The Essence of Afro-Cuban Rumba

By Jonathan Gregory

Introduction

Rumba is a folkloric manifest of the Afro-Cuban music that encompasses dance, voice, and drums. There are three styles in Afro-Cuban rumba: Yambu, Guaganco, and Columbia. The Yambu is the slowest of the three and is usually performed by the elders, or by mimicking old men. The Guaganco is a flirtatious dance and game between the male and female dancer. The Columbia is the fastest and most aggressive of the three; the rhythm is usually performed by men often mimicking a fight. The drums are essentially responsible not only for the rhythm itself, but also for the firing interactions between the three drummers and the dancers. Afro-Cuban rumba is like a musical conversation, where learning the vocabulary is fun-damental for decoding the language and understanding it’s meaning.

Key

Yambu

* The rhythms are also played on canjons.

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Guagancó - Havana style

Segundo - Matanza style

Rumba is originally from Africa and migrated to Cuba during the slave trade. The cities of Havana and Matanza were responsible for reviving the African rumba, each city developed their own form of perform-ing the rumba, hence the names Havana and Matanza styles.

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Columbia

Kata played with the correct phrasing and feel. Note that the Columbia portrays a particularly unique feel as it encompasses two different meters played simultaneously.

The essence of Afro-Cuban music goes beyond pure “folklore”; It’s a racial manifestation of the black identity in the island of Cuba; African descendants being the epicenter of such manifest expressed the so-cial conflicts and turbulence in the form of music, outlining the political turmoil, social injustice, colonial tyranny, and racial discrimination they went through during the colonial period.

Bibliography

RYAN, Josh; SPIRO, Michael. The Conga Drummer’s Guidebook. Petaluma: Sher Music Co., 2006.

URIBE, Ed. The Essence of Afro-Cuban Percussion & Drum Set. Percussive Notes, Indianapolis, Vol. 43, No. 1, February, p. 16, 2005.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.