Cuban Music from A to Z

Helio Orovio, Cuban Music from A to Z, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, xi + 235 pp.The enormous impact of Cuban music on popular culture throughout the twentieth century in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America, and as far as West Africa, is a well-established fact among historians and musicologists. By virtue of its long history of recorded output and endless innovation in musical styles, from son to timba, Cuban music has attracted a great deal of attention among scholars. A spate of high quality works have appeared over the past two decades detailing key moments in the development of Cuban music and the lives of important Cuban artists. However, comprehensive English-language surveys of the music as a whole remain astonishingly few in number.This English translation of Helio Orovio's highly regarded encyclopaedic work, Dicconario de la musica cubana, originally published in 1981, is therefore cause for celebration, as it collects information on an exhaustive number of themes, condensed into over thirteen hundred entries and 150 illustrations, in an easily accessible volume. A historian and musicologist with the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore at the Academy of Sciences in Cuba, Orovio's ambitious work commendably goes beyond focusing on artists, to include a wide range of items, such as musical genres, instruments, producers, musicologists and organizations. The entries are arranged alphabetically and adequately crossreferenced. Orovio's sources are culled from a lifetime of research on Cuban music.His careful mining of the available sources found in Cuban national archives, the Cuban press, interviews and information gathered from his personal travels across the island is obvious throughout the work. Orovio has put these sources to good use, updating old entries and including new ones not found in the Spanish edition. The African roots of Cuban rhythms, and late twentieth-century fusions with jazz, rock and roll, and contemporary dance music, are all documented.It is this comprehensive approach that is the book's major strength. There are fascinating entries on Indo-Cuban instruments, such as the mayohuacan and the fotuto, that highlight the deep roots of the country's musical traditions. The author also points out, en passant, the oft-overlooked role of various other Caribbean musical forms in the development of Cuban styles. For example, the tahona (also the name of a large tambourine) is a musical variant of rumba brought to Santiago in the early nineteenth century by enslaved migrants from revolutionary St Domingue (modern-day Haiti) (p. …