Word: montuno
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...this were a music video, it would start in this living room in Havana, with a tight shot of the skinny kid in the white tank top at the keyboard. He counts it off from four, and with a sort of animal ease, his fingers fly, and a montuno rhythm swells through the dented amp, surging until the drummer can't help joining in with the five-beat clave that is the backbone of all music here. And then the camera swings to the timbalero with a pink star dyed into his fade, cracking into the rhythm, and here comes...
Here's where the camera would pan way out, from that house in the Santo Suárez neighborhood, downhill past the official state recording studio, past the House of Music on Neptune Street, catching everyone's hips as it goes, until the whole crumbling metropolis is swaying to this montuno, all the way down to the Malecón on the sea, where the world's most humid block party unfolds on the esplanade, the way it does every evening of the summer, just across the Florida Straits from the big enemigo...
...jazz evolved, it continued to borrow heavily on Cuban forms, and in turn Cuban-born musicians such as the late, great Machito, who had played traditional Afro-Cuban popular music as well as jazz, migrated north and began combining Cuban rhythms such as the mambo, guaracha, and son montuno with jazz instrumentation and arranging techniques...
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