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Groove in Cuban Son and Salsa Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2021

ADRIAN POOLE
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Abstract

Using a combination of ethnography, empirical measures of microtiming between rhythm-section musicians and ethno/musicological analyses, this article examines and measures groove in three real-world performances of the popular dance tradition of Cuban son and salsa. The findings paint a complex picture of groove that is shaped by rhythmic-harmonic structure, shared concepts of timing, individual preferences, group dynamics and rhythmic interactions between musicians as they work together to negotiate a groove with the ‘correct’ feel. Microtiming analyses produce a snapshot of how rhythmic timing relationships are ‘played out’ between musicians in live performances and provide quantitative measures of the level of synchrony and separation within the rhythm section. They also suggest that microtiming is influenced by certain metric locations within the rhythmic-harmonic structure, particularly those locations that anticipate harmonic changes and mark the beginning of repeated rhythmic-harmonic sequences.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 146 , Issue 1 , May 2021 , pp. 117 - 145
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Graciela Rodriguez for her help with Spanish translations. Thanks also to JRMA’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. And I am especially grateful to the talented musicians that gave their time and offered thoughtful insights that deepened my understanding of groove and made this research possible.

References

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26 Sound clips of these instrumental parts in the selected extracts from the three recordings by the groups Riamba, Havana Club Descarga and Asere may be accessed in the Supplemental Material online at <sound clip 1>, <sound clip 2> and <sound clip 3> respectively. For details of the three performances, see Table 2 below.

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48 In 1959, Ira Hirsh argued that a separation time of ‘between 15 and 20 msec is required for the listener to report correctly which of the two sounds preceded the other’. Hirsh, , ‘Auditory Perception of Temporal Order’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31 (1959), 759–67 (p. 759)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although ±20 ms is used here as a convenient and widely quoted timing threshold, I agree with other scholars that this is largely arbitrary and that the threshold is probably lower at around 10 ms for expert listeners and musicians. See, for example, Benadon, ‘Near-Unisons in Afro-Cuban Ensemble Drumming’, 189.

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59 Doffman, ‘Making It Groove!’

60 Michel Salazar, interview, 23 July 2010.

61 Tres player. The Cuban tres is a guitar-like instrument with three pairs of strings.

62 Changüí is a musical genre that originated in the Guantánamo region in the east of Cuba. Although related in style and evolution to son, it ‘constitutes a unique complex of music, dance, and social behaviour’. Lapidus, Benjamin, ‘The Changüí Genre of Guantánamo, Cuba’, Ethnomusicology, 49 (2005), 49–74 (p. 69).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Adolfo Gonzalez, interview (translated from Spanish), 23 July 2010.

64 Mauleón, 101 montunos, 31.