2004: CUBA Seminar
Graduate School and University Center
City University of New York
From the Habanera to "Louie Louie": The Other Great
Tradition
Ned Sublette
The first written evidence of the word "drum" in English
dates only to 1540, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and
the word was "not very common" until 1573. But in 1527 there
were already a thousand or so negros in Cuba, and sailors and conquistadores-to-be
were already dancing in Havana. As music in the North American colonies
developed, there was already a music culture in the great maritime hub
of Havana, and musical ideas that came from Cuba entered North America
over and over. The most fabled town in American music, New Orleans,
became a recognizable city under Spanish rule, as an administrative
department of Havana. American popular music would be unrecognizable
without this influence.
Ned Sublette, author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums
to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press, 2004), will speak about the
relationship of Cuban music and music in the U.S. Among the ideas to
be discussed: the influence of musical ideas that passed through Cuba
back to Sevilla, transforming the music of Europe, in the 16th century;
the stylistic differences between Afro-Cuban and Afro-American music
onto the great stylistic differences between the forested and arid regions
of Africa; the presence or absence of Islamic influence as a factor
in the evolution of popular music; and the indispensable influence of
Cuban dance music on rock and roll, best exemplified in the way Richard
Berry in 1956 took the famous "Louie Louie" lick from the
opening bars of René Touzet's version of Rosendo Ruiz, Jr.'s
"El Loco Cha Cha."
Ned Sublette is a 2003-2004 fellow at the Dorothy
and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York
Public Library. He was for seven years senior co-producer of the public
radio program Afropop Worldwide, and is co-founder of their new "series
within a series" Hip Deep, a program of ideas about the music,
history, and culture of Africa and the African diaspora. He co-founded
the Qbadisc record label, which pioneered the marketing of postrevolutionary
Cuban music in the United States in the early 90s. He has been researching
in Cuba since 1990, and has led a number of musico-cultural tours of
the island. He is a 2004-2005 Tulane Rockefeller Humanities fellow,
and will spend next year doing archival research in New Orleans on musical
connections among Haiti, Cuba, and Louisiana.
When: Wednesday, May 19, 5:00 P.M.
Where: Room C202 (Ninth Floor)
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th St.)
To reserve a seat, please email cubaproject@gc.cuny.edu.
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