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"Survival Kits on Wax": The Politics, Poetics, and Productions of Gil Scott-Heron, 1970-1978

The rhythmic feel or 'groove' of Cuban dance music is typically characterised by a dynamic rhythmic energy, drive and sense of forward motion that, for those attuned, has the ability to produce heightened emotional responses and evoke engagement and participation through physical movement and dance. No single work on groove in Cuban dance music considers together the cognitive, cultural, socio-musical and emotional dimensions of the music-making practices and aesthetics that characterise groove production. This study integrates these perspectives into a single theoretical framework with the aim of gaining fresh insights into the nature of groove in two prominent styles of Cuban and Cuban-related dance music: son and salsa.

Methodologically, this study blends ethnography and the analysis of timing data extracted from real-world performances to explore the shared cultural knowledge, socio-musical processes, aesthetics and emotional dimensions of groove. Ethnography facilitates the detailed investigation of how performers talk about the music-making practices that characterise aspects of musical culture while the use of timing data, recorded in situ, facilitates the investigation of the real-time nuanced micro-timing relationships that shape effective groove production.

The findings of this study paint a picture of groove that is rich, complex and multidimensional, one that is built upon the expressive performances, socio-musical interactions and collectivist attitudes of rhythm section musicians as well as powerful cultural models and intersubjectively shared knowledge. When rhythm section musicians engage in expressive and interactive dialogues and work effectively as a synchronous collective, the resultant groove embodies the dynamic rhythmic, communicative and emotional energies of the individuals that comprise the group. In performance situations, when the groove of the rhythm section spontaneously finds union with the kinaesthetic and emotional energies of dancers and audiences, the cumulative energy possesses the power to inspire, excite, energise, invite participation and unite people in joyous celebration.

Groove in Cuban Dance Music: An Analysis of Son and Salsa

Dr. Christina Guenther, Advisor Dr. Francisco Cabanillas, Advisor This thesis explores the significance of the consumption of salsa music and dance in the Federal Republic of Germany and its impact on the construction and reconstruction of German and Latin American cultural identity. The discipline of cultural studies has much to learn from the Latin American presence in and their contributions to the establishment of the salsa institution in the Federal Republic. The thesis discusses the level of German involvement in the creation of a transnational music and dance culture traditionally associated with the Spanish-speaking world exclusively.

The dynamics of salsiology in contemporary germany: reconstructing german cultural identity through salsa music and dance

This is the collection of a novel, Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature: A Novel in Tracks, and an embedded short story, “Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos.” The novel tells the story of Palomino Mondragón, a Colombian mercenary who has arrived in New York after losing his leg to a mortar in Korea. Reclusive, obsessive and passionate, Palomino has reinvented himself as a mambo musician and has fallen in love with Etiwanda, a dancer at the nightclub in which he plays—but he cannot bring himself to declare his love to her. His life changes when he is deported from the United States at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis without having declared his love. Through the thirty years chronicled in the novel, Palomino does all possible in his quest to return to the United States to find Etiwanda despite the fact that he knows she has grown to be a fantasy, an obsession of his imagination. Palomino’s quest takes him to the United States and back three times, as he becomes more and more desperate, as he becomes involved with drug traffickers and for-hire murderers like Polo Norte, as he loses track of what it means to feel alive. Palomino is trapped in a tug-of-war between his rational desire for a normal existence and his irrational but inescapable longing for Etiwanda. In the end, his desperation to get to Etiwanda brings the underworld of Polo Norte to her doorstep. “Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos” tells the story of Polo Norte, Palomino’s antagonist, on his last day on earth, as he is followed by a writer who has agreed to watch him commit suicide. Together, the stories explore the history and nature of the Colombian Diaspora in the United States, and the violent circumstances surrounding the relationship between both countries and the migrants stuck in the middle of it.

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Cuban Jam Sessions In Miniature: A Novel In Tracks

Cindy Garcı́a’s Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles is a welcome entry into the field of Latin American social dance and Latina/o studies. The work broadens scholarship on salsa dance, shifting away from originary narratives of salsa that typically fixate on Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York to focus instead on the practices of Mexican and Central American salseras/os in Los Angeles.1 Garcı́a sidesteps elite male composers and performers of salsa music and engages instead the marginalized dancing bodies of Mexicans, Central Americans, and women attending salsa clubs on their own. The “crossings” in Garcı́a’s title refers to various things: the ways these bodies perform the actual crossings of dance steps, how they cross a club’s spaces, and who crosses particular city neighborhoods to go to which clubs. Garcı́a views Los Angeles salsa clubs as sites that connect these crossings to transnational labor practices, frameworks of racializing Latina/o bodies in the United States, and the politics of migration. The author is well positioned to engage this topic: she has an extensive background in salsa dance, having trained in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Her ethnographic approach incorporates her own enactments of latinidad as she dances with salseras/os from differing classes, locales, and stylistic backgrounds. Rather than concentrate on the upper echelon of salsa dance contest-winners or instructors, Garcı́a focuses on club attendees—the untrained as well as the trained, female as well as male, and salseras/os off the dance floor as well as on it. She uses her interviews and interactions with salseras/os and club attendees to investigate how they are assessed and disciplined through their social practices, including how they dress and the kinds of beverages they drink. The reader will also find rich descriptions of bodies in motion and of ways movements identify “otherness” and create hierarchies within salsa clubs. Garcı́a’s analyses and arguments are in dialogue with foundational and contemporary work on latinidad and social dance. For example, her articulation of salsa as a dissident practice enacted by everyday and queer bodies

Vernon W. Boggs

Papers

Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City