The pan-new world African nature of the Tresillo and the fallacy of "Spanish Tinge"

[IllmaticDelta]

It's basically a Niger-Congo African rhythm concept that can be found in a number of variations in the Afro-New World from the USA down to South America.

The reason it came to be known by the misnomer, "Spanish Tinge" was because of something Jelly Roll Morton said in an interview when talking about Jazz.

The phrase is a quotation from Jelly Roll Morton. In his Library of Congress recordings, after referencing the influence of his own French Creole culture in his music, he noted the Spanish presence:

Then we had Spanish people there. I heard a lot of Spanish tunes. I tried to play them in correct tempo, but I personally didn't believe they were perfected in the tempos. Now take the habanera "La Paloma", which I transformed in New Orleans style. You leave the left hand just the same. The difference comes in the right hand — in the syncopation, which gives it an entirely different color that really changes the color from red to blue.

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 himself who listened to classical music made the connection to "spanish" music because he knew of classical pieces like

The score of the aria was adapted from the habanera "El Arreglito", originally composed by the Spanish musician Sebastián Iradier. Bizet thought it to be a folk song. When others told him he had used something written by a composer who had died 10 years earlier, he had to add a note to the vocal score of Carmen acknowledging its source

and




without realizing that pattern was from africa and already native to the Southern USA

What is known in Latin music as the habanera rhythm (also known as the congo,[2] tango-congo,[3] and tango.[4]), and tresillo, are in fact, two of the most basic duple-pulse cells found in sub-Saharan African music traditions.They were brought to Cuba and elsewhere in the New World via the Atlantic slave trade.

The habanera rhythm's time signature is 2
4. An accented upbeat in the middle of the bar lends power to the habanera rhythm, especially when it is as a bass[15] ostinato in contradanzas such as "Tu madre es conga."[16] Syncopated cross-rhythms called the tresillo and the cinquillo, basic rhythmic cells in Afro-Latin and African music, began the Cuban dance's differentiation from its European form. Their unequally-grouped accents fall irregularly in a one or two bar pattern:[17] the rhythm superimposes duple and triple accents in cross-rhythm (3:2) or vertical hemiola.[18]

This pattern is heard throughout Africa, and in many Diaspora musics,[19] known as the congo,[20] tango-congo,[21] and tango.[22] Thompson identifies the rhythm as the Kongo mbilu a makinu, or 'call to the dance.'[15][23] The syncopated rhythm may be vocalised as "boom...ba-bop-bop",[15] and "da, ka ka kan."[23] It may be sounded with the Ghanaian beaded gourd instrument axatse, vocalized as: "pa ti pa pa", beginning on the second beat so that the last "pa" coincides with beat one, ending on the beginning of the cycle so that the part contributes to the cyclic nature of the rhythm, the "pa's" sounding the tresillo by striking the gourd against the knee, and the "ti" sounding the main beat two by raising the gourd and striking it with the free hand.[24]

and was already put to use by jazz's founder, Buddy Bolden

Bolden is also credited with the invention of the "Big Four", a key rhythmic innovation on the marching band beat, which gave embryonic jazz much more room for individual improvisation. As Wynton Marsalis explains,[9] the big four (below)[10] was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march.[11] The second half of the Big Four is the pattern commonly known as the hambone rhythm developed from sub-Saharan African music traditions.

.......in the years following that interview, ethno-musicoligists have ran with the term "spanish tinge" and have incorrectly tied all these tresillo patterns to Cuba. It's only been in more recent times that people have realize that this stance was flawed. Alot of the confusion was because Cubans, more than any other group, based basically ALL their music on the patterns known as CLAVES.


Clave pattern is to Cuban/cuban based music





what BLUES is to Afram/afram based music.



The truth though is that all new world blacks have these trasillo/clave/habanera patterns that originated in Niger-Congo Africa

@Supper @Jesus is my protector @Get These Nets @Cadillac

 

[IllmaticDelta]

spanish tinge is a misnomer to something that is actually AFRICAN. habenera/clave/tresillo etc.. are just spanish names for an african motif.

Hambone, Bo Diddley. ring shout and Charleston are english (usa) names for the same motif

jamaican dembow

argentine tango

puerto rico bomba/plena

cumbia

..........are all part of the same pattern

 

[IllmaticDelta]

some videos

Habanera rhythm (Tresillo over 2)



more examples...

Spoiler

Tango rhythm



World Percussion - Brazilian Clave



How to play Clave, Bombo, Ponche, Tresillo, Cinquillo



The World's Most Popular Rhythm



Tresillo - The 'Dembow' Rhythm

 

[IllmaticDelta]

.......in the years following that interview, ethno-musicoligists have ran with the term "spanish tinge" and have incorrectly tied all these tresillo patterns to Cuba. It's only been in more recent times that people have realize that this stance was flawed. Alot of the confusion was because Cubans, more than any other group, based basically ALL their music on the patterns known as CLAVES.


Clave pattern is to Cuban/cuban based music





what BLUES is to Afram/afram based music.

to follow up on that

 

[IllmaticDelta]

The same clave/habanera feel he called the spanish tinge is the feel of gullah dancing

the charleston dance

^^that same beat when clapped and stomped is exactly like the dem-bow of dancehall/reggaeton

 

[Cadillac]

Great Thread, how long you been working on this?

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Great Thread, how long you been working on this?

I had it on deck since this thread


https://www.thecoli.com/threads/alw...-was-new-orleans.676669/page-10#post-32533760

but I never got around to making a thread about it.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

same pattern tresillo in zouk

 

[IllmaticDelta]

tresillo in jamaican mento

 

[IllmaticDelta]

tresillo/clave


afram hambone song



.
.
bo diddley beat



.
.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Cuban mambo

banging out the clave on the cowbell



hand clapped clave

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Nuyorican Salsa (cuban based)

horn and piano doing the clave

 

[IllmaticDelta]

relevant video