Assist With Music

Rumba Cubana

tagStarted c. 1880Peak 1950–1990Last big hit UNESCO's 2016 inscription of rumba in Cuba, capping decades of Matanzas and Havana groups touring the worldFrom CubaSung in Spanish

Located in 1 route

Latin / Música Latina → Afro-Latin / Afro-Caribbean

Rumba is secular Afro-Cuban drum-and-voice party music with no chords at all: three tumbadoras carry it, with the salidor and tres-dos interlocking a fixed base pattern while the quinto improvises high, cracking accents aimed at the dancers' feet, over claves striking the asymmetrical rumba clave and a guagua/catá stick pattern beaten on bamboo or a drum shell; a lead singer opens with the diana, a wordless melismatic vocalise on syllables, moves into a Spanish-language sung narrative that can run to décima-style poetry, then launches a short chanted coro that the group answers in tight call-and-response while the percussion tightens behind it; the umbrella covers three distinct forms — yambú, the oldest and slowest, historically played on wooden cajones, with a stooped, mimed old-people's dance and no vacunao; guaguancó, the mid-tempo couple dance built around the man's vacunao thrust and the woman's evasive botao, and by far the most recorded form; and columbia, the fastest, in a rolling 6/8, a competitive solo showpiece for a male dancer full of Abakuá and Congo-derived gesture, shouts and fragments of ritual language.

History

Rumba coalesced in the 1880s and 90s after abolition, in the solares — crowded tenement yards — and dockside barrios of Havana, Matanzas and Cárdenas, drawing Congo, Abakuá and Yoruba practice together with Spanish song forms into an explicitly non-religious music that the Cuban establishment stigmatized for decades as lower-class and Black; Matanzas is the tradition's deep well, and its lineage runs through Grupo AfroCuba de Matanzas and above all through the group founded in 1952 as Conjunto Guaguancó Matancero, whose Puchito single pairing "Los Beodos" with "Los Muñequitos" was demanded so loudly by audiences that the band simply took the second title as its name — Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, still the benchmark ensemble, and heirs to the yambú and columbia repertoire as much as to guaguancó; commercial recording had opened with Alberto Zayas's "El Vive Bien" on Panart in 1955, and after 1959 the state's Conjunto Folklórico Nacional and the Egrem label moved rumba from the yard onto the concert stage, while Havana's own style was carried by Los Papines, by Yoruba Andabo, formed among the dockworkers of the port and heard on El Callejón de los Rumberos (1993), and by Clave y Guaguancó; weekly public rumbas — Sábado de la Rumba at the Folklórico, the Callejón de Hamel sessions in Centro Habana — kept the music communal rather than purely theatrical, and from the 1990s Qbadisc reissues, Egrem releases and constant touring pushed the whole complex worldwide, culminating in UNESCO's 2016 inscription of rumba in Cuba on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity; guaguancó, the most commercially dominant of the three forms, is documented separately in this encyclopedia, but yambú, columbia and the matancera lineage belong to the umbrella tradition described here.

Defining artists

Show 1 more

Essential listening

Show 1 more
← Explore Latin / Música Latina

Sources

  • UNESCO, "Rumba in Cuba, a festive combination of music and dances and all the practices associated" (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, inscribed 2016), https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/rumba-in-cuba-a-festive-combination-of-music-and-dances-and-all-the-practices-associated-01185
  • Ned Sublette, "Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo" (Chicago Review Press, 2004)
  • Robin Moore, "Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)
  • Esquina Rumbera, "A Discography of Guaguancó Matancero (and More Rarities)" (Esquina Rumbera, 2011), http://esquinarumbera.blogspot.com/2011/08/discography-of-guaguanco-matancero-and.html