Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York

IMPROVISING

SABOR

IMPROVISING

SABOR

Cuban Dance Music in New York

SUE MILLER

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI /JACKSON

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

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The University Press of Mississippi is a member of

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Copyright © 2021 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2021

∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947852

Hardback: 978-1-4968-3215-3

Trade paperback: 978-1-4968-3216-0

E-pub single: 978-1-4968-3217-7

E-pub institutional: 978-1-4968-3218-4

PDF single: 978-1-4968-3219-1

PDF institutional: 978-1-4968-3220-7

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Notes and Abbreviations

Foreword by Professor David Garcia

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  Spaces and Places

2  Los Tres Grandes: Redefining the Mambo Genre

3  La Mecha: Belisario López, José Fajardo, and Rolando Lozano

4  Exile and Adaptation: Eddy Zervigón and Orquesta Broadway

5  Charanga or Pachanga?

6  Charanga Embalao: Charlie Palmieri and Johnny Pacheco

7  Charanguea’o en Típico: Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta

8  I Don’t Like It Like That: The Latin Bugalú

9  La Charanga Moderna and the Modern Charanga

Conclusion: Defining New York Sabor

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Discography

This book is dedicated to Eddy Zervigón, charanga flute player and bandleader of Orquesta Broadway since 1962.

Eddy Zervigón, Manhattan Bridge, June 16, 2018. Copyright Sue Miller.

NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS

All scores of annotated transcriptions within the text are those of the author. All translations from Spanish to English are by the author. Explanations of Cuban and Latin terms are to be found within the text and/or in the glossary at the end. To avoid confusion with Western art orchestras, the charanga orchestra or band will, in the main, be referred to as charanga orquesta. When citing interviews, the initials of the interviewee and interviewer are used. For example:

SM   Sue Miller

EZ    Eddy Zervigón

MW  Mark Weinstein

WR   Willie Rodríguez

DP     David Pérez

CG    Connie Grossman

KJ     Karen Joseph

A full list of all recordings cited and analyzed in the book is given in the discography. An accompanying set of recordings by Charanga del Norte of repertoire analyzed is available on the websites www.charangadelnorte.co.uk and www.charangasue.com.

FOREWORD

Besides being colleagues in the academic study of music, Sue Miller and I direct charanga groups—hers in Leeds, Yorkshire, mine in North Carolina. Surely we came to devote our musical activities to leading charangas because of its fascinating mix of European-derived and Afro-Cuban instruments and performance aesthetics. Or did we want to distinguish our ensembles from the much more familiar—in both academic and popular dance music worlds—salsa and Latin jazz repertories? In any event, Dr. Miller’s specialization in charanga music, performance aesthetics, and history transcends her work with Charanga del Norte, and after many years of research, writing, and publishing, she offers her second book on charanga music, this one focused on the music’s transplanted history in New York City. Indeed, Miller is the first academic to publish research on charanga music of both Cuba and the United States. As a student of Richard Egües and with Eddy Zervigón as her primary collaborator, Miller’s Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York provides much-needed musicological insight into the important place charanga musicians, music, and performance aesthetics have in the history of Latin music in the United States. Whereas many US-based academics—whether in social and cultural studies or history and ethnomusicology—have researched the historical and performance aesthetic significances of big band mambo and salsa music, Miller stands alone in the musicological and ethnomusicological scholarship on charanga.

At the crux of the matter of charanga performance aesthetics are the concepts sabor and cubanía, into which Miller dives with the combined sensibilities of musician and academic in order to unravel the nuanced complexities of these concepts and make them legible for novices and experts alike. In other words, she is masterful in analyzing the aural literacy codified by generations of Cuban musicians—dating to those of the orquesta típicas of the nineteenth century—and at translating this knowledge from the aural to the written language. Indeed, Miller writes against the conventional understanding of New York salsa dura’s debt to Cuban conjunto and jazz music by revealing salsa dura’s equally important debt to charanga’s distinct improvisational dialects of sabor and cubanía.

The following pages demonstrate an expert interlacing of historical documentation, ethnographic exploration, and musical analysis that brings the past of charanga music performance throughout Manhattan and the Bronx into the combined present of its performance today. Miller begins our journey with New York charanga’s first generation of Cuban flautists Rolando Lozano, José Fajardo, and Belisario López, who transplanted the music to the dancehalls and clubs of New York in the 1950s. The journey continues with more New York–based charanga flautists, beginning with Eddy Zervigón and eventually non-Cuban charanga flautists and bandleaders Charlie Palmieri, Johnny Pacheco, Eddie Palmieri, Dave Valentín, and Ray Barretto. Miller’s annotated transcriptions are exceptional in their detail and clarity, as are her reproductions of Zervigón’s equally insightful graphs of fingerings on the Cuban wooden flute. In a word, these graphs are gold! I’m also intrigued by Miller’s explanation of the significance of the charanga aesthetic in the performance practices of New York–based percussionists such as timbalero Manny Oquendo, as well as her discussion of lesser-known but equally important charanga musicians Rod Lewis Sánchez, George Castro, and José Canoura.

As a fan and student of charanga music and history, I am thrilled with the publication of Miller’s second volume for all of these reasons. I suppose a foreword would not be complete, however, without mentioning some unanswered questions such as the heavily male-dominated presence of charanga musicians, flautists in particular, which Miller dutifully mentions in the conclusion. It is only within the last several decades that women musicians such as Andrea Brachfeld, Connie Grossman, Karen Joseph, and Sue Miller herself have emerged as important contributors to the music in the United States and the United Kingdom. Why? And who are the women charanga musicians of the past and present in Cuba? Perhaps a third volume will follow. Until then, Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York is a must-read for all students, musicians, dancers, and fans of Latin music performance and history. Indeed, it will be required reading for my charanga students for the foreseeable future. ¡Gracias, Sue, por su trabajo y erudición!

—David F. Garcia, professor of music

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

PREFACE

EL MAMONCILLO

In the preface to Cuban Flute Style: Interpretation and Improvisation,¹ I document how I discovered charanga music in the Casa Latina nightclub in Leeds, England, in the late 1990s. Named after the famous East Harlem record shop (see figure P.2), Casa Latina was started by the DJs Lubomir Lubi Jovanovic and Chris Chico Malo Murphy, both fanatical salsa aficionados who regularly played the music of Eddie Palmieri, Mongo Santamaría, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All Stars in their DJ sets. Live Cuban music and salsa bands from the UK, USA, and Cuba featured regularly every Thursday night. In addition to UK salsa bands, Cuban bands such as Son 14, Maraca Valle y Otra Vision, and Sierra Maestra performed at the Casa Latina following the success of Buena Vista Social Club in 1999. Although fewer US bands performed there at this time, Eddie Palmieri’s band was booked in 1999 for the Casa Latina Summer Ball in the larger venue of the Town and Country Club situated above the Underground Club (which hosted the Casa Latina nights).²

Figure P.1 Sue Miller and Eddy Zervigón at El Mamoncillo Festival, New Jersey, July 15, 2007. Copyright Sue Miller.

Figure P.2 The New York Casa Latina. Copyright Sue Miller.

Inspired by the music I heard at the club, I set up my group Charanga del Norte in 1998, and made arrangements of both Cuba-based and US-based charanga, including the Mongo Santamaría songs Olga Pachanga³ and Que Maravilloso⁴ and Ray Barretto’s Esa Es La del Solar (Bilongo).⁵ At this time Charanga del Norte’s debut single Violin Pachanguero featured on a salsa compilation Everybody Salsa.⁶ This captured the interest of DJ Al Angeloro, the manager of New York–based Charanga Soleil, and he subsequently interviewed me live by telephone for his show on WBAI in 1999.⁷ The very early days of my group reflected this balance between Cuba- and US-based charanga music. As I researched Cuban charanga more, however, I gravitated toward the Cuban charangas of the 1950s, studying with Richard Egües in 2000 and 2001, as documented in my doctoral practice research (2010) and book Cuban Flute Style (2014).⁸ At this time I mainly studied the improvisations of Richard Egües, José Fajardo, and other veteran Cuban players such as Melquiades Fundora from Orquesta Sublime. My interest in US-based charanga was reignited in 2006 when I received a phone call out of the blue from Eddy Zervigón inviting me to New York to play with his Orquesta Broadway at the Mamoncillo Festival in New York.⁹ He had watched me perform with my own band Charanga del Norte and with charanga orquestas in Havana on YouTube videos; he was intrigued by the fact that I played traditional charanga flute despite being a non-Latino from the UK. We subsequently spoke regularly by phone and corresponded via email about the charanga flute style, sharing our enthusiasm for the virtuosic soloing styles of Richard Egües and José Fajardo. As I had studied with Richard Egües in Havana, much of our conversation focused on Richard and his family. It turned out that in his teenage years Eddy knew Richard’s children Ricardito, Gladys, and Rembert and had often heard Richard Egües practicing his flute when he was at their family home studying music (solfège) with Richard’s father Eduardo Egües, a renowned music educator in the province of Las Villas.¹⁰ Zervigón later became a colleague and friend of José Fajardo in New York. It was a unique opportunity to link up to charanga flute history on either side of the 1959 Cuban Revolution divide, and without hesitation I accepted Eddy’s invitation to perform as a guest with Orquesta Broadway.

Armed with a photograph of Eddy from a 1970s newspaper article that he sent so that I would recognize him, I arrived at JFK airport in July 2007, flute in hand and a little nervous about performing with one of North America’s most accomplished charanga orquestas. I need not have worried. Eddy and his wife Nancy met me at the airport and, along with their dog Snoopy, made me feel right at home in their house in the quiet suburb of Maspeth in Queens. Chatting to Eddy about how he left Cuba in 1962 and how Orquesta Broadway was formed, my fascination with US-based Cuban charanga was rekindled. Eddy showed me Belisario López’s five-key flute that was gifted to him, and holding it I felt instantly connected to this wonderful Cuban tradition brought over from Havana to New York by the likes of López and Fajardo in the early sixties.¹¹ Of course Cuban music had been a feature of New York’s music scene long before their arrival—Cuban classical flute player Alberto Socarrás arrived in New York in 1927 and is said to have recorded the first jazz flute solo in 1929, for example;¹² and the 1950s mambo bands of Tito Puente, Machito, and Tito Rodríguez, among others, utilized the charanga flute from time to time, particularly with the popularity of the chachachá in the mid-1950s.¹³ Cuban musician Gilberto Valdés set up the first charanga orquesta in New York in 1952 and players from this seminal group (such as Mongo Santamaría and Johnny Pacheco) went on to perform in and direct charangas of their own.¹⁴

The first chapters of this book delve into the history of Cuban music in New York from the rhumba bands of the 1930s and ’40s to the 1950s mambo bands, conjuntos, and charangas of the Palladium era. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, more Cuban musicians came to Miami and New York; but as Christina Abreu’s research on Cuban musicians in New York and Miami (between 1940 and 1960) has shown, it is important to challenge the exile model and acknowledge the influence of earlier Cuban migrations on musical developments. Abreu also notes that it is important to critique assumptions made regarding the relationship between population size and musical influence when analyzing Cuban and Puerto Rican musical cultures.¹⁵ Individual musicians can be highly influential, causing sparks of interest and scene-specific creativity; the relationship between musicians, their local cultures, and their audiences are complex, and lines of influence follow a variety of tributaries within this transnational performance tradition. Following the mambo’s popularity, the chachachá was on the wane toward the end of the 1950s but was rejuvenated by visiting charangas such as Fajardo y sus Estrellas and Orquesta Aragón, and then by the new wave of immigration in the early sixties. Charanga orquestas became popular at this time, performing in the Palladium on Broadway and at other Latin music venues in New York such as the Caborrojeño, Casa Blanca, the Bronx Casino, and the Club Cubano Interamericano. Arriving in 1962, Eddy Zervigón found work in these clubs almost immediately.¹⁶ Performing with his own band Orquesta Broadway since its inception, Eddy also performed with Eddie Palmieri’s ensembles and Conjunto Libre. I performed with Orquesta Broadway at the Mamoncillo Festival that July, and also had the opportunity to hear Charanga América and Manny Oquendo’s Conjunto Libre, in which Eddy Zervigón’s virtuosic clave-driven flute solos soared above a four-strong trombone section. Having spent several years in Havana on research, I now found myself amongst a different pan-Latino community with performers connected to pre-revolutionary Cuban charanga and son on the one hand, and to US-based charanga, mambo, and conjunto culture on the other. The Cuban five-key wooden flute and charanga violins of La Broadway rubbed shoulders with Oquendo’s fizzing trombone section, reflecting aspects of cubanía, sabor cubano, and a distinctive New York sabor.

Figure P.3 Poster for the 2007 Mamoncillo Festival in New Jersey. Author’s copy. Public domain.

Figure P.4 Eddy Zervigón, Manhattan Bridge, New York, June 16, 2016. Copyright Sue Miller.

Intrigued by this new grassroots charanga/trombanga¹⁷ environment, I returned to New York in 2012 for further fieldwork research. On my visits, Eddy drove me around New York, pointing out where Latin music venues such as the Palladium used to be in the 1960s. He recounted fascinating anecdotes as we passed various landmarks, including one where a riotous gig with Tito Puente on a boat resulted in a piano being tossed into the Hudson River by the revelers onboard! Thus the seeds for this second part of the charanga flute story were sown, and I knew I would be returning to New York once the first book on Cuban charanga was complete.¹⁸ This is the second part of the journey—one in which Cuban dance music in the USA is explored, and where musical changes in the Cuban flute style of improvisation are further examined to evaluate those changes and their wider relevance to Latin music performance aesthetics. Through this work I hope to document the enormous contribution of performers of Cuban dance music in New York and to demonstrate the improvisational creativity and vitality of the charanga flute soloists in these groups.

This book is therefore dedicated to Eddy Zervigón in honor of his immense contribution to both the Cuban flute style and to popular Cuban dance music in New York and internationally over the last fifty-eight years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would most like to thank Eddy Zervigón for inspiring this current work; without his support and generosity this book would not have been written. I would also particularly like to thank the musicians from Charanga Del Norte, Orquesta Broadway, Charanga Soleil, and Charansalsa. I would especially like to thank the following people in New York and Miami for their invaluable help: Joe de Jesus, Al Angeloro, Nestor Torres, Mark Weinstein, Willie Rodríguez, David A. Pérez and family, Connie Grossman, Karen Joseph, John Berdeguer, Andrea Brachfeld, Ben Lapidus, Jessica Valiente, John Berdeguer, Jesse Herrero, Eduardo Aguirre, Gustavo Cruz, Rene Lorente, Andy Harlow/Kahn, Robert Heredia, and Manny Rivera. I would like to thank Latin American Music Journal for their kind permission to reproduce material from my article ‘Pacheco and Charanga: Imitation, Innovation and Cultural Appropriation in the Típico Tradition of New York City’ (Latin American Music Review, Spring 2020) in chapters 5 and 6 of this book. I would like to thank Latin American Music Journal for their kind permission to reproduce material from my article ‘Pacheco and Charanga: Imitation, Innovation and Cultural Appropriation in the Típico Tradition of New York City’ (Latin American Music Review, Spring 2020) in chapters 5 and 6 of this book. A big thank-you to Dr. George Kennaway (University of Huddersfield) for his helpful and timely proofreading; thanks also to Dr. John Cowley for advice on the presentation of the discography, and to Nigel Humphries for the clear technical drawing of the five-key flute fingerings in chapter 9. A huge thank-you also to Barkley McKay, Michael Ward, and Dr. Paul Thompson (Leeds Beckett University) for their expertise in recording, mixing, and mastering Charanga del Norte’s Charanga Time and Pachanga Time albums created especially to accompany this book. Thanks also to Leeds Beckett University for funding a twelve-week sabbatical in 2017 and a four-week fieldwork trip to New York and Miami in 2016. Music and Letters have funded several other short research trips to New York in 2012 and 2015, for which I am very grateful. Finally a very special thanks goes to Dr. Nick Williams, my partner, for his support throughout.

IMPROVISING

SABOR

INTRODUCTION

Chupa la caña, nena,

Tiene sabor, sabor, sabor… y nada más

There are many versions of the song Tiene Sabor, including those by Cuban groups Abelardo Barosso (Cha Cha Chá with Orquesta Sensacíon) and later Omara Portuondo (Buena Vista Social Club’s Lost and Found), and also by New York’s Típica Novel (Se Colo La Novel) and Charlie Palmieri (Salsa Na’ Ma’).¹ Sabor is evoked through the song’s lyrics using signifiers of cubanía (Cubanness)—a river through palm groves, the sea, the province of Matanzas, a fishing boat, the Havana suburb of Callo Hueso, the railroad, sugarcane, the machete, the national flag, and a rifle—all emblematic of Cuba’s history of slavery, colonialism, plantation culture, and revolutionary struggle. Here the concept of sabor is linked intimately to the Cuban experience, symbolized by the taste of sugarcane with its recurrent coro "chupa la caña, nena, tiene sabor, sabor, sabor … y nada más" [suck the sugar cane, girl, it has flavor and nothing more]. The use of the term is, however, much wider; Berríos-Miranda, Dudley, and Habell-Pallán, for example, in their book American Sabor, describe sabor as an essential quality of Latin music that evokes the delights of music and of food and makes our bodies want to move.² Janice Mahinka has discussed the difficulties of translating the term sabor and rejects the common translation of flavor, putting forward instead the optional (and non-encompassing) term savor.³ This term fits well with the idea of savoring the taste of the sugarcane in the context of the song’s lyrics.

When asked in an interview with Israel Sánchez-Coll about what made a good charanga flute player, Eddy Zervigón, bandleader of New York–based Orquesta Broadway, emphasized sabor as the most important aspect of Cuban flute improvisation: Un sonido limpio, ideas para desarrollar frases melódicas, algo importante, que le pongan sabor, no es la velocidad de 8,000 notas por minuto, es el sabor [a clean sound, ideas that generate melodic phrases, which, importantly, are given sabor, not 8,000 notes a minute, it’s sabor].⁴ Zervigón did not reference food associations in this interview with Sánchez-Coll, but he has talked at length about the dance imperative of Cuban popular forms, a quality also emphasized above by Berríos-Miranda et al. For Zervigón, sabor is about natural talent, creativity, cultural background (for example, having a deep knowledge of the danzón repertoire) and rhythmic placement. He cites the flute player Joseíto Valdés in Orquesta Ideal as having more sabor than Antonio Arcaño (while acknowledging Arcaño’s importance as an innovator) due to Valdés’s ability to play four well-placed notes—he could do a solo full of sabor on one note only.⁵

So what does sabor signify to Cuban musicians, who, like Zervigón, were later based in the United States, such as Cuban trumpet player Alfredo Chocolate Armenteros and charanga flute players José Fajardo, Rolando Lozano, or Belisario López? And is sabor understood in relation to nostalgia for a lost homeland and/or cubanía? Max Salazar certainly wrote about Zervigón in terms of nostalgia for a pre-revolutionary Cuba: "For Cubans, his music evokes pleasant memories of the swank cocktail lounge at the Hotel Nacional, the saltwater aroma of El Malecón, the palm trees on the gray sandy beaches of La Concha and Varadero, danzón and guajira music floating from the cantinas along El Paseo del Prado, and the flickering neon lights of the Havana skyline."⁶ In relation to Cuban flute improvisation and charanga performance, Zervigón referred to clave feel, rhythmic placement, and interaction with the ensemble, and was certainly being less poetic than Salazar.⁷ Instead, Zervigón prefers to talk about melody, repertoire, and rhythm and does not talk about his own playing in Salazar’s evocative yet romanticized terms. The context for Cuban charanga performance in New York was and is related to, but different from, that of Havana. Even though the source of the music is acknowledged as Cuban by the musicians I interviewed, they described the Cuban sound as more laid back, confident, or tropical, and the New York sound as being more aggressive, urban, and gritty (although few were able to give specific musical details to describe this different feel). These somewhat essentialized explanations are interrogated throughout this book using music analysis and comparative transcription to gain further clarity on the music’s development. Sabor in the context of Cuban music performance in New York may draw upon or subsume aspects of cubanía, particularly as many influential Cuban musicians were on the scene, but the terms are different and, as will be demonstrated in later chapters, one may have sabor without necessarily having much cubanía. Sabor might have connoted nostalgia for the homeland for those Puerto Rican musicians in New York in the 1930s and ’40s such as Noro and Esy Morales and Rafael Hernández, where similar experiences of migration and homesickness formed part of the performance context. But sabor may have a different meaning for those Puerto Rican musicians born and brought up in the Big Apple, the so-called Nuyoricans like Tito Puente, Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, and Ray Barretto. Aside from evocations of homeland (for example, the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico) or references to the barrios of New York, sabor must also, as Zervigón implies, be seen to relate to a Latin performance aesthetic that includes a dance imperative, melodic call and response–styled improvised inspiraciones, and a clave feel—performance aspects intrinsically linked to the music’s historical development. Sabor is a multifaceted concept that cannot, however, be explained purely in terms of flavor, nostalgia for the homeland, or clave adherence. This book, then, seeks to explore and define what it means to have sabor in the context of Cuban dance music performance in New York.

TAXONOMIES: LATIN MUSIC, AFRO-CUBAN/CUBAN DANCE MUSIC, TÍPICO, OR SALSA?

The naming of this music is problematic and there have been a considerable number of debates about the term salsa among musicians and scholars alike.⁸ The music industries have always had an influence on the naming of musical idioms, with styles such as rumba/rhumba, mambo, and pachanga also raising similar controversies and disputes over definition and ownership (see chapters 2 and 5). The term salsa has come to stand for a particular standardized set of performance practices, and the dominant narrative of its origins has tended to oversimplify Latin music history in the USA. This book seeks to document an understudied period of Latin music history across the divide of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to demonstrate a plurality of narratives including the history of the influential charanga orquestas of 1960s New York.

Performers interviewed for this book were asked how they wanted to name the music they played, and many stated a preference for Cuban or Afro-Cuban music and rejected salsa. Some New York Puerto Ricans interviewed prefer to call the music Afro-Cuban to acknowledge its Cuban origins and the debt to Africa.⁹ The term Latin music was on the whole disliked for being too general, as was the term salsa. It is well known that Palladium musicians like Tito Puente and Frank Grillo (aka Machito) never accepted the term salsa and that Puente preferred the Cuban or Afro-Cuban music descriptors.¹⁰ Most of the musicians interviewed, however, still used the Latin music term when talking more generally about their music in conversation, but very rarely employed the term salsa. UK-based rumba¹¹ specialist and ethnomusicologist Christian Weaver critiques the Afro prefix when writing about Cuban music on the island, but affirms that the use of either Cuban and Afro-Cuban terms is acceptable when used with the knowledge of their inherent historical meanings:

If the island’s culture has, for some considerable time, been seen as a combination of the Afro-Cuban and the Hispano-Cuban we can surely say that by now the Cuban has arrived. Furthermore, we can say that the idea of Cuban is contained within, or in some cases encapsulated by certain practices, ideas and activities that arose as a result of its formation…. I maintain that we can talk of the Afro-Cuban and the Cuban. This is not to try to imply that Cuban culture is built from a European basis and the African is something extra to this; it is to distinguish between those manifestations that most likely existed, albeit in other forms, outside of Cuba and those that arose within it. The use of the term Afro-Cuban however still brings with it a suggestion of otherness that I find problematic in some instances.¹²

I perceive a difference in meaning of the term Afro-Cuban in the New York context, as many musicians use it to refer to son, mambo, chachachá, and pachanga styles as performed by mambo big bands, son bands, charangas, and conjuntos. This is a legacy of Machito and also of the later political and cultural movements of the 1970s in the USA. Mario Bauzá’s deliberate choice to call the band he cofounded in 1940 Machito and his Afro-Cubans lay in his pan-African perspective, inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and his experiences in the swing bands of Noble Sissle, Chick Webb, and Cab Calloway. Paul Austerlitz