Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music, written by Alexandra T. Vazquez

2016; Brill; Volume: 90; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1163/22134360-09001028

2213-4360

Alexandrine Boudreault‐Fournier,

Music History and Culture

Alexandra Vazquez takes us through the sound paths of musicians in both Cuba and Greater Cuba (mainly the United States but also Europe) in a beautifully written book that goes beyond an in-depth account of musicians' life.Her observations spread like droplets of watercolor on a porous sheet of paper, allowing for the exploration of unanticipated detours and contours.She provides exquisite descriptions of the textures, characters, and colors of the music, "listening in detail" in both the literal and metaphorical senses.Listening to the sounds-including noises-unveils the colonial, racial, and geographical past and present of Cuba, but also shows attention to theoretical passages, felt impressions, and musicians' accounts, not to recreate the past but to reassemble what is inherited from them in the present.Rather than a comprehensive reading of Cuban music, Vazquez proposes an interpretation of it, raising Cuban music to an aesthetic level.She experiences with Cuban music rather than providing a detached ethnographic account of it.In using music as a gateway, she addresses the question of what Cuba and the United States have in common, navigating through sensitive borders and politics to address the way musicians and their music have created numerous crossings and overlaps.Five chapters dedicated to specific musicians provide key elements to an alternative experiencing of Cuban music and its relationship with borders, aesthetics, politics, and history.In the first, Vazquez listens, in detail, to the album Cuba Linda by Alfredo Rodríguez, a powerful arrangement of Cuban sound, to provide an alternative acoustic cartography of Cuba.She pushes the island's boundaries to relate Cuba Linda, a "creative laboratory," and the people associated with it, connecting New Orleans to Paris.She further deconstructs a rigid interpretation of musical genre in highlighting the various musical influences on the work.The second chapter deals with the music of Graciela Pérez, who was a member of the famous all-female Orquesta Anacaona, and later a vocalist for the New York-based band Machito and His Afro-Cubans.Vazquez listens to interviews to reconsider the relationship between gender, pedagogy, and music.Reflection on Pérez's contribution, based on interviews as well as ephemera and songs, allows her to address master narratives of sound, providing a refreshing feminist perspective of the emergence of Salsa music.The grunt made by the "King of Mambo" Dámaso Pérez Prado during his performances is the focus of the third chapter.Vazquez provides a fascinating interpretation of this vocal signature by connecting with issues of improvisa-