Son montuno

Son is a style of Cuban music which originated in the second half of the 19th century in the eastern province of Oriente.

It combines the structure and elements of Spanish canción and the Spanish guitar with African rhythms and percussion instruments of Yoruba origin.

The predecessor of son is thought to have been changui, another style from eastern Cuba which also merged the Spanish guitar and African rhythms and to which son is closely related.

As son moved westard towards urban and cosmopolitan Havana, its music and dance styles grew and evolved. In Havana, influences such as American popular music and jazz via the radio were adopted. The trios gave way to the septets, including guitar or tres, marímbulas or double bass, bongos, claves and maracas. The trumpet was introduced in 1926. Lead singers improvised lyrics and embellished melody lines while the claves laid down the basic son clave beat.

As time passed, musicians began "whitening up" son for the growing tourist traffic in the Havana nightclubs who did not understand the complex African rhythms. Arsenio Rodriguez, one of Cuba's most famous soneros, is considered to have brought son back to its African roots in the 1940s by adapting the guaguanco style to son, and by adding a cowbell and conga to the rhythm section. He also expand the role of the tres as a solo instrument. Rodriguez introduced the montuno (or mambo section) for melodic solos and his style became known as son montuno.

In the 1970s and onwards, son montuno was combined with other Latin musical forms, such as the mambo and the rumba, to form contemporary salsa music, currently immensely popular throughout Latin America and the Hispanic world. However, there are still many practitioners of traditional son montuno, such as Elias Ochoa, who have recorded and toured widely as a result of the upturn in interest in son montuno since the mid-1990s.

Piece moved from Music of Cuba

The earliest known form of modern Cuban music is the son, known to date from the late 1500s (the oldest known son is "Son de la Má Teodora", from about the 1570s in Santiago de Cuba). Son's characteristics vary widely today, with the defining characteristic a bass pulse that comes before the downbeat, giving son and its derivatives (including salsa) its distinctive rhythm; this is known as the anticipated bass. Contradanza and habanera were also early forms of Cuban music and dance, and the habanera especially has proven extremely influential on virtually all forms of Latin American music, especially in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. The 1762 invasion of Cuba by the United Kingdom brought flutes, clavichords, pianos and other instruments to the island.

Son is derived from Haitian, African, Spanish and native musical influences, arising first in the Oriente province, reaching Havana around 1909. The most influential group from this period was the Trio Oriental, who stabilized the sextet format that soon came to dominate son bands. In 1912, recording began with groups like Sexteto Habanero (a re-named Trio Oriental) and Sexteto Boloña;, and popularization began in earnest with the arrival of radio broadcasting in 1922, which came at the same time as Havana's reputation as an attraction for Americans evading Prohibition laws and the city became a haven for the Mafia, prostitution and gambling, and also became a second home for trendy and influential bands from New York City. A few years later, in the late 1920s, son sextets became septets and son's popularity continued to grow with artists like Septeto Nacional and its leader, Ignacio Piñeiro;. Piñeiro experimented with fusing son with other genres of music, forming guajira-son, bolero-son and guaracha-son. In 1928, Rita Montaner's "El Manicero" became the first Cuban song to be a major hit in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. In 1930, the Havana Orchestra took the song to the United States, where it also became a big hit. Arsenio Rodríguez; then became the most influential player of son and the origin of the modern Afro-Cuban sound, followed by Beny Moré and others who helped develop salsa music. Arsenio Rodrigíguez was especially influential, incorporating improvised solos, toques, congas and extra trumpets, percussion and pianos. Beny Moré (known as the "Barbarian of Rhythm") further evolved the genre, adding guaracha, bolero and mambo influences, helping make him extraordinarily popular and is now cited as perhaps the greatest sonero.

With the arrival of pop chachachá and mambo in the United States, son also became extremely popular but was usually called rumba, which more properly refers to a specific genre of music. Son, mambo and rumba, along with other forms of Latin music contributed to the development of salsa music, which quickly became perhaps the most popular form of Latin music ever.