Plena
Located in 2 routes
Plena is pandereta music — a stacked set of hand-held tambourine-like frame drums without jingles, where the big seguidor thumps a repeating low ostinato, the segundo answers it, and the small high requinto cuts across both with sharp improvised slaps — laid over a brisk 2/4 street-marching pulse with a güiro scrape and, in older styles, a cuatro or a button accordion filling the harmony; the tunes are short, plain and instantly singable, built as a four-line chorus everyone in earshot can join, alternating with topical verses about a neighbor's scandal, a hurricane, a strike or a politician, sung in a conversational, unpolished voice with the crowd answering back; it is designed to be played standing in a circle or walking down a street, and the bandleaders of the 1940s and 50s scaled the same rhythm up to trumpets, piano and full ballroom orchestra without changing its bones.
History
Plena took shape around 1900 in the poor Black barrios of Ponce on Puerto Rico's south coast — La Joya del Castillo is the neighborhood usually named — among Afro-Puerto Rican workers and English-speaking migrants from St. Kitts, Barbados and other eastern Caribbean islands, and it earned the nickname "el periódico cantado," the sung newspaper, because its verses reported the news of the block; Manuel "El Canario" Jiménez made it a commercial genre from 1927 onward, recording prolifically in New York for RCA and other labels and supplementing the panderetas with piano and horns, while César Concepción dressed it in mambo-era big-band arrangements in the 1940s and 50s as plena de salón for hotel ballrooms that had previously shut the music out; the decisive turn came in the mid-1950s when Rafael Cortijo's Combo, fronted by Ismael Rivera, put an all-Black band playing undisguised bomba y plena on Puerto Rican national television with hits like "El Bombón de Elena" and "Quítate de la Vía, Perico," a lineup and repertoire that fed directly into New York salsa, and Mon Rivera's trombone-driven tongue-twister plenas set a template Willie Colón later borrowed outright; the diaspora and revival strands run through New York's Los Pleneros de la 21, founded in 1983 by Juan Gutiérrez and documented on Somos Boricuas (Henry Street Records, 1996), Gary Núñez's Plena Libre in Puerto Rico from 1994, and Tito Matos's Viento de Agua, whose all-percussion Unplugged: Materia Prima appeared on Smithsonian Folkways in 2004; the panderetas remain a protest instrument, marching at the head of the plenazos that filled San Juan's streets in the 2019 demonstrations, and the tradition's Caribbean circulation keeps it cross-listed with the reggae-and-dancehall side of the tree.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Cortaron a Elena — Manuel "El Canario" JiménezSpotifyYouTube
- Santa María — Manuel "El Canario" JiménezSpotifyYouTube
- Pa' los Boricuas Ausentes — César Concepción y su OrquestaSpotifyYouTube
- El Bombón de Elena — Rafael Cortijo y su Combo con Ismael RiveraSpotifyYouTube
- Quítate de la Vía, Perico — Rafael Cortijo y su Combo con Ismael RiveraSpotifyYouTube
- Lluvia con Nieve(1963) — Mon RiveraSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Ruth Glasser, "My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917–1940" (University of California Press, 1995)
- Discography of American Historical Recordings, "Manuel Jiménez" (UC Santa Barbara Library), https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/mastertalent/detail/105354/Jimnez_Manuel
- Smithsonian, "Reflections on the Puerto Rican Plena, Post-Hurricane Maria" (Smithsonian Year of Music, 2019), https://music.si.edu/story/reflections-puerto-rican-plena-post-hurricane-maria
- Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popular, "César Concepción" (Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popular), https://prpop.org/biografias/cesar-concepcion/