his charanga in Afro-Cuban culture by being among the first charangueros to add conga drums to his percussion section.
This immersion in Afro-Cubanismo endowed his ensemble’s music with textures and timbres that were new to Cuban music (the combination of congas, strings, and flutes) but that Senegalese audiences later found familiar and satisfying. Among the many language communities existing within present-day Senegal’s borders, there have been widespread string and flute traditions. A number of groups, especially within the last one hundred years, have given a prominent musical role to the kora, a twenty-one-stringed African harp. The riti, a one-string bowed instrument with a violin-like sound, has also been musically significant in many areas. The xalam/hoddu, a plucked string instrument, has occupied a central place in Wolof and Pulaar/Tukolor musical culture. The Pulaar/Tukolor, who mainly reside in northern Senegal, are also famous for their wooden flutes. In all regions a diverse array of drumming styles continues to flourish. Though Arcaño’s music does not seem to have reached Senegal while he was alive, his influence on other Cuban string and flute orchestras was profound. Unwittingly, by augmenting the instrumental mix of danzón ensembles he paved the way for the vast popularity of Cuban charanga music in Senegal and other parts of Africa in the 1950s.
Arcaño’s revamping of the danzón genre was only one revolution among several that occurred in the 1940s in Cuban music. The blind tres player Arsenio Rodríguez (1911–1970) was similarly transforming son. Other Cuban musicians, like the conguero Chano Pozo (1915–1948), helped initiate bebop jazz in the United States.43 Reveling in their instrumental virtuosity, Cuban musicians delighted in intricate rhythms, dense sonic textures, and dissonant key changes. The music that grew out of this creative ferment, like the mambo, was artistically distinguished but increasingly difficult for Cubans to dance to, not to mention the tourists from the United States who were becoming big consumers of Cuban music. This may have been the reason that the mambo never became hugely popular in Senegal, although its brass-heavy arrangements also may not have been as appealing to Senegalese listeners as the string and flute charangas.44
The violinist Enrique Jorrín (1926–1987), who briefly played in Arcaño’s ensemble before becoming musical director of the charanga Orquesta America, noticed that dancers were having trouble adjusting to the complicated new syncopation of music like the mambos of Beny Moré. Rather than shifting their weight between the beat, they were moving on the second and fourth beats of the bar, out of sync with the music. Jorrín resolved to create a new offshoot of the danzón tradition that would be easier for dancers to master but that would still preserve some of the rich sonority and rhythmic complexity of the 1940s style.45 His nuevo ritmo came to be called cha-cha-chá, supposedly from the sound of dancer’s feet shuffling on the dance floor and the rhythmic accompaniment of the güiro and the timbales.46 In 1950 Jorrín wrote “La engañadora,” which became the first big cha-cha-chá hit. The song initiated a global boom for Cuban music similar to what had transpired with “El manisero” when it became a worldwide hit in 1930.47 The cha-cha-chá became a sensation in New York, Paris, London, and Dakar, where its popularity continues to this today.
For many Senegalese who came of age in the 1950s, the cha-cha-chá and later its variant, the pachanga, exemplified modernity. The musical forms sounded sleek and smooth, the aural equivalent of the smartly tailored uniforms the Cuban charanga musicians wore on their record covers. Even the dance attached to the music was streamlined, shorn of extraneous movement (and easy to learn). More than listeners elsewhere, the Senegalese were aware that the cha-cha-chá and the pachanga were the result of a centuries-long interaction among Spanish, French, and African music. It was a global cultural “movement” wherein African culture met European “civilization” on equal terms, without being peripheralized or exoticized. In the words of the noted Dakar recording engineer Aziz Dieng, the cha-cha-chá “is a mix of African music and classical music. It has the ambience of classical music.”48
Just as significantly, the cha-cha-chá / pachanga phenomenon combined contemporaneity with decorum. In so doing, it inspired young Senegalese to create a “local” modernity that allowed them to be polished, worldly, and resolutely African.49 In subsequent eras, first US soul music and funk and then hip-hop similarly created spaces where African publics could explore new ways of being in the world. However, none of the subsequent waves of popular music had the enduring influence of Afro-Cuban music. It ultimately constituted a foundation that other musical genres could build on but never totally displace.
TWO
Havana / Paris / Dakar
Itineraries of Afro-Cuban Music
The history of modern Cuban music in Senegal begins with the song “El manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”). It re-creates a Havana street peddler’s chant advertising the peanuts he has for sale. While the piece’s lyrics are not particularly memorable, its melody, rhythm, and key changes have fascinated musicians and listeners from many cultures ever since its composition in the 1920s by the Cuban musician Moisés Simons. The song’s impact was especially strong in colonial Francophone Africa and continued to resonate throughout the early phases of postindependence as well. This chapter focuses on what the Senegalese have heard in Afro-Cuban music, beginning in Paris and then in Dakar, from the 1930s onward. It examines the influence of Latin music on pre– and post–World War II Senegalese debates about the fashioning of an autochthonous modernity. Afro-Cuban music, for example, played a major role in the formation of negritude in the 1930s among Senegalese intellectuals in Paris, a relationship that many of negritude’s founders, like Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), who later became the first president of an independent Senegal, either ignored or obscured once they became prominent politicians and literary figures after World War II. This chapter also reveals why the nightclub became a site where Senegalese could formulate and contest different conceptions of negritude, the black Atlantic, and cosmopolitanism. As liminal spaces free from colonial hegemony, nightclubs allowed Senegalese to combine erotic adventure and intellectual exploration in unprecedented ways. At all points in this process of developing a modern cultural identity, Afro-Cuban music had a crucial role to play.
“El manisero” first became a hit in 1929. In that year the Cuban zarzuela singer Rita Montaner (1900–1958) traveled to Paris for her second French tour.1 France during the 1920s was cosmopolitan in its musical tastes. The French discovered jazz after World War I and were enthusiastic participants in the Charleston dance fad. Argentinean tango also acquired a sizable following. However, until Rita Montaner’s tour in 1928 and her recording of “El manisero,” Cuban music was relatively unknown to French listeners. Her first appearance at the Olympia the previous season, where she was accompanied by the dancing duo of Julio Richards and Carmita Ortiz, had piqued the Parisian public’s interest.2 Her 1928 recording of the song, released after her show at the Olympia, had raised her profile in France, and she wanted to build on her triumph there.
Montaner’s second concert in Paris, in 1929, was both a critical and popular success and brought Afro-Cuban music to the fore just as she had hoped. A highpoint of her act was “El manisero.” Her performance of the song made her the talk of Paris and promoted sales of her record. There was already a sizable community of Cuban artists, intellectuals, and musicians in Paris, and it is likely that their activity laid the groundwork for an escalating French interest in Cuban culture.3 Before long the disc circulated widely throughout France and the Francophone world.4 It ignited an enthusiasm for Cuban music in Paris that resulted in the establishment of a number of nightclubs featuring Cuban bands filled with Afro-Cuban musicians.5 These clubs formed the hub of a bohemian culture in Montmartre and the Latin Quarter in the 1930s that attracted the Antillean and Francophone African students who had come to France to obtain advanced academic training unavailable in the French colonies
The popularity of “El manisero” had ramifications even further afield. On Saturday,
