Son Cubano Reaches Havana

Son cubano emerged as a fused genre of song and dance in the mountainous east of Cuba toward the close of the nineteenth century.^[1] Its passage from that rural hinterland into the national capital stands as the decisive episode of its early history, since the move to Havana turned a provincial idiom into the most widely circulated music on the island.^[1] Historians of Cuban music situate the genre's deeper origins in the countryside of the eastern Oriente province, and around Santiago de Cuba above all, before any urban codification took hold.^[2]

The music that reached the capital was syncretic in construction, binding Spanish and African materials within one ensemble.^[1] Its Hispanic dimension furnished the vocal manner, the metre of the sung verse, and most distinctively the tres, a plucked string instrument descended from the Spanish guitar.^[3] Its African dimension, rooted in Bantu practice, furnished the clave pattern, the call-and-response shape of the singing, and a percussion section of bongo and maracas.^[3] A complementary account assigns these contributions to peoples carried from Kongo, Yoruba, and Bantu communities, who brought polyrhythm, antiphonal singing, and ritual drumming into Cuban music long before later genres took form.^[7] In this respect the son resembled other Cuban forms of mixed parentage, since the same fusion of Spanish elements with West and Central African practice underlay rumba and mambo as well.^[7]

The son travelled to Havana around 1909, and the first recordings followed in 1917, an event that opened the genre's spread across the entire island.^[4] Within the capital it moved swiftly from a regional curiosity to Cuba's most popular and influential form, a standing it retained through the decades that followed.^[4] The contrast with the genre's highland beginnings was pronounced, for it was the capital and the new recording industry, rather than the eastern hill communities, that propelled the son's diffusion across the whole island.^[4]

The 1920s in particular recast the son's performing format. Whereas the earliest groups had numbered between three and five players, the sextet rose to become the standard configuration over the course of that decade.^[5] The trend toward larger ensembles continued afterward, as a trumpet was added in the 1930s to yield the septet, and a lineup organised around congas and piano, the conjunto, prevailed by the 1940s.^[5] The son afterward supplied the principal material for the improvised sessions, or descargas, that flourished during the 1950s.^[5]

The genre's reach extended well past Cuba in the years following its Havana ascendancy. From the 1930s, touring bands carried the son to Europe and North America, where it was reworked for ballrooms under the label American rhumba.^[6] Transmitted by radio, it likewise gathered audiences in West Africa and the Congo basin, seeding hybrid forms such as Congolese rumba.^[6] Its descendants proved no less consequential, as New York's musicians of the 1960s drew on the son to assemble salsa while in Cuba the genre evolved into songo and, later, timba.^[6] A parallel line runs through the son montuno, the variant that Arsenio Rodríguez developed during the 1940s and that later writers treat as the direct basis of salsa.^[8]