A Musician's Relationship

"So why is it that playing a different rhythm, even a very closely-related one, causes the performer to listen to different things in the music?"

We began by interpreted the audible tones of the conga's tumbao moderno on the (more easily accessible) shakers. That exercise is designed for participants:

1. to know, actively, where the tones are located in the music; and,
2. to feel where those tones were relative to the embodiment (dance) timeline.

As proficiency increases, the actual tones of the conga in the music become obscured through the phenomenon of 'sonic masking'. This results in two displacements:

• the conga tones become inaudible, replaced by the sound of the shaker, and
• the participant assumes the position of the conguero within the context of the song.

Visualise the stage
In an example salsa ensemble, the (in this case, female) conguero is located at the centre of the stage. Immediately to her left is the timbalero, and beyond the timbalero, the bongosero, To her right is pianista, behind-right is the bajista. The metalles are arranged in an arc, curving from the bongosero's left, on the far side of the stage, to behind the timbalero. The singers playing percusión menor are in front.

The role and relationships of the conguero
When Arsenio Rodriguez brought his brother Israel a.k.a. 'Kike' into his ensemble to play tumbadoras (congas), he discovered that incorporating the drums increased rhythmic stability. When performing as conguero, I lock with the piano player's montuno and the bass player's tumbao, facilitated by clave phrasing. Then I listen to the vocalist. The congas provide the bedrock of percussion on which the timbales ride.

The role and relationships of percusión menor in boogaloo
My personal experience of the New York boogaloo (see Commentary: 13th June 2009 Joe Bataan @Rumberos, The Wardrobe, Leeds) changed the way I listened to the genre. Joe Bataan distilled the genre down to its very essence: just vocals and piano, punctuated by backbeat accents from hand-claps or tambourine. When I'm on hand percussion expressing the backbeats (clapping hands, shaking tambourines) I put the piano and vocals foremost; letting my backbeats frame the bubbly piano, and provide percussive counterpoint to the vocal interjections. Bandleader Pucho Brown famously described New York's boogaloo as "cha-cha (sic) with a backbeat", a sentiment I agree with. If the ensemble is interpreting boogaloo in this way, then I let the accents perch on top of the conga's tumbao, and lock with the chachachá bell on the timbales.

Rationale
Salsa musicianship, and some approaches to its dancing, adheres the African aesthetic of 'individuals performing in unity' (Farris Thompson, 2011). To achieve this, co-operative musicianship is exercised where each musician plays his/her part of the story, co-ordinated through the clave-pulse relationship, which all combine to present the whole. Thus:

Each musician knows his/her part relative to everyone else's.

A solares participant displacing the conguero would listen to the instruments to which the conga has a keen relationship. If that same participant where then to change rhythms and displace the percusión menor boogaloo performer, then the instruments listen to and related with will also change.

State of play
Two of the participants has had prior experience in ensemble playing, neither of them in the context of Afro-Caribbean music. I expect that they will build relationships with the most obvious instruments first: those commonly present and with the most similar roles in European music. Indeed, I'm targeting those first, as 'easy wins'.

We might be high up the heirarchy in Bloom's taxonomy, but that's just with two simple rhythms. The sobering thought is how to get there with the complex members of the various timelines.

Baby steps.
Loo

Reference
Farris Thompson, Robert (2011). Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music. USA : Periscope Publishing.

"pak"

True to my decision for a positive move to rhythm, I turned up to Solares armed with a learning game plan, a bagful of hand percussion, a compact conga, and a cajón. This approach to content - the meanings of rhythms to dancers - was new to Solares and although I had a direction, I couldn't anticipate the response nor outcomes, so I was loaded for bear.

There were two possible routes to take:

1. picking one timeline class and investigating-developing it to its fullest extent in the time available, or
2. skimming through the four timeline classes to give an overall feel for the rhythm capsule in ensemble.

I wouldn't know which route until I assessed Solares' participants response to the first exercise, which was designed as an indicator.

Background
Right from Solares' inception, the timing mechanism used has been based on the non-verbal vocalisation of the tumbao moderno's open tones "gung-gung" (beats 4 and 4+) either in full context of the music, synchronised to the actual open tones of the tumbao moderno played on congas by yours truly, or as a standalone rhythmic cue/timekeeper.

Backbeat Timeline: Tumbao Moderno rhythm
The lowest-hanging fruit was to explore the timeline in which the long-established "gung-gung" was a component - the backbeat* timeline. To put this more expressly, the tumbao moderno rhythm is an example of a backbeat timeline. To complete the timeline, all that was needed was the additional vocalisation "pak" on the European count of beat 2. Hence the vocalisation would be:

"gung-gung (4,4+), ... , pak (2), ..., gung-gung (4,4+), ... , pak (2), ..., " repeated

Exercise One
The Caribbean sway basic was used as the embodiment (i.e. dance) context.

1. "gung-gung" vocalisation followed by three steps, to yield:
   "gung-gung", step, step, step.
2. Then add the "pak" vocalisation synchronous with the second step:
   "gung-gung", step, "pak"step, step.

Results
All participants executed part 1 easily. But when it came to adding the "pak" vocalisation synchronous with their second step, they encountered difficulty. It took most of the workshop as learning time (with remedial instruction) to achieve independently reproducible practice. By default, Route 1 (above) became the course.

Participants' independence and reproducibility of practice was verified through the contrasting activity of incorporating the vocalisation in a simple rueda de casino comprising just basic guapea timesteps and dame partner changes.

Discussion
I believe two factors contributed to the unexpected initial lack of success.

1. The "gung-gung" had been interpreted as a component of the embodiment timeline, NOT as belonging to a separate timeline.
This meant that participants were only tracking one simple timeline. The addition of the "pak" forced the excision of "gung-gung" from the embodiment timeline into its proper backbeat timeline. Participants now had to track two timelines: the vocalised backbeat timeline and the stepped embodiment timeline. All-of-a-sudden, cognitive overhead had more than doubled since two timelines had to be maintained AND they had to be synchronised and merged to create a composite timeline**.

2. The "gung-gung" had been interpreted as a cue anticipating the beginning of the timeline NOT as the beginning itself.
The result, given that the human brain perceives regular meter as alternating strong and weak beats beginning with the strong***, was that the first and third steps coincided with the neurologically strong beats; the second step plus "pak", and the "gung-gung" fell on the neurologically weak beats.

Future Study
Participants' ability to track two separate timelines must continue to develop. This would allow for their merger to form a composite timeline yielding greater rhythmic stability; and an aesthetic investigation into what happens when a rhythm is allowed to modulate another rhythm.

A shift in the perceived start of the rhythmic timeline: from the first step to the "gung-gung" i.e. from the European to the African. To achieve success, "gung-gung" must be understood as important beats in their own right, not simply as cues to the (perceptually) more "important" beat of the first dance step. I think it likely that an interchanging dance-percussion ensemble format will be evaluated for its suitability.

Yeo Loo Yen

Notes
*The online definitions of the backbeat expose the limitations of the internet as a web resource. For example, Wikipedia's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(music)#Backbeat) point to its origin as being in rock music, and FreeDictionary's (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/backbeat) limiting it as a characteristic of rock music. Neither mention its pre-existence in, for example, Senegambian music, nor trace how it came to be in rock music (see 'The Latin Tinge' by John Storm Roberts).

**"Paillard-Fraisse hypothesis" or "code-generation hypothesis" where dynamic stability of a rhythm is achieved through the establishment of a master time code via multi-rhythmic encoding. In:
Volman, M.J.M., and Geuze, R.H. (2000). Temporal stability of rhythmic tapping “on” and “off the beat”: A developmental study. Psychological Research Vol.63, pp.62-69.

***Brochard, R., Abecasis, D., Potter, D., Ragot, R., and Drake, C. (2003). The “TickTock” of Our Internal Clock: Direct Brain Evidence of Subjective Accents in Isochronous Sequences. Psychological Science Vol.14 No.4 pp.362-366.