard them as a
potential
political menace. Under the dictatorship of Machado,
which ended
in 1933, satirical political ditties from the jungle caused
frequent
unrest, and more than one Negro songwriter disappeared with
a price on
his head.
Its rhythm comes from African jungles
TWENTY percent of the Cuban population is African, and much
of the male
portion of that percentage is affiliated with a vague
organization
known to Cubans as Los Nanigos, which has existed ever since
colonial
times. Upper-class Cubans sometimes frighten their
children by
telling them the Nanigos will get them if they are not
good. The
Cuban police keep Nanigo tribal rituals under surveillance
and are
ready to pounce the minute there is a change from harmless
voodoo to
political agitation. Once a year, at carnival time,
the Nanigos
come into the open as the big event of the Cuban
comparsas. Their
value as a tourist attraction is undeniable. For five
successive
Saturday night the streets of Havana stream with joyous
throngs of
fantastically costumed Negroes, prancing along to drumming
and chanting
that sounds as though it came straight from the heart of
Africa.
But when the comparsas are over the Nanigos go back to their
slums and
farms. The big conga drum, which occasionally makes
its
appearance during the
page 152
carnival, reverts to the status of an illegal
instrument. It has
been outlawed except during fiestas for a good reason: the
conga drum
has been used as a jungle telegraph, roaring out secret
messages from
town to town in the Cuban hinterland and from neighborhood
to
neighborhood in Havana.
With few exceptions the instruments of Cuban music are
constructed on
native African models and are unquestionably the most
primitive ones
that have ever been used in civilized music. The Cuban
Negroes
make them out of dry gourds, hoe blades, old cutlery,
skeletal remains,
tree trunks, discarded cowbells and goatskins. But
their
manufacture for the export market has now become a
standardized
industry. Even the exotic
quijada, which
is made out of the
tooth-bearing jawbone of a horse, is now manufactured
according to
strict specifications. The Havana musical instrument
firm of Jose
A. Solis, which supplies many of the world's foremost
quijada
virtuosos, lists the instrument with the following note "[
The quijada]
is composed of the inferior maxilar of native horses about 2
years old,
prepared in such a manner that when struck with the fist
produces a
peculiar vibration very original and solely of this
instrument.
Dimension are: 14 in. long. Weight 1,250 grs."
The indispensable trademark of all rumba bands is, of
course, a pair of
maracas,
or gourd rattles, which are shaken with unremitting
enthusiasm
by a musician who devotes his entire career to the
craft. Closely
related to these are the guiros, or "nutmeg graters," –long
gourds with
corrugated surfaces which are scraped with a nail or bit of
wood and
emit a sound somewhat like the continued cranking of an
outboard
motor. A pair of
bongos, or large
drums made of hollow tree
trunks and calfskin and thumped with the bare hands, is also
to be
considered standard equipment.
A large rumba band is incomplete without at least one big
conga drum,
which is made of either a hollow tree trunk or an old
barrel. A
very high-class rumba band may also contain a marimbula – a
large
boxlike instrument with a series of metal tongues attached
to it.
When plucked with the fingers like the tongue of a jew's
s-harp, these
strips of metal give forth a powerful twanging sound
resembling that of
a bull fiddle. The marimbula is a common instrument in
the
Belgian Congo. The Nanigos make it out of old boxes or
suitcases
and discarded clock springs. Cowbells [
pico] and Chinese
wood
blocks [
claves]
may be added. So may a large earthenware jug
called a botija, which is precisely the same instrument as
that used by
old-time American Negro jug bands. One notable feature
about all
these instruments is that none of them, except possibly the
marimbula,
is capable of carrying a tune. In the primitive
backwoods
ceremonies of the Cuban Negroes this deficiency is filled,
if at all,
by the human voice. In the rather prim-sounding
danzons of
Havana, flutes and guitars often provide the melody.
But in rumba
music as Americans know it, the percussive symphony of the
primitive
Cubans is drowned in a standard orchestration of violins,
pianos,
accordions, saxophone, trumpets and so on.
Such refinements are the price paid for civilization.
The
primitive Nanigo can make music out of practically
anything. One
of his favorite instruments that has, as yet, failed to
appear in
standard nightclub bands, is the door. To play the
door, you
remove it from its hinges, rest one end of it lightly
against your
knees and pound it deliriously with both fists. The
result is
extremely sonorous.
Cuba's No. 1 composer
AT the opposite end of the Cuban musical spectrum from
door-playing is
the lucrative art of composing Cuban music for the
international
market. And in this art Cuba has produced a large
handful of the
world's most popular composers. One of them was the
late
Moises
Simons, who won himself a permanent place in history
by writing the
famous Peanut Vendor. Another is
Eliseo Grenet,
nightclub owner
and dean of Cuban bandleaders, whose pro-African Cuban
Lament so
enraged the Cuban dictator, Machado, that he had Grenet
chased all the
way to Barcelona, Spain. Grenet's masterpiece is the
popular tune
Mama
Inez. The undisputed king of Cuban popular music
is,
however, a mild-mannered, melancholy looking man named
Ernesto Lecuona.
Lecuona is a unique phenomenon in the world of popular
music.
Mention his name in any random gathering of Americans and
the chances
are you will draw a blank. But you will seldom meet an
American
who is unfamiliar with his durable song hits. Some of
them are
such old familiar tunes that people are always attributing
them vaguely
to some long dead classical composer. Other tunes
Page 154
are constantly nudging the top numbers on each year's hit
parade.
Still others are genuine classics familiar to every aspiring
piano
student. Among a list of some 300 compositions that
Lecuona has
turned out during the past 40 years, the most universally
known is
probably the sultry song Siboney, which is sometimes
jokingly referred
to as the Cuban national anthem. It is closely
seconded in
popularity by the ubiquitous piano pieces Malaguena and
Andalucia (The
Breeze and I), and by an enormous sheaf of popular songs
(Say ‘Si Si,'
Always in My Heart, Noche Azul, Two Hearts That Pass in the
Night,
Maria My Own, Jungle Drums, I'm Living from Kiss to Kiss and
so on)
that are played and sung in nightclubs, ballrooms,
restaurants, ball
parks, bars and broadcasting studios from Alaska to Tierra
del Fuego.
In the song-publishing houses of Manhattan's Tin Pan Alley,
Lecuona's
compositions are known as "standards," or perennial
best-sellers.
Where the average Tin Pan Alley hit has a life of a few
months,
Lecuona's tunes go on selling for decades. Siboney has
been
recorded by every major record company two or three times
over and is
still going strong. Say ‘Si Si' has sold almost a
million copies
in the U.S. alone. Malaguena, with a steady sale of
100,000
copies a year since 1931, has set something of a record in
the catalogs
of its New York publisher. In arrangements for
everything from
brass band to piano accordion, it is the most consistent
best-seller in
the U.S. It has even passed the durable record of what
was
previously the all-time champion in long-term U.S.
popularity, Paul
Lincke's death-defying, 45-year-old classic, Glow Worm.
He takes his admirers with him
LECUONA is a large unquenchably good-natured
51-year-old Cuban with
tobacco-brown eyes and small vocabulary of infra-Basic
English.
He commutes indefatigably between a cluttered apartment in
Havana and a
suite in a midtown New York hotel. Despite an untiring
effort at
sartorial elegance, he looks (as his friends are continually
pointing
out) exactly like Comedian
Zero Mostel.
A distinctly sedentary
type of man, he is nearly always to be found slumped
wistfully in an
easy chair, surrounded by a chattering g roup of loudly
dressed Latin
admirers who follow him wherever he goes, eating his food
and drinking
his liquor in unlimited quantities. Lecuona himself
seldom
touches a drink. He regards this portable bedlam with
an absent,
preoccupied air, occasionally rising with an apology to go
to a nearby
piano and thump out a few tunes over the din of
conversation.
"After all," he explains defensively, "a man ought to be
able to play
piano in his own house."
Though his royalties are calculated in the tens of
thousands, Lecuona has none of the characteristics of a man
of wealth, except
Page 157
perhaps his rather absent-minded indifference to
money. He is
constantly giving away small sums to assist aspiring maracas
players
and cabaret singers, American as well as Cuban. Over
the years
the total of these gifts is undoubtedly immense.
Lecuona is such a celebrated figure in Latin America that
when a man
named Ricardo Lecuona was killed in a Colombian airplane
crash, radio
stations in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Argentina went
off the air
for a silent minute of mourning under the mistaken
impression that it
was Ernesto who had been killed. Five years ago
ex-President
Batista of Cuba named him cultural attache to the Cuban
Embassy at
Washington. As foreign propagandist for Cuba's native
music he
ranks second only to the redoubtable Spanish bandleader,
Xavier
Cugat. His unofficial career as Cuba's No. 1
musician, which has
recently culminated in half a dozen scores for Hollywood and
Latin-American movies, started in the cabarets and
silent-movie houses
of Havana. As a child of 11 he had already borrowed a
pair of
long pants and organized his first orchestra. A
two-step called
Cuba y America, which he composed at that early age, is
still in the
standard repertory of Cuban military bands. His first
big
international success arrived in 1922, when he toured
America and
appeared for eight consecutive weeks at the Capitol theater
in New
York, introducing his Malaguena and Andalucia to U.S.
audiences.
While Malaguena and Andalucia were typical Spanish-style
"salon pieces"
which might easily have been turned out by Latin composers
on either
side of the Atlantic, Siboney, which he introduced in 1927,
sounded the
typically Cuban note that was to infect U.S. dance
enthusiasts with the
rumba epidemic. The whole epidemic, as Cubans have
since
frequently pointed out, was based on a monstrous
misconception.
Siboney was not a rumba at all. Neither is The Peanut
Vendor. The mistaken and lucrative idea that they
were,
germinated in the head of the canny Tin Pan Alley Music
Publisher
Herbert E. Marks, who has since become the largest importer
of
Latin-American music in the U.S. In Cuba the rumba is
an athletic
exhibition dance requiring an enormous expanse of space and
an amount
of inspired wriggling that would reduce the average American
dance
floor to something resembling a choreographic hockey
arena. Its
music is fast and extremely furious. The dance that
Americans
have imported under its name is also authentically Cuban,
but it is
known in Cuba as the son (rhymes with "tone"). The
misconception
started when the Marks publishing company issued The Peanut
Vendor as a
son and found its bewildered customers arguing at retail
music
counters: "Must be a misprint. Whaddaya mean,
‘song'? The
directors of the Edward B. Marks Music Corp. immediately
went into a
huddle and decided to call it a rumba instead. And to
unsuspecting Americanos it has remained a rumba ever since.
At the moment the son's popularity is threatened in Havana
by a new
dance known as the botacita (the little boat), and
enterprising U.S.
dance promoters like
Arthur Murray
are scurrying to Cuba hoping to find
it a new terpsichorean gold mine. As danced in the
music halls
and on the streets of Havana, it is a thing of regimental
proportions
in which throngs of happy Cubans rock from side to side in a
boat like
rhythm with their hands on their hips. Like most Cuban
dance
crazes, it can be blamed squarely on the Nanigos and where
it will all
end nobody can tell.
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