Son Cubano

The origin of the son is to be attributed to the eastern region of the Cuban island and is associated with the “changüí” celebrations of African rhythm typical of the area.

At the beginning, the musical structure of the Son was based on the constant repetition of a four-beat refrain sung by a chorus, known as the Montuno. The original instruments of the Son were: the tres and the guitar. In the Son, African percussion instruments and Spanish plucked string instruments blend together; vocally, it blends the Spanish décima with the alternating song between chorus and soloist of African origin.

Ignacio Piñeiro’s song “Échale Salsita” (Put a little sauce on it), the first reference to the word Salsa in the music of the Caribbean, according to many authors. But it has a gastronomic perspective (échale salsita a la butifarra, put a little sauce on the sausage) and not the meaning that we ascribe today to the word Salsa, as the name of a Caribbean and worldwide musical movement.

The Son was one of the dances of the poor classes – of the solares – which was harshly rejected by the well-off classes, those – of the clubs – and was even prohibited by the government, which considered it immoral.

Then, entering the dance halls of Havana, the Son passed from the solar to the consciousness of the Cuban people and from there to the world.

After the 1920s the Son became the national genre of Cuba, surpassing the Danzón, which had held that place at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. Originally it was danced with the body and not with the feet (an evolution of the guaguancó), with permanent contact between the bodies.

For the tastes of the European aristocracy it mixed with the danzón and gave rise to the Danzonete. Development of the walked figures, turns, and variants.

When it spread to the USA in the 1930s, it took on the characteristics of a slow rumba (coming from the Guaguancó), which was defined as “square.”

The romantic and slow soul of the rumba (yambú, and very slow guaguancó and son) gave rise to the Rumba/Beguine strand, which became today’s Anglo-American Rumba, standardized, artificial, and adopted in Italy by the federations tied to liscio and ballroom dancing in the “Latin American” specialties.

The decade of the 1930s represents the period of the internationalization of the Son.

In 1940 the Conjuntos emerged, when the tresero Arsenio Rodríguez decided to expand the format of the septeto and added two trumpets, the tumbadora, and the piano.

In Arsenio’s Conjunto, the tres was played in a style distinct from the other musical formats of the Son, the piano elaborated rhythms of great vitality, and the trumpet developed rather Cuban improvisations starting from American swing.

In the decade of the 1950s, Benny Moré, the genius of Cuban music, created a school of his own in the interpretation of the Son.

This genre has a great number of variants, among which we can mention: the changüí, the son montuno, the son habanero, the sucu sucu, and the son pregón, among others. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the Cuban bassist Juan Formell and his group Los Van Van created El Songo, mixing the Son with American electronic Beat music.

The Son is, without a doubt, the Cuban musical genre that has most influenced salsa; both in its instrumental format and in its musical structure.