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Arsenio and his son combo
BY RAFAEL LAM—Special
for Granma International—
THE
son combos have reached their 65th
anniversary. According to many researchers, it
culminated in 1940 when, with the Arsenio Rodríguez
Combo, this instrumental form attained its finest
harmonic qualities in performance.
The
proof of its enduring quality can be found in dance
music in Cuba and throughout the Americas, on the
margin of possible non-determining replacements or
additions to the essence of the sound achieved by
the ensemble. At the end of the 50s and early 60s
Arsenio himself would add to it instruments such as
pans, flute, sax and guiro to the original sound.
Like
many other musicians he experimented in the 1930s
when the sextets and septets had already passed
their peak. “I thought that the septet, with
trumpet, guitar and tres lacked the necessary
harmony and I added three trumpets to harmonize with
the metal section. I also incorporated piano and
drumming with my brother Kike. I was looking for a
more powerful sound for the larger dancehalls and
outdoor spaces like El Polar. They called me the
Chambelona Crazy Guy but the following year when the
combos came into fashion, I wasn’t quite so crazy,”
Arsenio stated in the Bohemia magazine in
1952.
In
addition to all that, Arsenio was giving dominance
to voices, according to David F. García, he was
accustomed to using two first voices and a second to
obtain his group’s vocal sound. He imprinted an
African force to the combo’s “sound motor.” In order
to record the musical concepts and intelligence of
Arsenio with the combo, we took some statements from
his closest musicians and family members.
“I
began with Arsenio,” says Rubén González, piano man,
“in 1942 he was living near my apartment. He went by
and heard me with his prodigious ear. All of us who
worked in his combo received his knowledge, these
sound groupings were veritable music schools. The
Cuban music conservatoires were in the street, via
the oral tradition, from which music took
nourishment throughout the centuries. He was the
king of the clave, that was his concept for
facilitating the steps of the dancers, which is the
essence of son. Arsenio played in a slow
rhythm, seeking stability and security for the
dancers.”
Another of Arsenio’s brilliant pianists. Lilí (Luis)
Martínez, worked with the ensemble from 1945-1950
and informed journalist Mayra A. Martínez in 1983:
“If I hadn’t played with Arsenio, I definitely
wouldn’t have known son so well. I learned at
his side, I was his arranger. When he was inspired,
whatever the hour he would call me so that he
wouldn’t forget the composition. He would sing it to
me and say in his rough voice: ‘When will that be
ready?’ I would arrange it without piano, wherever I
was and in a few hours the composition was there.
Arsenio never insinuated to me that there was
anything he didn’t like.”
Arsenio’s brother, Raúl (Papá Quila) was the combo’s
bongo man. “Arsenio wasn’t easy to swallow, he was
very demanding, he had a very precise school that he
made everyone go through. When somebody went out of
key, he had a natural knowledge, an extremely
talented ear. He had his thesis of music and
maintained it with his idées fixes. The old-guard
musicians were like that, they died with their boots
on. They had to wait for many years before history
gave them the right. He used to say to me: ‘You
plant a sapling and other people enjoy the tree.’
When he arrived in the United States the Latino
musicians went along to copy him, steal his tricks.
They weren’t going to dance, they were constantly
copying him. That was how the so-called Latin salsa
emerged, along with Ignacio Piñeiro and Miguel
Matamaoros.”
In
the 1952 Bohemia interview, Arsenio casually
commented that at the end of his radio performances,
Pérez Prado, Bebo Valdés and René Hernández (three
geniuses) would ask him: “What music is that that
you play with the combo?” They didn’t understand the
musical rarity. “A long time later,” Arsenio
stated, “those people began to write mambos and send
them to New York and other countries, without me,
who invented it, knowing about it.”
Cheché, one his relatives who still lives in Güines,
noted that Arsenio was “tireless in rehearsals and
performances. He slept little, obliged his musicians
to be elegant and vain – a demand of the time –
checked out his musicians, touched them to see if
their hair was cut properly, with suits and ties.”
According to the Helio Orovio Dictionary his date of
birth was August 31, 1911. His registration however,
is for August 31, 1913 with the name of Ignacio
Arsenio Travieso Scull. Rodríguez was a last name
“loaned” for the entry in the Güines Civil Registry. |
