"The son is the most sublime way of reaching the soul"—this was the tone set by one of Cuba's most important pioneers of the genre, Ignacio Piñeiro. Truly a Creole form, the son is the product of African and Spanish rhythms, melodies and dances, and became the catalyst for most of the island's popular music (and dance).
Developed in the late 1800s, Cuban son began in the eastern cities such as Guantánamo and Santiago, and made its way to Havana by around 1909. The first style of son was the changüí, a lively and highly syncopated genre featuring the instrumentation of the tres (a six-string double course guitar), the bongos (two small drums held together by a piece of wood and played between the knees), the Congolese-derived marímbula (a box lamellophone similar to the mbira thumb piano, only larger), the maracas and a metal scraper called the guayo. Couples danced closely together in sensual moves and turns, and followed the syncopated beat of the marímbula bass-line, and the songs featured a repetitive section with call-and-response vocals known as the montuno. However, the son was viewed as immoral at first and was summarily banned. But as the recording industry began to develop by the 1920s, its popularity could not be stopped, and the son soon traveled the island and the world.
The first major development of the more "urban" form of son was a change in the instrumentation from its more rural predecessor, resulting in the sexteto which maintained the tres, bongos (the bongo player also added a cowbell for the montuno section) and maracas, but replaced the African marímbula with the symphonic double bass and added a Spanish guitar along with the most important ingredient of all: the Cuban claves. The claves became the primordial element in almost all of the island's music, not only outlining the popular and repetitive five-note pattern, but the structure of the music as well.
Also different was the tempo and overall feeling, which—although still highly syncopated—was much calmer compared to the changüí. In 1927, bassist and composer Ignacio Piñeiro (director of the Septeto Nacional) added a trumpet to the sextet, resulting in the septeto instrumentation, and also explored a fusion of the son with other popular musical styles such as the Afro-son, bolero-son, guajira-son and others.
Cuban groups into the 1930s and '40s explored further developments of the style, among them tres player and composer Arsenio Rodríguez, who popularized the hybrid called the son-montuno and added to the septeto instrumentation, resulting in the Cuban conjunto. His revamped conjunto added three more trumpets (for a total of four), the piano and one tumbadora (conga drum); the conjunto format would inspire numerous groups in the decades that followed.
The next transformation saw the emergence of a slightly faster, more energetic version of son called the guaracha, which motivated Cuba's dance-oriented public as they explored fancier moves. It is the guaracha that would become the central style in the genre known as salsa. In the decades that followed, the son continued to form the building blocks of most of Cuba's dance rhythms, and although it would experience many changes and adaptations, its foundations remain into the 21st century. —Rebeca Mauleon
