Books 24 CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS, 768 PAGES, $36   NED SUBLETTE SET out ...

CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS, 768 PAGES, $36

NED SUBLETTE SET out to write a memoir of Havana's music in the 90s, an explosive era he participated in as musician and producer, an era that found political lenience ushering Cuba's stellar, long-banned acts before reveling U.S. audiences: Los Van Van, rumberos Los Munequitos de Matanzas, piano wizard Chucho Valdes, Buena Vista's late life son party. A publisher bought Sublette's pitch, and the fledgling author began recognizing that parts of the musical picture needed explaining. Big parts.

By the end of Cuba and Its Music, Sublette has delved from prehistory up to 1952 and tv, when mambo frenzy galvanized the international scene. Cuba (a second volume will bring us up to date) is a lithe, 600-page musicological/ ethnographic trove, lusciously tempered with the impact of pleasure, and remember, it's Cuban music we're dealing with.

In Cuba's preface, Sublette writes of his 80s immersion in New York's vibrant salsa scene, which "satisfied me intellectually and physically—kinetically—the way rock and roll had once done (though "these guys had much better rhythm"). To hone the book's generous m.o., he considers "trying to talk about rock and roll with someone who didn't speak English and had no knowledge of U.S. history and culture."

With the subtitle "From the First Drums to the Mambo," first things must come first: Chaucer, the sly totalist, never mentioned drums, a word that first appeared in English in 1540. "Enter blackamoors with music," says Love's Labors Lost, as by Shakespeare's day African musicians lived in London. The New Grove Dictionary of Music has it that "around 1600 a dramatic change took place in Western rhythmic notation" after which "most music was metric."

Wonder where the beat came from? Grove left Africa out of its massive 'rhythm' entry, but Sublette redresses things quickly: "I would like to suggest," he writes, "that…as everywhere else Africans have gone, they played music and got people dancing." On the way to chaconas and most tellingly to zarabandas (straight outta the Congo), Cuba's pre-1492 opening could benefit from more musical bridges like "listen to any contemporary salsa record, no matter how slick, and notice what the bongo is doing…. He's talking," which sets up speculation that speech and drumming evolved simultaneously. But the foundation-building gets a sonic blast when Berbers proclaim jihad in 1039, marching up the Iberian peninsula "with a slave army of Sudanese with an African weapon the Castilians had never seen: drums."

Pygmies (whose field recordings are unforgettable) weren't slaved to the New World, but their farming masters, the Bantu, were (as the Congo, "the common denominator of the African experience in the New World"). Pygmies and the Bantu have a thumb piano designed to "play repeating rhythmic cycles. It's not an instrument for expressive melody; it's an instrument for melodic rhythm." Amplified into a resonating calabash, it becomes "the prototype for the modern Latin dance-band piano player. The guajeo, or repeating rhythmic cell that the piano plays in Cuban dance music, treats the piano as rhythmic percussion" in an age-old, continent-leaping tradition.

A remarkable dovetail concludes Cuba's first section, with the upper/lower body relations in African dance interposed with survival on slave ships and Sublette reminding our culture of stock-still listeners that "dance is an intense listening state." Juvenal gets quoted on the nasty dancing girls of Cadiz (the port at the end of the Roman world and Havana's great- aunt), with Sublette translating: "the girls shook their booties down to the ground." A New York evening at the Copa or El Flamingo Club will show you anything else you need to know.

En route to tales of mid-20th-century Havana—home of Machito and Mario Bauza, whose powerhouse big band took New York by storm; of conguero Chano Pozo Latinizing Dizzy Gillespie before taking seven bullets at age 33 in a Harlem bar; of Arsenio Rodriguez souping up early son with piano solos and the conga, and writing scads of its hot tunes—Sublette provides vivid immersions in Abakuan ceremony and Yoruban santeria. Dance-mad relations with New Orleans included Louis Gottschalk's Berlioz-era, 900-member "monster concerts," while those with Oriente brought son, the eastern province's synthesis of Bantu rhythm and Spanish peasant language.

Cuba hits harsh facts of the slave trade: Africans were brought to Cuba far longer and in far greater numbers than to North America, and the sugar industry worked them with a brutality seldom practiced by cotton. Sublette's provocative distinction between Afro-Cuban music and African-American music—the former spurred by slaves brought from Congo, where drums dominate, while the latter derived from bardic Islam and Sahelian peoples playing blues-bent notes—is amply backed with cultural and musical description.

Nodes on musical figures resurface, including tango, the four-note rhythmic cell also called habanera, which grew by the late 1800s to "infect the music of the world." Then "Cuban musicians put more of a bump on the and of two by laying out on the downbeat of three," which elided the cell into the tresillo, the basic syncopated figure heard in "boogie-woogie, in countless rhythm and blues records, and, of course, as a fundamental part of rock and roll."

James Jamerson, "the bassist on many of the most famous Motown records, and probably the most influential electric bassist of the twentieth century" was raised on a South Carolina island, playing a Pygmy-style earth-bow. Sublette also spotlights Israel "Cachao" Lopez, whose late-career CDs and astonishing S.O.B.'s gigs here beat Buena Vista by several years, and who is "arguably the most important bassist in twentieth-century popular music…melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic, all at once, all the time."

Cuba even gets back to the Havana opera company's Giovanni Bottesini, "one of the first contrabass virtuosi" who "revolutionized the instrument by using a violin-style bow" named Il Devastatore. Then the modern era finds John Cage forming a percussion orchestra and inviting the legendary composer Alejandro Garcia Caturla to contribute (Caturla was too busy practicing law in Havana).

Cage gleaned something of the rhythmic unification of the clave, which structures Cuban polyrhythms into a key, freeing the bass and binding diverse percussion patterns in an interwoven, irresistible whole. Anyone who's seen one member of an Afro-Cuban outfit play just a pair of stubby sticks (or heard an audience clap the telltale, reversible 3/2 patterns) knows clave. Sublette pinpoints the hardwood sticks' invention in Havana's shipyard, where clavijas were dense pegs manufactured in place of nails. The chapter "Tres and Bongo" shows the clave sticks' sexed pairing (macho and hembra) duplicated in bongos and maracas—also Cuban inventions—and finds Sexteto Habanero, the first great son band, in a Havana hotel room with an early Victor rep, waxing breakout sessions now on a Tumbao CD.

SUBLETTE ANSWERED FOR the size of his book in an interview, laughing that "it's a big topic. Cuba is a full alternative musical system to what Americans know. The world looks very different from Havana than from New York or Washington.

"I've spent my life trying to figure out why our music is the way it is," he said. "I've been under the hood of a wide variety of music, earned two degrees, played vuelhas in Spain, led my own band and played with Glenn Branca's group, and with Rhys Chatham." On arriving in New York in the late 70s, he sent notes to John Cage and La Monte Young, and both responded.

"And the Cuban influence was always there. I'd want to change chords on the four instead of the one. A rock bassist in my band said, 'You don't change on the four, you change on the down beat!' And I said, 'But it changes on the four, see?' The clave was in my music looking to bust out, but I hadn't really organized it properly in my head." Arriving in Havana with Robert Palmer in 1990, the first of dozens of trips, Sublette felt he'd "walked through a door."

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross called Sublette "by common consensus, the tour de force" of Seattle's Pop Conference 2003, in a July '03 piece Ross wrote on rock academia. In an e-mail, Ross added that "Sublette's lecture was a performance in itself, and not in a showy sort of way. Listening to him, you aren't locked up in one genre, one set of attitudes—you're looking at some of the core DNA of music."

Cuba and Its Music wraps up with a suggested listening list. Smithsonian Folkways discs get mention, culled from ethnologist Lydia Cabrera's crucial field recordings, as do Tumbao's indispensable studio classics. Sublette's own label, Qbadisc, does not, though from traditional rumba of Los Munequitos de Matanzas to today's timba and NG La Banda, Qbadisc rocks. Harry Sepulveda's Cuban Gold compilations for the label are definitive, and wildly entertaining. o