Habanera (music) - History - African American Music

African American Music

African American music began incorporating Cuban musical motifs in the 1800s with the popularity of the habanera. Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform and not surprisingly, the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. Whether the habanera rhythm and variants such as tresillo were directly transplanted from Cuba, or if the habanera merely reinforced habanera-like "rhythmic tendencies" already present in New Orleans music is probably impossible to determine. There are examples of habanera-like rhythms in a few African American folk musics such as the foot stomping patterns in ring shout and the post-Civil War drum and fife music. The habanera rhythm is also heard prominently in New Orleans second line music.

The habanera rhythm can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.

John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera, "reached the U.S. 20 years before the first rag was published." Scott Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is considered a habanera (though it's labeled a "Mexican serenade").

For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African American popular music. Early New Orleans jazz bands had habaneras in their repertoire and the tresillo/habanera figure was a rhythmic staple of jazz at the turn of the 20th century. "St. Louis Blues" (1914) by W.C. Handy has a habanera/tresillo bass line. Handy noted a reaction to the habanera rhythm included in Will H. Tyler's "Maori": "I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction to the rhythm...White dancers, as I had observed them, took the number in stride. I began to suspect that there was something Negroid in that beat." After noting a similar reaction to the same rhythm in "La Paloma", Handy included this rhythm in his "St. Louis Blues," the instrumental copy of "Memphis Blues," the chorus of "Beale Street Blues," and other compositions."

Jelly Roll Morton considered the tresillo/habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be an essential ingredient of jazz. The habanera rhythm can be heard in his left hand on songs like "The Crave" (1910, recorded 1938).

Now in one of my earliest tunes, “New Orleans Blues,” you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz—Morton (1938: Library of Congress Recording).

Although the exact origins of jazz syncopation may never be known, there’s evidence that the habanera/tresillo was there at its conception. Buddy Bolden, the first known jazz musician, is credited with creating the big four, a habanera-based pattern. The big four (below) was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.

A habanera was written and published in Butte, Montanta in 1908. The song was titled "Solita" and was written by Jack Hangauer.