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TOURS - GIRAS
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Ritmo Oriental by Kevin Moore - ©2007
The early Los Van Van mixed rock and pop with charanga and changüí (to say nothing of merengue con bomba y son), while Irakere combined jazz, classical music and progressive rock with Afrocuban folkloric music and enough modernized son montuno to keep people dancing. The early creations of these bands were such dramatic fusions of styles that even the casual listener may occasionally hear some of the "seams". Ritmo Oriental's departure from previous Cuban music was more seamless and organic. North American influences can certainly be heard in their music, but unless I'm mistaken, (always a distinct possiblility), that influence probably stemmed as much from exposure to the early successes of Los Van Van than from a conscious attempt at fusion. Unfortunately, while we have many interviews with Chucho Valdés, Juan Formell, Changuito et al, we have none with Enrique Lazaga, Humberto Perera, or any of the other architects of Ritmo Oriental's transformation from a traditional charanga into one of the three most important groups of the 70s and 80s.
La Orquesta Ritmo Oriental is among the most underrated and under-researched groups in Cuban music history. Unlike Van Van and Irakere, there's no EGREM "Colección" series to chronicle their discography and no lengthy biographical DVDs recounting their history and interviewing their surviving members. Unlike Arsenio Rodríguez, Beny Moré, Chano Pozo and Sexteto Habanero, there's no meticulous Cristóbal Díaz Ayala discography or lovingly documented box set from Tumbao Cuban Classics. "La Ritmo" was as innovative, influential, prolific and musically brilliant as any of the aforementioned groups, but their work would be mired in almost total obscurity if not for the heroic efforts of a handful of people like Ned Sublette (QBADisc Records), Brett Gollin, Rob Holland, John Santos, Michael Spiro, Martin Karakas, Victor Barrientos, Emilio Vanvanedes, Danilo Lozano, Emiliano Echeverría, Osvaldo Martínez, David Cantrell, Burrell Spates, Luis Carranza and Will Schultz. As it is, some key parts of the Ritmo Oriental discography are only available on rare or lost vinyl and there are other key gaps which remain a total mystery. Here's what we've been able to piece together with the help of Brett Gollin and a mysterious Havana musicologist named Cristóbal. timba.com's Ritmo Oriental Discography
What follows is the sketchy historical outline that I've been able to piece together. If you can add to it, you know where to find me!
La Ritmo's
Rhythm Section American musicians marvel enviously at the ability of timba bandleaders to keep well-rehearsed "monogamistic" groups together for extended periods of time, but the timba scene looks more like a circus of free agent baseball players when compared to the Cuba of the 70s and 80s. There was a bit of musical chairs in the vocal and string sections, but Ritmo Oriental's rhythm section nucleus remained completely intact throughout their phenomenal 18 year run at the top of the charts.
Unlike Changuito and Irakere's drummers, Bernardo García and Enrique Pla, Daniel Díaz never used a kick drum. He employed a very unusual percussion setup with a foot pedal playing the largest bell, a snare drum, and a wide assortment of timbales, toms and bells arranged in unorthodox fashion.
Fate, and history, have been kinder to bandleader, songwriter and güiro player extraordinaire Enrique Lazaga, who is still healthy and active in 2007, having toured the world with Maraca and Cubanismo and being generally revered as one of the greatest güiro masters of all-time, as well as a being as being a remarkably good bandleader, songwriter, and the father of Eduardo Lazaga, the founding timbalero of Charanga Habanera and one of the most important and innovative timba percussionists.
Conguero Juan Claro Bravo, discussed in greater detail below, was still with the group in the early 2000 but as of 2005 had been replaced by Enrique Lazaga, Jr.
(photo from Rob Holland)
It was probably more than a coincidence that shortly after Humberto Perera's arrival, Ritmo Oriental released the 4-song EP (CA 468; EPA 6238) that gives us our first glimpse at the bold new Ritmo Oriental of the 70s. We don't know the exact year, but it was either 1970 or 1971, and the big hit was Sabroseao con la Ritmo.
1970? Ritmo Oriental - Sabroseao
con la Ritmo (EPA-6238)
notes: There's only one bass tumbao in this song and it's very much in keeping with the style we've encountered in Los Van Van's 1969 recordings -- a strong downbeat followed by a melodic, clave-aligned series of offbeats and upbeats. Its only unusual feature is that, like Los momis, it has no ponche (xxxx xx0x). In fact, Sabroseao is rhythmically equivalent to Los momis except for the addition of the downbeat. 0xx0
x0x0
xxx0
x0x0
Sabroseao
con la Ritmo The tempo, which reaches 111 bpm, is also in keeping with Los Van Van's first songo tracks -- significantly faster than charanga, although not quite as fast as Los Van Van's faster 1969 recordings, and only hinting at the breakneck speeds that all three of our groups would reach by the mid-70s. Tempo Comparison Chart 59
bpm - slow son montuno - Arsenio Rodríguez - Yo
no engaño a las neñas Timba's most common tempo range is from the high 80s to the low 100s. So, in many ways, Sabroseao con la Ritmo could be thought of as the application of some of the stylistic innovations of Los Van Van and Pello el Afrokán to a genre perfected by Fajardo and Aragón. Ah, but there's so much more to it than that. It's not simply that Ritmo Oriental used faster tempos that its predecessors -- it also used multiple tempos in the same song and switched between them in extraordinarily sophisticated ways. We'll be spending a lot of time studying this practice, which the bandmembers called "con efecto", but first we need to explore la Ritmo's reinvention of one of Arsenio Rodríguez' favorite devices: the bloque The Art of the Bloque Ritmo Oriental is to the bloque as Bach is to the fugue -- neither was the first or last to employ the device, but each elevated it to a level that has yet to be surpassed. The bloque at the end of the intro to Sabroseao con la Ritmo is our first hint at la Ritmo's mind-bending new approach. All right then ... what's a bloque? Imagine a rollercoaster that threatens to throw its screaming occupants out of their seats as it hurtles around a turn, only to give them another big thrill as it accelerates into the next straightaway. So it is with a bloque -- the whole band stops keeping time and then re-enters in complete rhythmic unison with a challenging syncopation. Listeners and dancers who can hang on long enough are rewarded with an incomparable feeling of exhilaration when the rhythm section roars back in. Arsenio Rodríguez was the first great master of the bloque: Arsenio
bloque example 1 Whole chapters could be written on the bloques of each major timba band. (In fact, I'm in the process of doing just that). Everyone has their favorites, but it's hard to top the original Charanga Habanera, whose leader, not coincidentally, got his start as a violinist and arranger with la mismísima Ritmo Oriental, and whose timbalero, not coincidentally, was the son of Ritmo Oriental's leader Enrique Lazaga. Charanga
Habanera bloque example 1 In 1971, twenty years after Arsenio recorded his last Cuban 78 and twenty years before la Charanga would release its first timba LP, Ritmo Oriental began a truly astounding twenty year run of bloque creativity: Ritmo
Oriental bloque example 1 What is it about these Ritmo Oriental examples that creates so much more rhythmic tension and makes them so much harder to learn and (trust me) to write out? It's the tempo changes. An Arsenio Rodríguez or Charanga Habanera bloque holds a steady tempo while doing its level best to throw you off the rollercoaster by convincing you that the tempo, or at least the meter, has changed -- but if you refuse to give in and tap the original beat steadily enough, you'll find yourself right back in the pocket, and grinning ear to ear, when the band surges back in. Try doing that with the Ritmo Oriental examples! Even the world's most rock-solid studio drummer will end up scratching his head in bewilderment. If a normal bloque is the musical equivalent of an Escher painting, a Ritmo Oriental bloque is like viewing that painting on a rotating canvas. I'd been scratching my own head in bewilderment for some time when my research finally led me to two musicians without whom this section could not have been written: bassist Rob Holland and timbalero Brett Gollin, who had the great fortune to hang out and even sit in with the band in the 1980s (Gollin also studied with Daniel Díaz). Rob Holland called this tempo-bending practice con efecto, a term he picked up from Enrique Lazaga himself in late 1985, so that's what we'll be calling it throughout our survey of La Ritmo. To head off any future confusion, note that many timba musicians use the word efecto to refer to the bloque itself. For example, when Tomasito tells us about the songo con efectos gear of Paulito FG's band, the term "efectos" refers to the rhythmic punches played by the bass and percussion while the piano, voices and horns continue normally, holding the tempo steady. In the case of la Ritmo, however, efecto refers to the feeling created when the whole band drags the tempo down dramatically. No one is holding down the original tempo -- the tempo has actually changed. In this context, the musicians would say that they're playing "con efecto". For this article, we'll use the following definition:
Here's how the opening bloque of Sabroseao con la Ritmo looks written out: legend: 0xx0
x0x0
xxx0
x0x0 Now compare these four audio examples: MIDI
at a constant tempo (104 bpm) The Making of the MIDI File: Holland and Gollin point out that, in general, La Ritmo's percussionists would synchronize these dramatic tempo changes by stopping right on the 2nd stroke of the 2-side of the clave, and in this the percussionists do, but because the last note of the bass tumbao hits one subdivision later, I changed the the tempo from 104 bpm to 95 bpm to coincide with the bass. When I played my MIDI file against the original recording, the bloque worked like a charm -- the punches lined up perfectly. But my MIDI version still came back in too soon, in spite of the fact that I'd compensated for the fact that the band comes back in at a slightly faster tempo of 107 bpm. I finally got it to sound right by putting yet another tempo change of 72 bpm in the silence prior to Daniel Díaz' abanico (where the tempo rises to 107 bpm at the final underlined x). I'm quite positive that no one was ever feeling a tempo of 72 bpm. They simply played the bloque, stopped, and waited for the timbalero to bring them back in with his abanico (drum roll on the timbales). But since the computer can't "listen for the abanico", I had to cheat and insert the extra tempo change. If you want to try this at home with your band, here's the routine:
Rob Holland, based on his experience of transcribing and performing many of these arrangements, explains further:
Sabroseao
con la Ritmo -- bloques
2 & 3 An even more complex time warp occurs at the second bloque. legend: 0xx0
x0x0
xxx0
x0x0
"corriendo
la cintura" MIDI
- slow without tempo changes This one required 11 MIDI tempo changes, three of which are again simply pauses as the musicians wait for the strings and flute to bring them back in. There's also a subtle clave anomaly in this passage, but until we get a much clearer recording, it would be counterproductive to get too obsessed with it. I've left the MIDI clave out of the ambiguous portions of the MIDI version and I suspect la Ritmo left out of the actual recording for the same reason -- it shall remain a mystery for now! These elaborate exercises in MIDI madness are intended to make two points:
If I were to apply this treatment to every Ritmo Oriental bloque, several more Cuban genres would probably come and go before I could finish this article, so from here on I'll simply show how each rhythm would look without the "efecto" applied and only occasionally add efecto to the MIDI examples. Our final excerpt from Sabroseao con la Ritmo showcases a different type of bloque. Half of the band continues playing at normal tempo and the other half plays the bloque. It's almost as if there's tug-of-war going on with the tempo, with the bloque faction trying to play it con efecto while the bass, piano and violins battle to hold the original tempo. Before leaving this excerpt, also listen to the changes in the conga marcha. The Conga Marchas of the 70s Sabroseao con la Ritmo, the "missing link" in the development of Ritmo Oriental's arranging style, also appears to mark a shift in the style of their conguero, Juan Claro Bravo. Throughout most of the track he plays variations of the generic conga tumbao: (s=slap,
o=tone.
x=manoteo) But during the middle section of Sabroseao, Juan Claro plays a marcha, now commonly called bota, which was used extensively by Los Van Van and later become extremely important in the timba of Paulito FG, Manolito y su Trabuco and others. xxsx
xsxs
xxsx xsxs
bota
básica By the time La Ritmo recorded again, Claro had all but abandoned the standard marcha for the flexible new guaguancó-based approach that he would use throughout the rest of his career. Here's a typical example from la Ritmo's Baile del azúcar: xxsx
xs00
xoxx xs00
Ritmo
Oriental -- Tomasito El Yulo had already introduced a similar approach in Los Van Van's 1969 songo recordings, but Juan Claro tended to be stay closer to guaguancó while Yulo's relied more on creative melodic combinations of open tones. xxsx
oo00
ooxs
xxxs LVV
-- Tomasito
Meanwhile, Irakere's first conguero, Lázaro "Tato" Alfonso, had his own take on the re-rumbafication of the congas in Cuban pop. Irakere called their version batún-batá. Tato played the congas with one hand and a bell with the other while Oscar Valdés played an interlocking part on an Iyá. We'll have more on this a little later. ===snip=== As the "perfect storm" gathered force, Ritmo Oriental was as productive as Los Van Van and even harder to keep track of. If you're as fascinated as I am with reconstructing this period in chronological order and hearing every important track, here are 3 links to discographies in progress. Ritmo
Oriental Partial Discography As you can see from the Ritmo Oriental Discography, EGREM, in its infinite wisdom, failed to date the recording sessions or the vinyl releases. To make matters worse, almost none of the LPs had titles other than the name of the group. And to guarantee complete confusion for future generations, EGREM not only used different covers for the same albums, they also used the same covers for albums by completely different groups! For example, an LP by Orquesta Aragón uses the same cover as the first Irakere album, and each was released in both red and blue.
The second and third covers contain the same tracks, and, as a further bit of irony, none of the three contains a recital at Teatro Amadeo Roldán. Thanks to a Havana musicologist named Cristóbal, we have a copy of EGREM's internal listings for Ritmo Oriental. Each song has two numbers. The "job number" starts with CA, CS or CP. "CA" stands for "Cera Areíto" (cera means wax, which was used in the early days of recording). Think, for example, of the famous Charlie Parker song "Max is Making Wax". "CS" is probably "Cera Siboney" and "CP" (only used once by la Ritmo) is "Cera Palma". The second number was simply the catalog number of the album (assuming the song was released). Areito LP numbers started with "LD" and 45s and EPs started with "EPA". Throughout most of our Ritmo Oriental Discography, the two columns of numbers fit together logically except for one session, CA-718, which has no LP or EPA numbers, leaving us to assume that these recordings were never commercially released. Perhaps they were used as radio demos. With the exceptions of Que se sepa bien and Quién dice, which somehow found their way onto rare compilations, all of these songs also appear on later CA sessions. The separate CA number should mean they were re-recorded, and if that's the case, 7 of these original 9 recordings are probably lost. What we can say, however, is that these were the first 9 songs that Ritmo Oriental developed in the "perfect storm" period of the early 70s, so we'll cover them first, taking our musical examples from the later versions.
Before concluding this sidetrip into discographical dementia, I'll repeated my urgent plea: write to EGREM. Try to explain to them that Fania is making money hand over fist by re-releasing their entire catalog with loving documentation and remastering. EGREM badly needs to do this with la Ritmo, and it needs to start over with Van Van and Irakere and do the job right. It's tragic that so much historic music is being neglected, so let's get on their case! Send letters, make phone calls, and send emails! Write to your congressman! Getting back to the task at hand, we'll tackle the early masterpieces of la Ritmo in the order in which they were first recorded, beginning with the mysterious CA-718 session, which began with Ritmo Oriental's breakthrough hit, Mi socio Manolo. Note that all the songs in the next section were re-recorded in 1974 and those are the versions we'll be listening to. No one that we've encountered has ever heard the mysterious original CA-718 recordings. So we're listening to 1974 recordings of songs that the group began playing live around 1972. Sigue
aguajeando Manolo
The CA-718 Session
197? Ritmo Oriental-
Mi
socio Manolo (composer:
Juan Crespo Maza) notes: The main tumbao is an exhilarating example of something we'll call "motivo gear" when we get to Volume II. In motivo, other instruments double the bass tumbao, turning it from accompaniment to one of the principal musical themes. In this case, not only the piano, but also the string section take up the addictive figure, which was later famously paraphrased by Conjunto Libre in the Nuyorican classic Llora timbero. At the end of our excerpt is a wicked set of bloques played over the motivo tumbao. Also note that the tempo is now over 120 bpm, well into guaguancó territory. The cuerpo of Manolo continues and extends the trademark style of bloques and tempo changes that we encountered earlier in Sabroseao con la Ritmo. 0xxx
00x0
xxx0
xx0x
The guy laughing is Pedro Calvo, who sang briefly with La Ritmo before joined Los Van Van in late 1974 or early 1975. Our last excerpt, the transition from the cuerpo to the montuno section, is a great example of Enrique Lazaga's güiro playing and his absolute mastery of tempo. The end of the cuerpo is 116 bpm and the montuno section is 122 bpm. It's not the fact that it changes tempo -- it's the adrenaline rush that results from the way that it changes! Listen to the excerpt again, concentrating on the güiro. Genius. 197?
Ritmo Oriental- Se
perdió el amor (Juan
Crespo Maza) Se perdió el amor is la Ritmo's third classic recording in its new style, the most correct term for which is probably "nueva onda de Areíto". Regardless of what we call it, we can identify at least four qualities that it shares with LVV's early songo and Irakere's batún-batá: 2-3 rumba clave, a very fast tempo (this one tops out at a sizzling 125 bpm), guaguancó-influenced congas and drums, and of course, the approach to the bass tumbao, the feature which most consistently ties our three groups together: a melodic figure that hits the downbeat of the 2-side, followed by a syncopated series of upbeats and offbeats. The most striking thing about this particular bass tumbao is the unusually long rest before it repeats. Our MIDI example (comprised of only bass, clave and güiro) sounds empty at this point and lacks swing. No such problem occurs in the audio example, where the strings and percussion fill the hole left by the bass tumbao in many wonderful ways. In the case of the percussion, this occurs effortlessly because of the inherently contrapuntal or "conversational" nature of Cuban music. The idea of one instrument playing in the space left by another is built into the fabric of the musical style, from the call and response of the coro and lead vocalist, to the interlocking mambo horn sections, right down to the nuts and bolts of the basic rhythm section parts and their folkloric predecessors. A perfect example of this is that timba kick drum pattern we suggested memorizing and filing away for future reference: xx0x
0xxx 0xx0
xxx0
clap
(2-3 rumba clave) The kick and clave are in constant conversation, never coming together during the entire cycle.
xx0x
0xxx 0xx0
xxx0
2-3
rumba clave As we said, this tendency towards conversation is "built-in". The congas fill the gaps in the clave and since this type of bassline marks the clave, it's only natural that the congas and bass will also tend to sound like their talking to each other. As if to help us underscore the point, the arranger, Juan Crespo Maza, provides us with a passage in a distinctly non-Cuban style. As we've noted, the North American influence is much more subtle in Ritmo Oriental than in LVV or Irakere, but the cuerpo's B-section is a major exception, using a "walking bassline" as you'd expect to hear in swing jazz, and bluesy elements in the melody and chord progression. 0x0x 0x0x 0x0x 0x0x walking bass One of the most useful ways to look at rhythm and clave orientation is to break the 16 possible pulses into categories. The common names for them are less than perfect. Call them what you will, but look for the logic in the x's and 0's. 0xxx
0xxx 0xxx
0xxx main
beats The "walking bass" consists of all the main beats and upbeats and its mirror image is the changüí tres part, which is comprised almost entirely of offbeats. 0x0x
0x0x
0x0x
0x0x
walking
bass What these parts do have in common is that neither jazz nor changüí has clave. In clave music, as we go about studying bass, piano, string, vocal and horn parts, we'll find that the key to their clave orientation lies in the way they jump from one stream of pulses to the other. With this in mind, let's go back to Humberto's bass tumbao: xx0x 0xxx 0xx0 xxx0 2-3 rumba clave |
In
the mid-50s, a group of musicians led by Elio Revé (that name just
keeps popping up, doesn't it?) relocated from Guantánamo to Havana.
They formed a traditional charanga band which recorded four (unavailable)
tracks in January of 1958 under the name Orquesta Revé, according
to the 
In
1965, at the tenth recording session for the new state-owned label EGREM
Areíto, Ritmo Oriental released this (unavailable except on vinyl)
self-titled LP, EGREM LD-3145. Four of the songs were also released as
EPA-1053, which has the same cover. The music is very much in the traditional
charanga style, as you can hear in this excerpt from 
From
the 1965 album cover, we can see that the percussion section was already
in place at that point with timbalero Daniel Díaz,
conguero Juan "Claro" Bravo and leader Enrique
Lazaga on güiro. This wonderful trio, which probably began
playing together in 1958, would stay together until death did them part
with Diaz' tragic passing in the 90s. 
Daniel
Díaz' untimely death in the 1990s prevented his playing from being
properly documented on video and resulted in him receiving far too little
credit for his innovations. To make matters worse his drum parts are woefully
undermixed in Ritmo Oriental's studio recordings. Thus, it could be said
that Daniel Díaz holds the dubious distinction of being the most
tragically underappreciated member of the most tragically underappreciated
band of the most tragically underappreciated era of the most tragically
underappreciated country in music history. And if I sound tragically overdramatic,
just keep following along with this series of articles and you'll see
what I mean!
Not
yet in the group for the 1965 LP was the fourth key rhythm section member,
The
best way to acquire most of the best of these
tracks is the 16-track QBADisc compilation,
Listen
again to the first