Transforming the Bass in Contemporary Cuban Popular Music: Rameau Meets The

“Lowest Lead”

by Orlando Enrique Fiol

University Of Pennsylvania

Department of Music

2014

Introduction

An entire history of music could be written using the transformations of the bass (the

lowest part of a musical ‘texture’) as a central thread. Folk, popular and serious musics

around the world have brought to bear many conceptualizations of pitched and percussive

bass in terms of harmonic delineation, melodic intrigue and rhythmic personality. In

Western classical music, as the lowest structural voice migrated from the tenor in

Medieval/Renaissance vocal polyphony to the Baroque basso continuo, horizontal and

vertical concerns seemed at odds. Should the bass outline root-based harmonic motion

through leaps or involve itself in chord inversions in order to move melodically? In a host

of popular musics, from jazz and funk to conjunto norteño, polka and bhangra, Western

art music’s pitched bass has been expanded to include unspecified relative pitches, ,

modulating pitches and percussive effects. In contemporary Cuba’s popular musical

landscape, the Western art music conservatory has rubbed up against West African-

derived aesthetics of the lowest drum as lead. Throughout the past two centuries of much

Afro-Diasporic popular music, the bass, played on various instruments from the

marímbula to the acoustic and electric bass, remains a multi-functional melodic/harmonic

and percussive force supporting tonality’s endurance. The creolized and hybridized

Cuban bass’s historical and contemporary transformations evince a set of vital issues

relevant to contemporary music theory and analysis: nonliteral repetition, controlled

improvisation, conversation and variation. Whether playing traditional genres such as

son, guaracha, danzón and chachachá or branching out into Latin jazz and timba, Most of

today’s Cuban bassists are conservatory educated, historically informed and

cosmopolitan in their incorporations of techniques culled from other cultures.

This study examines the intellectual intersections and divergences between Jean-Philippe

Rameau’s fundamental bass theory and Afro-Diasporic conceptualizations of a bass role

transcending the boundaries of pitch and percussion. After a brief overview of

Medieval/Renaissance and Baroque basso continuo theory, I examine the intellectual

implications of Rameau’s basse fondamentale theory in terms of the overtone series,

melodic attraction and felt (rather than sounded) chord roots. Combining Rameau’s

fundamental bass theory with what little we know about European vernacular musical

traditions, I provide a historical survey of bass functions in 19th

and early 20th

-century

Creole Cuban genres such as danza, contradanza and early danzón. Moving through the

first half of the twentieth century, I chronicle the gradual introduction of the Afro-Cuban-

inspired “lowest lead” concept into prototypical bass tumbaos (ostinati) in genres such as

bolero, guaracha, chachachá and mambo. Finally, in close analyses of three historical

examples from the genres changüí, son montuno and timba, I postulate that the

contemporary Cuban bass has reached a particularly exhilarating zenith combining the

traditional pitched bass with percussive principles from Afro-Cuban ceremonial genres

and cosmopolitan influences from Afro-Diasporic musics.

A Brief Taxonomy of Pitched and Percussive Bass Behaviors

By the eighteenth century, the basso continuo in Western classical music could be

“realized” by the bass viol, violoncello, string bass, tuba, keyboard’s left hand or organ

pedals. This model of pitched harmonic foundation, rhythmically centered around

downbeats and harmonically focusing on chord roots with diatonic or chromatic

decoration, remains the bass’s most recognizable function, from country, disco and heavy

metal to bossa nova, calypso and highlife.

The tympani can serve here as a useful transitional link between pitched and percussive

“bass” textures. In the 18th

-century symphonic orchestra, it typically provided rhythmic

accentuation or punctuation that, thanks to its tenability, could be both pitched and

percussive, reinforcing the sonic bottom alongside pitched bass instruments. In European

vernacular genres such as fife and drum or marching band, the unpitched bass drum

provided formidable rhythmic reinforcement capable of diverting aural attention away

from chord roots in middle and upper voices of instrumental and vocal ensembles. The

primarily rhythmic function of unpitched bass drums endures in genres as diverse as New

Orleans second line, Brazilian samba reggae and techno dance. In some of these cases,

the unpitched bass provides an isochronous steady pulse (I.E. all four downbeats in

common time). In others, the percussive bass drum plays simple non-isochronous or

additive rhythmic cells such as 3+3+2.

Moreover, in West African ceremonial and social drumming, there is often a veneration

of the lowest instrument as lead (E.G. the atzimewu drum in Ghanaian Ewe ensembles).

In the Afro-Cuban folkloric pantheon, the lowest lead concept is embodied by the iyá

drum in the batá battery or the caja (log or conga drum) role in the Palo Congo ensemble.

In addition to a steady stream of inventive improvised or precomposed variations atop

repeating and interlocking “bases rítmicas” (rhythmic patterns), the lowest lead initiates

conversations and sectional divisions. These roles: variation, conversation and sectional

demarcation, can be found (albeit to a limited structural extent) in Afro-Diasporic popular

musics such as American post-bop and avant-garde jazz, 1960s soul/funk and roots

reggae. But although the combinations of pitched and percussive bass techniques in these

genres are indeed exhilarating, the bass often stops short of aggressively shaping

prevailing interlocking structures.

Given these three broad categories of pitched and percussive bass behaviors, Rameau’s

fundamental bass theory, applied to contexts besides the Baroque basso continuo, endures

as a vital conceptual force, liberating the bass from the harmonic delineation of chord

roots.

Rameau’s Fundamental Bass And Musical Motility

In Western European art music during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the lowest

tenor voice in sacred and secular vocal and instrumental polyphony led musical motility

or motion by regulating imitative counterpoint, outlining melodic modal tendencies and

cadential figures. It also constituted the acoustical and mathematical basis for concord

categorization according to consonance/dissonance ratios favoring octaves and fifths as

points of repose. Until the seventeenth century, there was no major/minor nomenclature;

what we now hear as major or minor triads in all their inversions were understood as

discrete concord arrangements rather than equivalent, transposable and invertible

sonorities. It was thus nearly impossible to speak of “harmonic progressions”; theorists

instead conceived of concord and cadential formulae based on tenor movement towards

and away from each modal final (Fuller 2002: 477-500; Schubert 2002: 503-533). By the

late-17th

century, there was indeed a sense that composite polyphonic simultaneities

could and should be called triads, employed as compositional building blocks rather than

considered the results of strictly horizontal contrapuntal processes (Lester 1992). Yet,

despite the burgeoning major/minor system and triadic nomenclature, polyphony

continued to operate horizontally according to diatonic and even chromatic voice-leading

traditions and conventions (Narmour 2010). The tensions between harmonic functionality

and counterpoint necessitated the conceptualization of triadic harmony independent of

polyphony’s registral pitch distribution, a profound shift affecting the bass’s role.

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s base fondamentale theory, initially set forth in his Traité Sur

L’Harmonie, (1722), gave Baroque composers and musicians the intellectual tools to

reconcile contrapuntal voice leading and key-based major/minor harmony by separating

the physical/audible bass from the mathematical triad. Heavily influenced by Descartes’

appeals to reason and rationality, Rameau sought a mechanistic rationale for harmonic

motion in terms of Newtonian principles of gravitational attraction (Christenson 1993). In

previous centuries, only modal voice leading provided senses of attraction toward finals

through cadential formulae. Rameau’s fundamental bass theory posited the idea that

harmonic triads were based on pure overtones inherently capable of stimulating longing

for resolution toward the tonic. But if the basso continuo was expected to outline fifth-

based harmonic progressions through root motion, melodically jarring leaps would ensue.

By allowing the basso continuo to sound triad tones other than their roots, employing

diatonic and chromatic non-harmonic decorative pitches, the melodic integrity of bass

voice leading could be maintained.

The physical bass’s reintegration into polyphony therefore capitalized on the aural effects

of qualitative chord differentiations. As the bass’s motility options increased through

chord inversions, Rameau’s fundamental bass posited a basis for musical motion apart

from abstract theory. The attraction of a dominant seventh to its tonic, having more to do

with the overtone series than with specific voicings, could therefore stand apart from

Steve Larson’s notions of melodic gravity and magnetism in jazz theory (Larson 2002:

352).

Fortified by Rameau’s fundamental bass theory, Late-18th

and 19th

-century Western

classical compositions became concerned with motivic and formal cohesion within

diatonic and chromatic tonal frameworks, emphasizing musical motility over theme-and-

variations or imitative counterpoint found in genres such as the chaconne, cannon,

invention and fugue. Yet these theme-and-variations, cyclically repeating genres, were

most ubiquitous in the Mediterranean and Latin American colonies, many of them (such

as the zarabanda and fandango) influenced by African ingredients (Sublette 2004: 1-

124).

Syncretism, Creolization and the Cuban Bass

From the 16th

through the late 19th

centuries the colonial New World’s musical cultures

were largely shaped by Western classical traditions transmitted from Europe via

ecclesiastic and economic institutions. In Latin America and Cuba in particular, white,

black and mulatto musicians, playing for plantation slave masters and in military brass

bands, responded to their cultures’ clamoring for Creolized genres. For early examples of

emerging forms such as contradanza and danza, As evinced from surviving piano scores,

bass parts can only be inferred from the piano’s left hand(Manuel 2009) In the

gestural/textural writing of predominantly binary forms based on 18th

-century European

classical models including minuet/trio and rondo, the aforementioned traditional pitched

bass’s chord root-based harmonic foundation was given a Creole touch via signature

additive non-isochronous rhythmic cells including the cinquillo [X0xx 0xx0] and

amphibrach [Xx0x x0x0] (Rey 2006). However, whereas the Baroque basso continuo,

thanks in part to Rameau’s fundamental bass theory, could resolve dominant seventh and

fully diminished chords to their tonics by melodic stepwise motion, the bass in 19th

-

century creole Cuban genres conspicuously avoided chord inversions. In this sense, 19th

-

century Cuban genres were no different from European waltzes or polkas, early-20th

-

century American Dixieland jazz and a host of world genres favoring root-based bass

movement.

Existing scores of early 20th

-century Cuban popular genres such as bolero and trova

santiaguera, like their forebears, show no actual bass parts. The most famous bolero

composers, e.g., Sindo Garay and Pepe Sánchez, composed their songs for voice with

guitar and no bass; ensembles could of course add it, expecting bassists to outline

harmonic progressions by ear with stock rhythmic patterns derived from the same

additive rhythmic cells found in 19th

-century contradanzas. These were recombined and

permuted to produce patterns such as the “Habanera,” [X00x x0x0],tresillo [X00x 00x0]

and “anticipated bass” [000x 00x0]. Moreover, none of these stock rhythmic cells was

limited to the bass; they were used in vocal parts, instrumental accompaniments and

“minor percussion” such as güiro or clave. The cinquillo became the backbone of trova

santiaguera and danzón, while the tresillo became characteristic of son from 1900

through 1940. It is through these cells that the timbalón in Cuban orquestas típicas (two

large kettle drums derived from the tympani) punctuated early 20th

-century danzones with

rolls and cinquillo-derived phrases.

Bass Transformations In Mid 20th

-Century Cuban Popular Music

By the 1920s, the European-derived pitched bass, combined with a collection of stock

additive rhythmic cells, “officially” arrived in Cuban popular music recordings in the

form of barely audible bass parts played on tuba, trombone, botija (clay jug), botijuela

marímbula and finally the string bass. The early Cuban bass was not yet conversational

or improvisatorily interactive as it would become in 1960s songo, 1990s timba or even

1940s son montuno. But this approach’s antecedents can be heard in the upper-octave

embellishments of tresillos in 1920s-1930s son, broken octaves in 1940s bolero and

doubled pickups in 1950s mambo, guaracha and chachachá.

For the past fifty years, spanning many genres, the bass Cuban popular music can be

conceived along a continuum spanning generic and song-specific rhythmic ostinati or

tumbaos. A near century of recorded examples of Cuban popular music details the shifts

in performance practice from literal repetition in Antonio Arcaño’s danzón mambo or

guaracha, minimal varied repetition in Los Van Van’s songos, to controlled

improvisation in the timba of NG La Banda. Like the tympani in a symphony, the Cuban

bass in salsa and timba can accentuate or reinforce portions of coros (vocal refrains) or

mambos (horn vamps). Introductions or song “hooks” often employ motivo (doubling

technique between bass and piano). Genres such as son, mambo and guaracha tend

towards generic bass tumbaos, while son-montuno, songo and timba rely more heavily on

song-specific tumbaos, motivos and modular gears intended to vary the bass’s behavior.

The most ubiquitous generic bass tumbaos are either anticipated, clave-aligned or half-

clave in length. Clave-aligned tumbaos’ pitches coincide with the clave’s prominent

pulses, while clave-neutral or half-clave tumbaos take up a quarter or half of a clave’s

cyclical length. Song-specific bass tumbaos and motivos are generally thought to have

begun with Arsenio Rodríguez’s “singing bass” and have proceeded through the songo of

Los Van Van and the timba of Issac Delgado, Charanga Habanera, Bamboleo and others.

The Marímbula and Anticipated Bass

Having provided an overview of historical and contemporary bass approaches in

Cuban popular music, the following three musical examples can be properly

contextualized and analyzed. The earliest consistent usage of both unpitched and

percussive bass fell to the marímbula, a rustic instrument of African origin consisting

of a wooden box with four to eight tuneable metal keys. Due to its ergonomic

limitations, the most popular marímbula tumbao (ostinato) has become known as the

“anticipated bass” (Manuel 1985). If a clave cycle is notated in two measures of cut or

common time, the prototypical anticipated bass occurs on the & of 2 and 4; this is

known as bombo-ponche or onomatopoeically as “quin con.” The anticipated bass

appears in nearly all the genres emanating from Cuba’s eastern provinces: changüí,

quiribá, nengón and regina (Lapidus 2008: 95-109). In these genres, the bass function

was first handled by the botija or clay jug, which, depending on the player’s intonation

and musical skill, could sound any microtonal pitch. Guantanamero musicians cite

1929 as the year when the marímbula, a metalophone of Bantu origin, gained

widespread use. It is a large wooden box with a sound hole and at least six plucked

metal keys (Ibid: 17). For Donald Thompson, “The marímbula has become simply an

inexpensive and easily portable bass instrument, used in many styles of folk-popular

music. It is, in effect, the poor man's bass fiddle. “The instrument's tonal limitations

are at most only mildly bothersome in the milieu for which it is appropriate and in

which it is cultivated, for much of the music which it is called upon to perform is

limited to the tonic-dominant cycle. A three-tongue instrument tuned to the tonic,

supertonic, and dominant scale degrees serves nicely for the non-modulating

Dominican merengue and for other simple folk-popular species. More elaborate

marímbulas, such as the ten-tongue models seen in Puerto Rico, can provide tolerable

basses for even the freely modulating boleros which the country folk have learned

from the ubiquitous television and phonograph. Naturally, the basses are not always

the ones which the harmony demands nor those which the performer would like to

produce, but on one half of the keyboard or the other there is likely to be a note that is

close enough to serve.

The usual method of launching a piece illustrates the tolerance with which other

instrumentalists view the marímbula's limitations. After deciding what piece will be

played, the performers may attempt to pitch it in a key for which the marímbulero has

some basses available. If agreement cannot be reached, due to a guitarist's limitations or

to strictures created by a singer's range, no regrets are felt. The piece will be played

anyway, the marímbula providing a cycle of basses perhaps a vague second or third off

the true key,” (Thompson 1975: 147-148).

The marímbula’s function and typical tumbao poses intriguing issues involving

anticipation and pitch. For many Latin musicians, arrangers and scholars, the anticipated

bass must involve deliberately chosen pitches that anticipate harmonic chord roots before

they are sounded by other instruments. Yet, when the marímbula is relegated to barely

tenable diatonic pitches rather than chord roots, the rhythmic effect of its signature

tumbao is identical to that of the anticipated bass. When modern groups such as Elito

Revé’s charangón play changüí-inspired material, the electric or baby bass, using

appropriate chord roots, plays the same rhythmic ostinato as the traditional marímbula.

In Example 1: “Voy cruzando los caminos” by Grupo Changüí de Guantánamo (1999),

Pedro Speck’s cycle-of-fifths progression has no hope of being articulated by Olivar on

the marímbula. Rather, the generic anticipated tumbao, augmented by Olivar’s percussive

effects, imbues the song with a characteristic signature sound or sello in changüí, that of

the approximate or dissonant bass sounded against diatonic harmony. According to

Cuban bassist and arranger Jiovanni Cofiño, who familiarized himself extensively with

changüí while working with Orquesta Revé, a fastidiously tuned marímbula would sound

too much like a bass and be therefore inappropriate for changüí (Cofiño: telephone

communication 2012). This example and others of its kind clearly demonstrate Donald

Thompson’s claim that the dissonances arising from mismatched marímbula

approximations of harmonically significant pitches and the actual prevailing harmony is

aesthetically favorable when conveying a rural or rustic feel.

However, as Cuba’s eastern rural genres migrated to Havana to coalesce in the urban son

of the 1920s and 1930s, the marímbula’s pitch limitations became glaringly problematic.

Many marimbuleros switched to a rare three-string acoustic bass that is still in use today.

Marímbula patterns were replicated according to their contours, often either oblivious of

the prevailing harmony or crudely chromatically transposed to accommodate it.

Notwithstanding this transitional period’s sonic awkwardness, the gradual shift to

acoustic and then electric bass has allowed Afro-Cuban musicians to navigate a host of

diatonic and harmonic progressions using the marímbula’s rhythmic pattern, deploying

chord roots to make it the now familiar anticipated bass. This practice remained

normative throughout 1950s big band mambo and is now a cornerstone of contemporary

pan-Latin salsa, constituting a significant component of the overall groove upon which

dancers depend.

Moreover, the ubiquitous anticipated bass has never exerted an aesthetic/stylistic

hegemony over Cuban popular music. By the 1940s, with most professional urban

popular genres handled by acoustic bass rather than marímbula, Cuban popular music

was ready for a revolution of syncopation and pitch expansion, spearheaded by the blind

bandleader, tresero and composer Arsenio Rodríguez.

Arsenio Rodríguez and the Singing Bass

During the 1940s and 1950s, Arsenio Rodríguez nearly singlehandedly invented both the

prototypical conjunto ensemble and the son-montuno genre most closely associated with

it. Much slower, more syncopated, polyrhythmic and contrapuntal than traditional son,

son montuno places greater emphasis on the open-ended call-and-response estribillo or

montuno sections of arrangements than their introductory verses or canto sections. In

addition to an intensely interlocking clave-aligned conga/bongó matrix, Arsenio’s highly

syncopated “bajo cantado,” or singing bass was (and remains) integral to son montuno as

an enduring genre. Doubling dancers’ footwork, son montuno’s syncopated singing bass

anticipates the clave’s 3-side with a strongly accented pickup rather than its downbeat

(García 2006: 43).

Example 2: “Mi china me botó” by Arsenio Rodríguez’s conjunto (recorded in 1950),

demonstrates how a vii-i minor harmonic progression gets articulated by a master

acoustic bassist, Lázaro Prieto, capable of precise intonation and syncopation. It is

significant that the song’s A-minor tonic in bar 2 occurs on the pickup to the clave’s 3-

side rather than falling squarely on a downbeat or in the typical anticipated bass position.

While the tonal teleology points to A-minor, the coro’s periodicity, doubled by the tres

guajeo in bar 1, begins on the 2-side’s “weaker” G-7 chord, creating clave counterpoint.

Most significantly, the B-natural on the clave’s 2-side, G major’s third rather than root,

occupies the prominent ponche where the anticipated bass would dictate the chord root. It

is difficult to know whether Arsenio’s audience or dancers felt disconcerted by the sheer

sound of an unresolved chord inversion on the ponche.

On one hand, it may have embodied a West-African lowest lead aesthetic with additional

intrigue stemming from the instability of chord inversions. In the next logical evolution

of the marímbula aesthetic, any harmonically suitable low chord tone could serve the

same purpose as the chord root. However, the enduring persistence of chord roots and

anticipated bass patterns in genres such as guaracha, mambo and salsa suggests that both

the anticipated and singing bass’s rhythmic and harmonic ramifications connote

controversial extremes of musical/cultural pride.

The ongoing tension regarding the bass’s best behaviors regarding pitch versus

percussive effects has permeated nearly every facet of Cuban popular music and its

Diasporic offshoots. Upon his permanent move to New York in 1952, Arsenio

Rodríguez’s singing bass encountered considerable resistance from predominantly non-

Cuban audiences accustomed to faster tempi and the anticipated bass (Salazar 2002).

New York bands including Tito Puente, Machito and his Afro-Cubans, Tito Rodríguez all

relied on the anticipated bass for guarachas and mambos. But the singing bass returned in

the early 1960s as part of Eduardo Davidson’s pachanga craze, as well as in the late

1960s as part of Nuyorican boogaloo or Latin Soul, its syncopations especially well

suited to the average tempo and backbeat of African-American soul (Flores 2000: 79-

114).

Los Van Van’s Songo, Motown and Psychedelia

While 1960s Nuyoricans fused African-American music with son montuno singing bass

lines to form the boogaloo, Juan Formell and Los Van Van, in newly Revolutionary

Cuba, incorporated select elements of African-American soul and British psychedelic

rock by crafting a complex of rhythms and song forms dubbed songo, (Moore 2006: 115-

116). Rather than use stock bass tumbaos, Formell instead combined the bajo cantado

with elements of legendary Motown bassist James Jamerson’s blues/jazz-based approach

to diatonic and chromatic harmony. Formell’s songos augment traditional Cuban popular

music harmony with seemingly nonfunctional tertian-based Beatles-influenced

progressions, modernizing the typical Cuban dance band soundscape with Farfisa organ,

Fender Rhodes, Moog synthesizers, electric guitar and drum kit. Songo dancers entrain to

the congas, woodblock clave and güiro, while the bass and piano tumbaos, violin guajeos

, guitar and drum set parts, often derived from genres such as rumba, comparsa and

changüí, syncopate the composite texture. Among songo’s many innovations is the

polyrhythmic interaction between pitched electric bass and the drum set’s kick drum.

This interaction between pitched bass and kick drum has become a cornerstone of

modern timba.

Jazz and Funk in Afro-Cuban Bass

From the 1970s through the 1990s, Cuban bassists such as Irakere’s Carlos del Puerto,

NG La Banda’s Feliciano Arango and Issac Delgado’s Alain Pérez augmented traditional

Afro-Cuban and songo bass with African-American funk-based snaps, pops, hammer-

ons, pull-offs, thumps and ascending/descending slides, found in the music of Sly Stone,

Earth Wind and Fire, Parliament Funkadelic and other groups clandestinely enjoyed by

young Cubans. Eager to add greater gestural modernity and self expression to traditional

popular music, dancers have developed pelvic shakes, thrusts and circular movements in

semiotic symbiosis with funky bass and heavy backbeat drums used aggressively and

frequently by cutting-edge groups such as Irakere, Afrocuba and NG La Banda. This

aggressiveness, coupled with hip-hop influences has fueled modern timba’s subset of

open montuno section despelote, bomba or tembleque gears , in which non-pitched

ascending/descending bass slides largely define the gear sounds and structures. Today’s

Cuban bassists incorporate pedal tones, percussive thumps and pointillistic, punchy

reggae-inspired lines into the now traditional arsenal of anticipated and singing bass

patterns. All these techniques constitute a contemporary reimagining of the low lead

aesthetic wherein the bass provides much more than time-keeping stability.

Examples 3A and 3B: “La Vida Sin Esperanza” recently recorded for an instructional

book by timba pianist Iván “Melón” Lewis and bassist Alain Pérez, demonstrate many of

timba bass’s most astounding developments. This example’s length attests to the variety

with which timba bassists can subtly and nonliterally repeat a two-clave tumbao. Kevin

Moore, a prolific author on timba and my frequent collaborator, has systematically

notated and codified Alain Pérez’s every percussive technique, from string taps and snaps

to thumps and ascending/descending slides. Pérez elegantly navigates the extended ninth,

eleventh and thirteenth harmonies in Melón’s piano tumbao, the traditional ponche

remains cadentially important, while the bass line’s pointallistic melodic contours are

obviously influenced by bajo cantado. All the while, the marímbula’s percussive legacy,

filtered through American funk and Afro-Cuban folkloric drumming, gives the bass an

unmistakable sense of cultural, stylistic and musical meaning. This extended example of

timba bass is simultaneously structurally cyclical and narrative, with the clave, harmonic

progression and coro (refrain) serving as boundaries. It is at once deeply historical and

marvelously modern, blending the conservatory with the street, bringing dancers to their

feet and satisfying even the most erudite musicians.

Whereas Cuban timba arrangements mitigate salsa’s constant literal repetition with

aggressive bass and percussion gears, international salsa tends to employ funky bass

techniques as exotic accents or spicy seasonings. This ethnically demarcated disparity

belies many historical and political ironies between Cuba, the United States and Latin

America. Despite political isolation and economic adversities, Cuban timba is on the

whole more cosmopolitan, especially in terms of the bass. For U.S. Hispanics, salsa has

long represented a bastion of cultural identity into which elements of mainstream

American culture are only cautiously incorporated. International ballroom salsa dance

culture also restricts the bass’s boldness. By constructing elaborate choreography around

a very historically limited salsa groove, many intensity-building bass techniques end up

sidelined to a false nexus between predictable repetition and danceability. The bass’s

textural, rhythmic and harmonic roles thus broker power negotiations between

international salsa and Cuban timba’s struggles for individuation, commercial success

and cultural preeminence.

Conclusion

Just as an entire Western history could be written about the tenor’s acoustic and

theoretical migration to the bass as we know it, Cuban popular music’s history of

transcultural, creolized and hybridized bass transformations, if perhaps less formally

documented, is equally rich. In its nineteenth and twentieth-century European-derived

genres, the bass behaved similarly to Baroque basso continuo composition and

performance practices informed by Rameau’s fundamental bass theory. Today, West-

African-derived principles of lowest lead and varied repetition allow the pitched bass to

opt in or out of harmonic delineation without derailing it. The techniques used by Cuban

bassists have fused African and European aesthetic, stylistic and sonic elements into a

uniquely Cuban sense of national cultural/musical pride. Yet, for international salsa

dancers and consumers, Cuban timba’s percussive and pointallistic bass techniques

disrupt necessary grooves and challenge the social dance hierarchy in which musicians

are expected to provide dancers with choreographic canvases. By contrast, in Cuba,

popular music is so inextricably linked to folkloric and liturgical traditions that the ultra-

modern electric bass, using unpitched percussive effects and rhythmic displacement, can

indicate sectional divisions and signal conversations like the lead drum in the batá

battery.

If the literal and figurative physical bass, whether in Western classical or Afro-Diasporic

contexts, can assume metaphorical kinship with beating hearts, Mother Earth, Reason and

Truth, it is because so many musical syntaxes fall within its purview. Concords and triads

have been built upon it, chords have had to invert around its mammoth melodic motions,

and dancers have felt threatened by its deliberate disappearances. In a world where so

much unpitched thumping bass menacingly bellows out of car radios and clubs, the

magnitude of a bass independent of harmonic function may in fact demand and command

more attention than do outmoded and racially suspect ideologies intent on its restraint.

Distorted bass panned on a single stereo channel could at one time make needles jump off

phonographs. The equally radical transformation of the Cuban popular music bass, from

creolized imitations of Western classical models to folkloric blends of percussive and

nonfunctional pitch, the singing bass and today’s timba, have challenged the bass to

fulfill the sociocultural, sonic and stylistically aesthetic needs of black, white and

multiracial Cubans as symbols of cubaneo (Cuban musical identity) on the island and in

exile. What artistic, philosophical and sociocultural upheavals will bass behaviors cause

in different musical and cultural contexts as its traditional roles are amalgamated and

transformed? I can only hope that legions of keenly curious, subwoofer-toting scholars

will remain on call around the world to find out.

REFERENCES

Acosta, Leonardo. 2003. Cubano be, cubano bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba.

Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institute.

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