The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer
necessary to produce the most lively popular music in the country” (1989: 41).
The advent of música antillana in Colombia was prefaced by the development of national and transnational transport and commerce since the second half of the nineteenth century. Increased contact and trade with the Caribbean region through the late 1800s, as well as with the United States, opened the doors for outside cultural influences. Urbanization and industrial expansion through the first half of the twentieth century grew hand in hand with channels of transportation, communication, and musical diffusion. In the first part of this century, a steady transnational flow of people, musicians, sounds, and ideas began linking Colombian cities to other urban centers in Latin America and the United States. With the evolution of mass media between the two world wars, the flow of musical styles through the Americas spread even more rapidly, via recordings, radio, film, and concert tours. The popular dance music of this time reflected and also contributed to this process. Cuban and North American styles were particularly influential and were listened and danced to in Colombia’s urban centers. Regional Colombian traditions were also fused with cosmopolitan musical practices and styles for city audiences.
Through radio broadcasts, musicians and fans were introduced to the sounds of Cuban son, played by groups such as the Trio Matamoros and conjuntos such as the Sexteto Habanero and Septeto Nacional. The sounds of danzón were also popularized, played by such charanga ensembles as that of Antonio Romeu and, later, the famed radiofónica of Antonio Arcaño. In these early decades of radio, from the 1920s through the 1950s, bands performed live-to-air in radio theater studios (see López 1981). Hence, those perched by their shortwave radio sets in Colombia actually heard the music as it was being performed in Havana.
Records have comprised the most important avenue of diffusion for música antillana in Colombia. The first 78 rpm records arrived with sailors docking in Barranquilla, Colombia’s principal port on the Caribbean. Indeed, Barranquilleros, when challenging Cali’s claim to be the Colombian stronghold of this musical tradition, often point to the fact that música antillana arrived first in their city. Exact dates of the first Cuban recordings in Colombia are uncertain, but González notes that local newspaper advertisements for Cuban music appear by September 1927 (1989: 41). Radio stations in Barranquilla purchased recordings of Cuban music for local airplay, a practice that continued through the 1950s.32 Recordings of música antillana soon found their way into other urban centres in Colombia, brought through the main ports of Barranquilla and Buenaventura (on the Pacific) by sailors or by special dealers traveling directly from New York, then the capital of the recording industry. In the late 1940s the Colombian record mogul Antonio Fuentes purchased national distribution rights for recordings made by several Cuban artists. The 1950 catalog of his company, DiscosFuentes, lists such groups as the Sonora Matancera, Orquesta Riverside, Hermanos Castro, and Miguelito Valdés (Betancur 1993: 288). Most records of música antillana, however, arrived in Colombia via sailors in Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Buenaventura. The difficulty of obtaining recordings heightened their value as consumer items and contributed to the cachet this music had already acquired as an index of cosmopolitan cultural identity. Owing to Cali’s geographical distance from the Caribbean, many of the Cuban bands touring Colombia did not include Call on their itinerary; thus, recordings became all the more important as a source of this music.
González notes that radio and record diffusion intensified the process of contact, hitherto intermittent, between Cuban and Colombian musicians and audiences. Such contacts had been established in the nineteenth century by individuals who traveled from Cuba to Colombia and vice versa. Trade between Cuba and Colombia’s Atlantic coast—centered around tobacco, coffee, and livestock—was established in the second half of the 1800s (Posada-Carbó 1996). Cuban and also Dominican migrants settled in various towns along the coast, some near Mompox and some further east, near Valledupar. Among these settlers were Cuban musicians including the great accordionist Hernando Rivero—better known as Nendito El Cubano—who left his native Manzanillo in 1878 shortly before Cuba’s war for independence.33 Colombian musicians who went to Cuba in the 1880s and 1890s to help fight for Cuban independence brought Cuban musical styles back home with them and also introduced Colombian genres, such as the bambuco, to Cubans (Betancur 1993). The extent of Colombo-Cuban contact was perhaps best symbolized by the construction in 1889 at Puerto Colombia of a huge dock, designed by the famous Cuban engineer and independentista Francisco Javier Cisneros. This public work, some thirty kilometers east of Barranquilla, was built to facilitate transport connections, since Barranquilla’s location in the sandy Magdalena River delta prevented larger ships from landing there.
During the 1940s and 1950s Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican performers appeared in widely distributed movie musicals. For many viewers, films starring Miguelito Valdés, Daniel Santos, and Bobby Capó were the first and perhaps only opportunity to see these famous vocalists. Famous scenes from Acapulqueña (1947), where Valdés performs his signature “Mr. Babalú” number,34 and Daniel Santos’s rendition of the guaracha “Tíbiri Tabará” in El angel caido (1948) are still occasionally featured on large videoscreens in Cali’s tabernas. Another important musician was the “mambo king,” Pérez Prado, who popularized this sound not only through his recordings, but in films such as Al son de mambo and Qué rico el mambo, which played in movie theaters throughout the country (Betancur 1993: 288). Such musicians not only played and sang in this films—they also danced, providing images of corporal expression to go along with the music. Dynamic screen dancers such as Tin Tán, Resortes, Antonietta Pons, and Tongolele, however, really fired the imagination of local dancers, especially those in Cali. These dancers, Mexican artists who had adopted and refined Cuban styles, were key in disseminating the popular dances of música antillana.
In conjunction with growing channels of mass mediation for the diffusion of música antillana to Colombian shores, improved transportation links facilitated regular concert tours by Cuban and Puerto Rican artists, reinforcing the presence of música antillana for Colombian audiences. Visits by Cuban musicians had already been established before the turn of the century but increased greatly after the 1930s. Fabio Betancur scrupulously documents the concert appearances by these leading artists; his description serves as the basis for my discussion here (1993: 201–299). Owing to their location on the Caribbean, Cartagena and Barranquilla became principal destinations for touring artists; no doubt geographic conditions and ease of travel made it more feasible for entrepreneurs in these cities to contract Cuban and Puerto Rican artists than for those farther away in Cali. Although Cuba’s acclaimed Trio Matamoros visited Cali during their 1933 tour, it was not a regular stop on many of the concert tours of música antillana performers until the 1950s and 1960s. Artists did frequently travel to Bogotá and Medellín, however, since they were important economic and political centers with enough resources to support concert tour appearances. Social clubs in these cities often contracted major Cuban orquestas such as the Sonora Matancera or Benny Moré for carnival balls and other fiestas. During these visits Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians also made appearances in local concert halls and radio theaters that were open to the general public. Cesar Machado recalls that during the December Ferias of the late 1950s and early 1960s, radio stations in Cali competed for the opportunity to broadcast live-to-air performances of the most famous visiting artists, backed by radio house bands.35
In keeping with the cosmopolitan aspirations of urban Colombian audiences, Colombian dance orquestas—like their counterparts in other Latin American cities—performed a variety of international popular musical genres. These included North American fox-trot and charleston, Argentine tango, Spanish pasodoble
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