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The Four Great Clave Debates by Kevin Moore ©2001 Clave and clave changes are among the most misunderstood and heatedly debated topics in all of music. In this article we'll try to sort out the silly semantic misunderstanding and also discuss some of the truly fascinating issue in this most mysterious of musical topics. Also see our more extensive article "Clave Changes the Music of Charanga Habanera". Among many other meanings, the term "clave" refers to a 5-note rhythm pattern which is either played or implied in many types of Latin music. The five notes can be spaced in at least a half a dozen ways, but the whole pattern always lasts exactly four beats, although it’s frequently written in the space of 8 beats, leading to the first Great Clave Debate: Clave Debate #1: Should clave be written in two bars of 8th notes or one bar of 16th notes? Most Cubans write it in 16ths and most others write it in 8ths. The 16th note camp argues that their method shows the pulse where it really is. The 8th note camp insists that 8ths are easier to read on the gig. In defense of the 8th note devotees, if you play it with the correct feel, it doesn’t matter how you write it, and experienced musicians can read 8th notes while feeling the pulse in half notes. We’ll go along with them on this, and have no problem with writing parts for experienced musicians in 8th notes, but to learn to understand clave in the first place, it’s horribly misleading to display it as 8th notes spanning two bars because it draws attention away from the real pulse. Our solution will be to show it graphically, which combines ease of reading with the 16th note conceptualization. The four most common clave patterns are shown below:
[click here for notes on the audio examples] Note that we haven’t named these four rhythms! That’s because of: Clave Debate #2: What are the correct names of the various clave rhythms? This is the funniest clave argument and we’ve watched excellent musicians pull out their hair (and at times the hair of others) arguing about whether rhythm 4 above is "3:2" or "2:3" clave. The idea behind naming clave patterns with numbers like 2:3 and 3:2 is that the clave rhythm tends to sound as if it has two halves, or two "sides", one with three notes and one with two notes. Note that rhythm 3 begins with three 0’s, each separated from its neighbors by two x’s; there are then three x’s which separate the first three 0’s from the next two 0’s, which are only separated by a single x; then there are three more o’s before the pattern starts over again. Thus rhythm 3 very obviously breaks into a group of 3 and a group of 2 and everyone happily agrees that the name of this rhythm is "3:2 clave". Now look at rhythm 1 and note that it’s exactly the same as rhythm 1 except that it starts in the middle. In other words, the 3rd and 4th groups of rhythm 1 are the 1st and 2nd groups of rhythm 3 and vice versa. The proportions remain the same and everyone agrees that rhythm 1 is "2:3 clave". So far, so good, but a great deal of Timba and other Cuban music uses rhythms 2 and 4 in place of rhythms 1 and 3. Now look at rhythm 4. It’s exactly the same as rhythm 3 except that the third 0 comes one subdivision later. All the books we’ve ever seen written on clave (which are written by people who read music), call rhythm 4 "3:2 clave" as well, and go on to distinguish between the two by calling rhythm 3 "3:2 Son Clave" and rhythm 4 "3:2 Rumba Clave". Sometimes a different adjective is used --"Son" might be replaced by "Puerto Rican" and "Rumba" might be replaced by "Guaguancó" or "Cuban", and a fair amount of hair has been pulled out arguing of which these is correct as well, but in each case the numbers remain 3:2. Likewise, these books, and most people, call rhythm 1 "2:3 Son Clave" and rhythm 2 "2:3 Rumba Clave". The reasoning behind this is that once you’ve gotten used to rhythm 3 being called "3:2 Son Clave", all you have to do is change one note and it becomes "3:2 Rumba Clave". This is where the big argument comes in! The other debate team usually consists of people who have learned the rhythms by listening rather than reading. They're almost always people with a very good natural sense of rhythm, and are frequently drummers and dancers who have learned to play and dance beautifully without ever having looked at the rhythms on paper. When these folks listen to rhythm 4, what do you think they hear? Look at the x’s and 0’s! The first two 0’s have two x’s between them and then there a big gap of three x’s before the next three 0’s come in, separated by only two and one x’s respectively. Then there are three more 0’s before the pattern repeats. So even though rhythm 4 looks like it’s only one note different from rhythm 3, which everyone calls "3:2", rhythm 4 sounds like two notes, a space and then three notes! The arguments that result from this queer little conundrum can be extremely hilarious as long as no one gets hurt. We’ll make three points. The first one is so obvious that it’s almost always overlooked. 1) It doesn’t matter what you call them!. You could call them "Beavis" and "Butthead" and they would still sound the same when you played them. The only thing that matters is that everyone agrees on the names and keeps them straight. Our second and third points will explain why we use the first naming convention. 2) The other instruments, such as campana, mambo bell, cáscara, etc. play the same part for rhythm 2 that they play for rhythm 1. 3) Cuban musicians, when playing clave, will sometimes interchange rhythm 1 with rhythm 2 in the same section of music, but will never interchange rhythm 1 with 3 or 4. This pretty much seals the case for the first naming convention. Rhythms 1 and 2 are one family and 3 and 4 are another. So now, finally, we can name the four rhythms:
Clave Debate #3: "There is no such thing as 2:3 clave". In argument 2, we pointed out that those who call rhythm 4 "2:3 clave", while ill-advised about the name, are usually very talented, and that in fact, their ability to intuitively hear music is what leads to the confusion over the name. This is not the case in argument #3. As far as we can tell, the only way to logically conclude that there’s no such thing as 2:3 clave would be to be completely oblivious to the voices, horns, piano, and bass! Nevertheless, we’ll take their argument as far as it will allow: Suppose you have 4 people in a room. One is playing rhythm 1 on clave. The other 3 are playing timbales, congas, and campana bell, using their most basic patterns and locking to the clave without playing any fills or decorations. Now, suppose you had walked into the room after the music had already started. Which clave is the music in? Are they playing rhythm 1 (2:3 son clave) or rhythm 3 (3:2 son clave)? The answer is that you couldn’t tell. So, the extremist argument goes, "there is really only one type of clave" (they usually say it’s 3:2). The problem with this argument is that if you had been there when they started, someone would have said ("one, two, one, two, three, four") and they would have started by playing either the 2 side or the 3 side. You would then know that the musicians, in their own minds, were thinking of their rhythm as being 2:3 or 3:2. But if you had walked in after the pattern had begun, you might hear the rhythm starting on either 2 or 3 because you have no point of reference, so your brain creates one for you. The pattern just keeps cycling and it’s up to you to decide where it feels like the beginning is. If you had never heard any type of clave-based music, you might even hear the pattern starting in any of the 14 other possible places!! Each of those is a legitimate rhythm of some sort. It’s just a matter of where the listener perceives the downbeat. If the musicians started on the 2 side and in their own minds are feeling the 2 side as being the beginning of the rhythm, then we would say they’re playing in 2:3 clave. The extremist argument then goes: "well, they should have started on 3 because there is only 3:2 clave". But this fails to take into account that the clave rhythm is also used to accompany songs! And that about half of them begin on the 2 side! For example, "Pare Cochero". [audio example 5] Pare coche coche - ro Pare coche Try singing it while clapping 3:2 and then 2:3 son clave. 2:3 feels much more natural because "re" and "co" fall on the two beats of the two side and "che" and "ro" fall on the second two beats of the 3 side. If you listen to any of the hundreds of recordings of this song, you’ll find that they’re all in 2:3. If the still doesn’t prove the existence of 2:3 clave, then the problem is again with semantics and we faithful believers in 2:3 need to define our terms better. To do this we’ll play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in both 3:2 and 2:3. [audio example 6] — Twinkle Twinkle in 3:2 clave [audio example 7] — Twinkle Twinkle in 2:3 clave Listen to example 6, in which the nursery rhyme begins right on the downbeat of the 3 side. This is what it means to be "in 3:2 clave". Now listen to example 7, in which the same melody begins on the downbeat of the 2 side. Since Twinkle Twinkle is all quarter notes, it sounds equally dumb in both 3:2 and 2:3 clave, but the point is that if you start singing the song on the 3 side, the listener will perceive the rhythm as 3:2 and if you start singing it on the 2 side, the listener will perceive the rhythm as 2:3.The harmony and melody force you to hear the phrase starting in a specific place, and if the percussion is playing the 2 side, that is what the 2:3 believers call 2:3 clave. Having satisfactorily
proven the existence of 2:3 clave, we can now neatly divide all
music in 3:2 and 2:3 and live happily ever after, right? Wrong!
Let's look at the song "Por encima del nivel", also
known as "Sandunguera", by Los Van Van [audio
example 8] Start clapping 2:3 clave such that the first clap of the 2 side falls between "gue" and "ra" of "Sandunguera". Hold on stubbornly until you’ve gone through all the words listed and arrived back at "Sandunguera". The section now repeats, note for note. But what happened to your clave? Your 2 side is no longer between "gue" and "ra"! Now your 3 side begins right with "gue". Also, you may have also noticed that the clave began to feel very out of place right after "y dicen que". Now try dancing to it. At the first "Sandunguera" start dancing a basic step, breaking forward first, and keep dancing until this part comes around again. The second time through you’ll find yourself breaking backwards instead of forwards! Dancing the basic step and clapping one clave both take exactly the same amount of time, 4 beats. But this song has an extra two beats which keeps the clave and basic step from coming out even! What if you have a great song which doesn’t come out evenly? Or, what if you have a great song which sounds better in 2:3 at one point and better in 3:2 at a different point? Let’s see how Los Van Van solved these problems in "Sandunguera". Try clapping 2:3 clave again, but when you hear "y dicen", leave off the last note of the 3 side and then start the 3 side again (a second time in a row) right on "que". Now everything will come out right and you’ve just experienced what the composer, Juan Formell, refers to as "Clave License". Now we’re getting to the really interesting part. Many, if not most, Latin songs, coros, mambos and breaks sound better, sometimes a lot better, when accompanied by one clave rhythm than they do when they’re accompanied by the other. If the rhythm section plays in the other clave pattern underneath, it sounds off, and this is called "cruzado". This is not one of the great clave debates because to'el mundo y su hermano agrees that "cruza’o" is not a good thing! The disgreements revolve around how to best avoid this undesirable state of affairs and this brings us to the term "clave change". The simplest solution would be to never write music that doesn’t break down into equal four-beat measures, and to never combine musical ideas that sound better in 3:2 with those that sound better in 2:3. This is indeed exactly what happens in more than half of Salsa and Timba arrangements, but there are many great arrangements which don’t. Whenever one of these issues arises the arranger has to do something to reconcile the situation. The first solution is that the last measure of 2:3 can be cut two beats short so that the 3:2 section can begin on the 3 side. This way, the percussionists don’t have to change, but the emphasis of the new section causes the listener to start hearing the music in 3:2 clave. The second solution is to let the phrase end naturally and then have the percussionists themselves change to the other clave for the next section. This can be broken down into two types of Clave Change, those where the 2 side is repeated and those where the 3 side is repeated, and each has a distinct personality. How to name these three types of clave change brings up a whole new semantic can of worms, which we’ll explain in the final section. Clave Debate #4: Of the three ways to "change clave", is only one of them "correct"? This one is much more than a silly semantic argument. It’s a very real and complex aesthetic musical issue. There are those who feel strongly that the integrity of the arrangement is compromised by breaking the flow of the clave and playing the 2 or 3 side twice in a row, and a survey of a huge amount of the best music of Ruben Blades, Tito Puente, The Fania All-Stars, etc. will show a strict adherence to this rule. Since we haven’t found any existing terms to describe the different ways of changing clave, we’ve decided to make up our own. We call this method "New York style", which is where many of these famous arrangements were written. It's not that the Cubans don't also use this method - it's that a significant number of master arrangers in New York only use this method. "New York style" clave change: With this kind of clave change it’s possible to play clave from the beginning to the end of the arrangement without ever playing the 2 or 3 side twice in a row. To repeat, this style was not invented in New York and is also used freely in many types of Cuban and Puerto Rican music, but many of best New York arrangers use it exclusively and consider the other method to be incorrect, so we chose this term, aware of the danger that it might add new semantic fuel to the debate! But we had to call it something. Of course it doesn’t really matter what it’s called as long as you understand what it is. While there are those who will argue to the death that this is the only correct way to change clave, there are two counter-arguments. The first is of course that Los Van Van, Issac Delgado, Charanga Habanera, NG La Banda, and others have created dozens of drop-dead masterpieces which change clave however they see fit. The second argument is that changing clave New York style will confuse and/or irritate some dancers. We call the other way to change clave "Clave License" style. "Clave License" clave change: In this case the clave changes by playing one side twice in a row. The term "clave license", as in "poetic license", comes from an interview that Rebeca Mauleón-Santana conducted with Juan Formell for her book "101 Montunos" in which he said something to the effect of "we like to think that we have clave license", meaning that he has no problem with changing the clave any which way as long as it sounds good, and that he trusts his intuition to know what sounds good. We break this down into "2:2 Clave License" and "3:3 Clave License" depending on which side gets played twice in a row. The above example of "Sandunguera" is an example of a "3:3 Clave License" clave change, but note that when the section above repeats, the clave changes back to 2:3 again, and this time it does it New York style. With the Cubans, there’s no philosophical preoccupation with clave. They just play it as they hear it and let the clave fall where it may. As noted, an interesting side-effect of the Clave License method is that it doesn’t change the foot pattern of the dancers. The New York style change will result in the the leader breaking backwards with the musical phrasing instead of forwards, while the Clave License style is likely to be completely unnoticed by the dancers. Some dance teaching methods actually include a special 2 beat step for flipping the basic step back around when the clave changes. To conclude, let's look at one of the greatest examples of New York Style clave changes,"Todos Vuelven" from Ruben Blades’ 1984 classic, "Buscando America". The arrangement is by Oscar Hernández. The song changes clave five times, but if you start clapping 3:2 clave from the very first note, you can go all the way through without ever changing. The opening is a bit nasty, but remember that the first sound you hear is the downbeat of the 3 side. Here’s the roadmap: Todos vuelven [audio
example 9] An even wilder example of multiple NY style clave changes is the Fania All-Stars’ version of "Bamboleo". Marty Sheller’s beautiful arrangement of "Oye" (from "Tras la Tormenta") by Ruben Blades and Willie Colón) has only one clave change but it’s done so naturally that it becomes one of the highlights of the arrangement. It’s as if the NY arrangers imposed this artificial restraint on themselves to inspire their own creativity. Each clave change presents a problem and the creativity expended to solve is has resulted in a lot of great music. NOTE ON LISTENING TO AUDIO FILES: If you have difficulty hearing the examples, just search www.google.com for WinAmp and install it. There are versions for both Mac. By changing the setting you can make one example stop as soon as you click on next. NOTES ON THE AUDIO EXAMPLES: |
