African/Caribbean Based Social and Vernacular Dance Forms

One of the most magnificent spectacles of all Mardi Gras celebrations is the elaborate tradition of the black neighborhood “tribes” who dress up to honor the Native Americans who first befriended them as runaway slaves in early days of New Orleans. A unique vernacular tradition that combines the cultural customs of African and Native Americans emerged in the 1880s as an act of liberation, a spirit of rebellion that used masking, chanting, and body language of their hierarchy of positions “to take to the streets.”

The tradition of brass band street parades goes back well over a century to the first jazz funerals, held by jazz musicians when one of their brethren died. In the jazz funeral parade, the band follows the coffin, behind that is the “second-line” made up of family, friends, and mourners. On the way to the grave the mood is somber and the band is often playing “Flee as a Birde,” a slow dirge with muffled drum. In the walk home, jubilation and rejoicing overtake the crowd as they celebrate the departed’s joyful entry into heaven, often to the tune of up-tempo jazz “Oh Didn’t He Ramble.” Today, these marching bands are made up primarily of brass, reeds, and percussion. They can be hired to play at both funerals and parades, and still often donate their services for fellow musicians.

Held during Lent and culminating during Holy Week, Haitian Rara is a series of multifaceted celebratory events that feature mobile musical bands, religious rituals, exuberant dancing and songs that range in subject from satire to obscenity, and public displays of cooperation and conflict. (Largey) McAlister points out that “while the ‘tone,’ or ‘ambiance’ of Rara parading may seem secular, the festival should more properly be understood as a synthesis of carnival behavior and religious practice.

Cuban Comparsas

During colonial Cuban history, the comparsas were known as “the black people’s carnival.” Originally, the Latin Catholic feast of Epiphany was the only day when the members of the cabildos de nacion were permitted to parade through the city in a march to the governor’s residence to pay homage to the colonial authorities. This exotic pageantry was a combination of costumes, songs, dances, and instruments from both traditional and ritualized traditions that, to an outside observer, appeared as a carnival extravaganza. In reality, under the conditions imposed upon them, the slaves had reconstituted, on Cuban soil, the ancestral rites of purification of expulsion of evil spirits. (Ortiz) In 1884 these carnival processions were abandoned. After the abolition of slavery, and then under the Republic of Cuban, the tradition of street processions was revived in the form of carnival camparsas.

Comparsas traditions varied in Havanna and in the eastern region. Many Cubans frequently state that the only real carnivals are those of the eastern Oriente region, especially those of Santiago de Cuba.

Records show that as early as 1805, The Place Congo or Congo Square (now known as Louis Armstrong Park) was a grassy plain on the edge of the swamps at the far side of the French Quarter where gens de couleur fibre (free blacks) and slavers would congregate. It became a place where African rituals and ceremonies were kept alive and where disparate peoples from a variety of tribal groups found a cultural bond in their improvised music. The immigration of the gens de couleur fibre, slaves, and former slaves from Haiti in the early 19th century served to infuse other African tribal traditions into those of the Louisiana slaves, many of whom were by then third-generation Louisianians.

Vodou is a syncretic religion that combines African beliefs veiled in Roman Catholicism. These African beliefs are predominantly from the religion of the FON people of the Dahomey region of Africa (the modern day nation of Benin). Vodou drumming, dance and music is central to the story of Haiti where Vodou is believed to have become standardized sometime between 1750 and 1790. Vodou’s rhythmic traditions, frequently mentioned in 1800’s descriptions of dances of Congo Square, can be found in the early dances of the eras of jazz and ragtime.

The dominant religious music in Cuba is a belief known as lucumi, frequently referred to as a syncretic religion blending African and Catholicism beliefs known as santeria. The drumming rhythms of the batci drum used in lucumi ceremonies corresponds to each of the divinities (arishas) with a special musical language that includes songs and dances. These religious rhythms, songs, and dances were absorbed into the secular Cuban music that would become (according to Ned Sublette), a fundamental music of the New World. Its influence can be found in classical music, ragtime, tango, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, rock and roll, funk, hip hop, and salsa.

Migrations resulting from the Haitian Revolution altered the cultural landscape of the Caribbean (this includes New Orleans). By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, one of every four people in Santiago de Cuba had come from what is now Haiti. The Haitian French established coffee plantations in the hills and mountains of Santiago, a crop new to Cuba. The French brought a repertorie of ballroom dances known as contredanses in French, (eventually contradanza in Cuba)
including quadrilles, the minuet, and cotillion. The musicians playing for the French contradanses were black and remade the French dance and music into their own tumba francesas. Black franceses from Saint-Domingue began to form their own cabildos, which became known as tumba francesa societies. Tumba Francesa fused elite French court dances with African drum traditions. Dance can function as a kind of “embodied History”, enriching and extending our understanding and identity.

In the history of the danzon, we find court dances and music of the aristocracy imitated in bourgeois salons, and musicians of color who creolize these European music forms. At the end of this process, we see the appearance in the late nineteenth century, the danzon, the first dance rhythm considered authentically Cuban.

The son, “considered the very expression of Cuban identity” is believed to have appeared about 1860 in the eastern mountains of Santiago. This “Cuban identity” is a study of Afro-Hispanic trans-culturation. A fusion of the original Spanish families to settle in the rural eastern part of Cuba from Andalusia or the Canary Islands and the laborers of African origin, especially Bantu and Dahomeyans. The golden age of the son is the 1920’s during the presidency of Machado in 1925, a time of the electrical recording and the restrictions of black drums.

The rumba is a strictly secular dance and music that originated in the regions of Matanzas and Havana among blacks and persons of low condition. The crisis of the slave system and economic upheavals drove these people from the plantations and agricultural exploitation to the cities, where they merged in the ranks of freedmen and former urban slaves in neighborhoods “outside the walls” in subdivided buildings known as so/ares, where conflicts were frequent. The courtyards known as solar and the red-light districts were the locations where the rumba developed. There were three varieties — the yambu, the columbia, and guaguanco. The story of the rumba in America becomes another highly stylized version of the original Cuban rumba.

Clave Rhythms in Son and Rumba

Clave is the name of an instrument, two short but thick sticks, used to keep the rhythmic tempo. The clave is the key to the rhythmic cell of the music.

When the Afro-Cuban habanera, a combination of words and rhythm, arrived in Buenos Aires after 1850, it triggered a sequence that led to the milonga, canyengue, and tango. In New Orleans the habanera bass went straight into jazz. Jelly Roll Morton, who almost certainly learned it from Mexican bands in New Orleans, called it the “Latin tinge.” In the 1970s the popular New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair was alternating habanera bass and a boogie-woogie riff with his left hand while playing triplets with his right. (Thompson)

Starting in the late 1940s throughout the 1950s, the mambo, a descendent/pretender of son, a type of syncopated montuno was a dominate presence in the popular culture of the Americas and Europe. The Palladium was to become internationally known as New York’s most popular place for mambo music and dance. Controversy among Cuban ethnomusicologists regarding the origins of mambo does not diminish the excitement generated by the music of Perez Prado, Benny More, Arcana and Orestes Lopez. The invention of the cha-cha-cha is a precise accreditation given to Enrique Jorrin, the creator of the last-known variation of the danzon — the cha-cha-cha.

Cajun and zydeco music and dance share common musical traditions. However, they vary in instrumentation, and definitely in the “look” of the dance movements. Early zydeco, was a sexy dance that displays the uninhibited movement styles of African influences. The percussive zydeco frottoir from the ordinary washboard and the field hoi Iars from the Afro-Creole jure, and a chromatic piano accordion produces flatted, bluesy notes to “get down dance to.” Zydeco is a coming together of rock’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, Cajun, and jure.