The Cuban Son: The Soul of an Island (16th Century–1960)

modern history. An island of just over one hundred thousand square kilometers that generated not one but a dozen original musical genres, each with its own rhythmic grammar, its own history, and its own global impact. Son, bolero, mambo, chachachá, guaguancó, guaracha, danzón, conga, feeling, timba: they were all born there, on that Caribbean island that was for centuries the point of convergence of three worlds — the indigenous Taíno, the European Spanish, and the enslaved African — and that turned that forced and painful convergence into something that the entire world ended up dancing to.

And at the center of it all, like the trunk from which all the branches sprout, is the son.

The roots: three cultures on one island

The history of Cuban music cannot be told without first understanding what Cuba was: the jewel of the Spanish crown in the Caribbean, a mandatory stopover for transatlantic trade, a recipient of African slaves coming mainly from the Yoruba, Bantu, and Carabalí nations, and the last American colony to gain independence from Spain in 1898. This accumulation of history—longer colonial rule, later slavery, denser mixing—explains why Cuban music has a rhythmic complexity and melodic richness unparalleled on the continent.

Spain brought its harmony, its guitar, its décima—the ten-line poetic form that is still the vehicle for Cuban peasant song today—and its Mediterranean melodic sensibility. Africa brought its drums, its rhythmic clave—that five-beat pattern distributed over two measures that is the invisible skeleton upon which all Cuban music is built—and its call-and-response structure between soloist and chorus that musicologists call call and response and Cubans simply call montuno. The Caribbean contributed the warmth, the sensuality, and that physical attitude toward music that makes the body in Cuba not just listen, but respond.

From that fusion, the son was born.

The origin: east before west

Son was not born in Havana. It was born in the eastern provinces of Cuba —Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Manzanillo— in the second half of the nineteenth century, in communities of descendants of African slaves who mixed their musical traditions with the rhythms and melodies they had absorbed from the colonizers. Some trace its origins back to the sixteenth century with the so-called "Son de Ma Teodora", attributed to Teodora Ginés, a free musician of African origin who lived in Santiago de Cuba. Whether or not that date is accurate, what is certain is that son as a recognizable genre took shape in eastern Cuba before Havana ever knew it.

Its original instruments were modest: the Cuban tres —a six-string variant arranged in three pairs of the Spanish guitar—, the bongó, the maracas, the marímbuto or botija —a clay instrument of African origin—, and the clave. The clave —those two small wooden sticks that mark the fundamental rhythmic pattern— is the simplest and most indispensable instrument in all of Cuban music. Without clave there is no son. Without son there is no Cuban music.

Son arrived in Havana around 1910, brought by musicians from the east who migrated to the capital. At first the Havana bourgeoisie rejected it, considering it the music of Black people and peasants. The police banned it on some occasions. The Cuban government itself declared it immoral at some point. None of it made any difference. Son was too good to be banned.

The structure of the son: cuerpo and montuno

The son has a two-part structure that is one of the most elegant musical forms in world popular music. The first part is called cuerpo: the soloist develops the melody and the lyrics in elaborate verses, telling a story, describing a landscape, declaring love, lamenting an absence. The second part is called montuno: the chorus enters with a repetitive refrain of no more than four bars, responding to the soloist in that call-and-response pattern of African heritage. The soloist improvises over the montuno, the chorus responds, the music spins and spins in a spiral of increasing energy that can last for minutes or eternities depending on the dancer's state and the musician's mood.

It is a perfect form because it is simultaneously simple and infinite. Simple in its structure: everyone knows when the chorus enters, everyone knows what direction the music takes. Infinite in its execution: every singer, every improvisation, every montuno is different because the son lives in the moment of its performance, not on the paper where it is written.

The Septeto Nacional and the Trumpet That Changed Everything

In 1926, Ignacio Piñeiro founded the Septeto Nacional in Havana. The decisive innovation was incorporating the trumpet into the son ensemble, an instrument that until then was not part of traditional son. This addition changed the sound of son forever: it gave it brightness, projection, and an acoustic filling capacity that previous ensembles lacked.

Piñeiro was also the first composer to systematize the fusions of son with other genres: guajira-son, rumba-son, and guaracha-son. His song "Échale Salsita" (1928) —whose title would decades later be the origin of the term "salsa"— is one of the first great standards of the son repertoire. The Septeto Nacional played at the Ibero-American Exposition of Seville in 1929 and at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, bringing Cuban son to international audiences for the first time.

The Trio Matamoros: son conquers the world

While the Septeto Nacional dominated Havana, in Santiago de Cuba the Trio Matamoros —founded in 1925 by Miguel Matamoros, Rafael Cueto and Siro Rodríguez— took son toward a more melodic dimension better suited to the international market. In 1928 they traveled to New York to record with RCA Victor, and their first album made an immediate impact. Their repertoire —which included "Son de la Loma", "Lágrimas Negras" and "El Mamá de la Mama"— established the standard for romantic son and brought it to Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Spain in the thirties.

The Trio Matamoros was the first great export vehicle for Cuban son, anticipating by decades the role that the Buena Vista Social Club would play in the nineties: making the world pay attention to that extraordinary music Cuba was producing. "Lágrimas Negras" —composed by Miguel Matamoros— would become one of the most recorded standards in all of twentieth-century Latin American music.

Arsenio Rodríguez: the father of modern Cuban music

If Ignacio Piñeiro incorporated the trumpet, it was Arsenio Rodríguez who transformed son into the most complex and advanced music of his era. Born in Güira de Macurijes, Matanzas, in 1911, blind from the age of seven after being kicked by a horse, Arsenio was nonetheless one of the most visionary musicians in all of Cuban history. As a tres player, his command of the instrument was absolute. As an arranger and bandleader, his ambition knew no bounds.

In the nineteen forties, Arsenio expanded the son ensemble by adding a second and third trumpet, incorporating the piano and the tumbadora —the conga— into the standard format, and creating what would become known as son montuno: an extended and denser version of traditional son in which the montuno section occupied more space, the brass arrangements were more complex, and the rhythmic foundation was more powerful. That structure —which Arsenio refined over a decade of extraordinary recordings for RCA Victor— would become the direct basis of New York salsa in the nineteen seventies.

He was also a composer of extraordinary richness: "La Vida Es un Sueño", "Fuego en el 23", "El Tumbador" are songs that transcend the genre to enter the territory of great popular music. Arsenio Rodríguez died in Los Angeles in 1970, after years of relative anonymity in the United States, without having received during his lifetime the recognition his work deserved. Today he is considered, alongside Ignacio Piñeiro, one of the fathers of Cuban popular culture.

La Sonora Matancera: the university of son

Founded in Matanzas in 1924, La Sonora Matancera was for decades the most influential orchestra in Cuban son and the one that launched the greatest number of extraordinary voices into the world. Its list of singers is a catalog of the history of Caribbean popular music: Daniel Santos, Bienvenido Granda, Carlos Argentino, Celio González, Bobby Capó and, above all, Celia Cruz — who would become, with La Sonora, the most important female figure in the entire history of son and salsa.

Celia Cruz began singing with La Sonora around 1950 and remained with them until her exile in 1960. Those ten years of recordings — guarachas, sones, boleros, mambos — are one of the most complete and consistent discographic bodies in Cuban music. Celia's voice — that cry of "¡Azúcar!" that would become her trademark, that power and joy that seemed to defy any adversity — found in La Sonora Matancera the perfect setting in which to unfold.

Benny Moré: the Bárbaro del Ritmo

Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré Gutiérrez was born on August 24, 1919, in Santa Isabel de las Lajas, Cienfuegos, the oldest of eighteen siblings in a humble Afro-Cuban family. His great-great-grandfather on his mother's side was, according to family tradition, a descendant of a Congolese king enslaved in Cuba. That heritage was audible in his voice: a tenor of a fluidity and expressiveness that no Cuban musician of his generation matched.

They called him El Bárbaro del Ritmo and El Sonero Mayor. Both titles were accurate. He was a bárbaro because his command of Cuban genres was instinctive and total: he could sing son montuno, mambo, guaracha, bolero, guaguancó, and rumba with the same naturalness with which other singers handle a single style. He was the sonero mayor because his way of phrasing, of improvising over the montuno, of finding the exact moment for a vowel or a pause, was the perfection of the sonero art taken to its limit.

Benny Moré lived intensely and died young: on February 19, 1963, at forty-three years of age, a victim of the alcoholism that had been his shadow for years. In less than two decades of active career he left a discography spanning hundreds of recordings. In the nineteen fifties he founded his Banda Gigante—more than forty musicians—and with it created the most ambitious arrangements of Cuban son and mambo. He performed at the Academy Awards ceremony, toured all of Latin America, and never ceased to be what he had always been: a musician of the people, without academic training, who made the music that sounded in his head and that turned out to be exactly what everyone needed to hear.

The son as a root

In 1959, the Cuban Revolution arrived, and with it, the exile of many of the musicians who had built the son over decades. Celia Cruz left. La Sonora Matancera left. Arsenio Rodríguez was already in New York. Benny Moré died in 1963 before deciding. The son as a massive cultural movement in Cuba entered a different phase under the Revolution, but it never died: it simply transformed, went to Miami, New York, Caracas, Mexico City, and continued to grow from exile.

What Ignacio Piñeiro, Trío Matamoros, Arsenio Rodríguez, Sonora Matancera, and Benny Moré had built between the twenties and the sixties was the foundation of everything that would come: mambo, chachacha, salsa, timba. All Latin American popular music of the 20th century has Cuban DNA, and that DNA comes from the son.

Editorial selection

Top 10 Essential Albums and Recordings of Cuban Son

1. 1

   Lágrimas Negras

   1931

   Trío Matamoros
2. 2

   Con Todos los Fuegos

   1946

   Arsenio Rodríguez
3. 3

   El Bárbaro del Ritmo

   1955

   Benny Moré
4. 4

   Con la Sonora Matancera

   1950–1960

   Celia Cruz
5. 5

   Échale Salsita

   1928

   Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñeiro
6. 6

   Son de la Loma

   1928

   Trío Matamoros
7. 7

   La Vida Es un Sueño

   1947

   Arsenio Rodríguez
8. 8

   Banda Gigante

   1953

   Benny Moré
9. 9

   Suavecito

   1930

   Septeto Nacional
10. 10

    Son Montuno

    1944

    Arsenio Rodríguez

Next chapter — Cuba Series: Bolero and Feeling: the romantic song Cuba gave to the world (1883–1960).