Explore distinct sounds in world of Latin music
From bachata to reggaeton, Bay Area offers wealth of options for Cinco de Mayo
While assembling your playlists in anticipation of this year’s Cinco de Mayo festivities, it’s worth remembering that though used with a general sense of commercialized ubiquity and ease in the United States, the term “Latin music” is inherently misleading: Those two words shoulder the hefty responsibility of representing the music of 33 countries and 15 territories across North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Latin music is thriving in the Bay Area, making it a fitting time and place to explore the diversity of the genre and its subgenres in the U.S. today. Chances are that at some point this week, you’ll dance along to hints of salsa-inspired rhythms and cyclical cumbia beats, or find yourself caught up in the lyrical emotion of regional folk akin to Mexican mariachi, or stumble across the dembow-infused roots of reggaeton.
Bachata
Bachata spans the spectrum of passion. Artists like Juan Luis Guerra, Romeo Santos, Aventura and Prince Royce have popularized the genre, singing about love and loss and lust to sold-out
arenas and electric, packed dance socials.
“This is very smooth, romantic music that’s gone very mainstream,” says Omid Rouhani, the founder and director of Bachata Sentimiento, a nationally recognized Bay Area bachata dance team and studio. “The modern version of bachata tends to be very sensual, with a very Latin flavor to it. It really is very beautiful.”
Originally from the Dominican Republic, bachata began as blues-like lamentations of lost love, and as the genre evolved, it held onto this theme even tighter. The music lent itself to this, emphasizing the singer’s croon (historically male) over weeping guitar and soft, compact bongo drums.
Bachata derives from bolero music, a slow, acoustic ensemble-based Spanish style that fused with a series of rhythmic, indigenous genres upon arriving in Latin America, most notably with Cuban son (coincidentally, also an ancestor of salsa). It’s known for elaborate guitar play — rapid-fire plucking, vaguely reminiscent of classical flamenco — and smooth percussion keeping time that serves as a call to action to any dancers within earshot.
The bachata dance has been as important to the genre’s development as the musical contributions of Romeo Santos or Juan Luis Guerra, and like the music, the dance has lately been rapidly rising in popularity. Bachata’s themes of love and sensuality are translated into a series of equally sensual, fluid, four- to eight-step partner dance styles, and people find it irresistible on the dance floor.
“People dismiss it, they say it’s just a type of close grinding, but that’s not really it,” he says. “There’s a lot of musicality to it, a lot of technicality. … The music is about love, about lust, and the dance reflects that.”
Cumbia
“It’s like a heartbeat,” says Dan Yockey about cumbia. When Yockey first discovered it nearly a decade ago, he thought that the live cumbia show was “the coolest thing” he’d ever seen. It consisted of a large ensemble — anywhere from six to 10 people — playing a variety of specialized in-
struments like congas, timbales and a guïro alongside more common staples like bass and accordion.
Now Yockey is the bassist for the Bay Area cumbia band Candelaria, which will be performing during Cinco de Mayo festivities at the New Parish on Friday, May 5.
“Cumbia, I feel, is like Afro diaspora music stripped down to its most basic,” he says. “It’s like a heartbeat that gets inside you, picks you up and carries you away.”
Cumbia’s two-step beat has such a widespread appeal that it has diffused across Latin America and the U.S., creating all kinds of distinct offshoots. Regional cumbia styles developed into unique sounds throughout Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, its native Colombia and other Latin American nations. Blends of the genre, like tecnocumbia and Tejano (think Fito Olivares and Selena), made it big in the U.S. when introducing new instruments and techniques into the mix.
“Cumbia is our foundation, but it’s also very flexible,” Yockey says. “You can take almost any song and make it into cumbia, and it just sounds so great.”
Cumbia has always been open to change and growth, but its genius lies in how it all comes back to that strong, two-step percussionist thread linking all the rhythms and melodies together — that heartbeat.
Mariachi
Josué Eduardo López, a mariachi arranger and consultant based in Los Angeles, says that many people have lost track of what mariachi is.
“Mariachi is very lively, and there’s lots of alegria — el gusto, las ganas, the energy. It’s often the life of the party,” he says. “But at the same time, people have all these misconceptions. They think of big hats and mustaches, and they assume that mariachi music is out of tune, that it’s all ‘La Cucaracha,’ and that’s just not true.”
It’s a fascinating change, because as recently as 40 years ago, mariachi was the pop music of Mexico. A regional folk music from rural Mexico, mariachi became known for its gripping emotional hold over listeners due to its passionate lyricism and deceptively simple acoustic hooks.
Yet today, mariachi is in a state of flux, stuck between reflecting the past and looking to the future. To survive in the 21st
century, López says, it ultimately has to evolve. It’s not unprecedented, either. Artists like Alejandro Fernandez (son of mariachi legend Vicente Fernandez) and even non-mariachi acts like La Quinta Estación have been blending mariachi with pop, jazz and blues to much success.
But part of this survival also goes back to enriching public understanding of mariachi beyond popular party hits and the colorful sombreros and trajes (the mariachi suit), There is a poetry and detail to this music that gets lost in limiting stereotypes frequently advanced by pop culture. Understanding mariachi is key to its survival outside of weddings and quinceañeras.
“It’s just a matter of opening your eyes and your ears,” Lopez says. “Give it more than five minutes on Cinco de Mayo.”
Reggaeton
To recognize a reggaeton song, listen for its underlying calling card of a beat, a fundamental musical characteristic directly descended from Jamaican dembow riddim: booooom — chick-boom-chick — booooom — chick-boom-chick.
Then watch how people move to the music. Reggaeton imposes a strong rhythmic uniformity, dictating that the dance floor instinctively follow the dembow in every move.
Reggaeton “is most often recognized by its riddim — that’s the form in which it’s circulated so much, and one reason it’s such a slippery transnational genre,” says Anna Schultz, associate professor of music at Stanford University.
Like its hip-hop cousin, reggaeton first developed outside of the mainstream, a reimagination of traditional Spanish-language and Caribbean music styles into streetwise mixtapes and underground gatherings that offered young Latinos a place to come together and claim their cross-cultural identities through music.
Schultz references Daddy Yankee’s breakthrough smash “Gasolina” in 2003 as one of reggaeton’s first and most influential mainstream turns. Today, reggaeton has developed into a much sleeker, fine-tuned version of itself that’s increasingly compatible with the Top 40 charts, permeating the work of pop monoliths like Drake and Justin Bieber, and gaining greater mainstream recognition through the work of prolific Latin American reggaeton artists like J Balvin, Maluma and Nicky Jam. This chart-friendly fusion with pop is one of the latest developments in reggaeton, a young, energized music that has always been de-
fined by its adaptability to changing trends.
“Now, it goes beyond being music that was just grabbed onto by Latin nations and youth as expressions of identity,” Schultz says. “As it becomes more and more popular, it appeals to people with different aesthetic tastes. … It’ll be here, I think, to stay for the foreseeable future.”
Salsa
“You need a very strong rhythmic dance element,” says Patricio Angulo, salsa dancer and percussionist for local salsa outfit Rumbaché.
Dance is one of the first elements of salsa that comes to mind, and with good reason: Salsa music and salsa dance are inherently tied together; neither could exist without the other. “When you’re playing salsa,” Angulo says, “everything else gets built on top of that.”
Making music in service of movement was, in many ways, always the intention behind salsa. The label itself is a wholly artificial construct, a term coined by salsa legend Johnny Pacheco to describe the jumble of traditional Latin music genres — guaracha, cha cha, mambo, samba, Cuban son — that began to overlap and fuse in the U.S. after immigrant communities from Latin America began to learn and share styles. Legendary artists like Celia Cruz, Rubén Blades, Héctor Lavoe, Tito Puente and Willie Colón eventually crystallized it into the irresistible, instantly recognizable music — a soundtrack for the pleasures in life, even in the face of hardship — that is still performed and revered today.
“It’s a culture, a legacy, a tradition set forth by various artists that came to be, and we labor to continue this tradition,” says Tony Rodriguez, frontman for Conjunto Picante, the eight-piece salsa band headlining this year’s San Francisco Cinco de Mayo Festival on Saturday, May 6, in the Mission District.
Rodriguez perceives salsa as an expression of joy and emotion. But perhaps most importantly, he also sees it as a timeless expression of the cultures and experiences that make up Latino communities around the world.
“Salsa is an reaffirmation that we (Latinos) are real, we’re still strong, our struggle continues,” he says. “We have real goals to move forward as a community, and we use music as a vehicle to move forward as a community.”
Reggaeton “is most often recognized by its riddim.” Anna Schultz, associate professor of music at Stanford University