Tango, choro, samba, bossa nova and Cuban music

While jazz was being born in New Orleans, other ports of the Americas also became musical crossroads: Havana, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro. The same mixture was found there: European dances (contredanse, polka, waltz), rhythms brought from Africa by enslaved people, and immigrants from all over Europe. The result was dance music that conquered the world, all sharing one feature: very recognisable syncopated rhythms.

Cuba: habanera, son and clave

In the 19th century Cuba turned the European contredanse into a slow, swaying dance, the habanera ("from Havana"). Its bass rhythm (dotted eighth, sixteenth, two eighths) travelled around the world: Bizet adapted it in the famous aria from Carmen (1875), after a song by the Spaniard Sebastián Iradier, and you can hear it in the left hand of Scott Joplin's Solace. A variant, the tresillo (3+3+2), is the basic cell of a great deal of music in the Americas, from tango to rock and roll.

M:2/4
L:1/16
Q:1/4=72
K:C clef=bass
"^habanera" C,3 C, E,2 G,2 | C,3 C, E,2 G,2 | "^tresillo" C,3 C,3 C,2 | C,3 C,3 C,2 |]

In the late 19th century the danzón appeared, an elegant ballroom dance; in the early 20th century the son came down from the east of the island to Havana. Its groups mixed guitar and tres (a guitar with three pairs of strings), double bass, trumpet, bongos, maracas and claves, two wooden sticks that strike a two-bar pattern, the clave. The whole band organises itself around it. Here is the "3-2" clave: three strokes in the first bar (this is the tresillo), two in the second.

M:4/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=100
K:C
"^3" c3 c3 c2 | "^2" z2 c2 c2 z2 | "^3" c3 c3 c2 | "^2" z2 c2 c2 z2 |]

In 1930 El manisero ("The Peanut Vendor"), recorded in New York, launched a worldwide craze for Cuban music. Then came Pérez Prado's mambo and Enrique Jorrín's cha-cha-chá in the 1940s and 1950s, and, in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, the salsa of Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians (Celia Cruz, the Fania label). In 1997 the album Buena Vista Social Club brought the old masters of son back to a worldwide audience.

Buenos Aires: tango

In the late 19th century, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the habanera met the Argentine milonga, Afro-Argentine rhythms and the songs of Italian and Spanish immigrants: this was the birth of tango. The bandoneon, a small button concertina from Germany, gave it its deep, plaintive voice. Tango triumphed in Paris around 1913; in 1917 Carlos Gardel recorded Mi noche triste, often regarded as the first tango song. After the golden age of the big orchestras in the 1940s, Astor Piazzolla invented tango nuevo, fed by Bach and jazz, meant for listening more than dancing. You recognise tango by its strongly marked 4/4, often split 3+3+2, its crisp accents and dramatic stops.

Rio: choro, samba, bossa nova

Around 1870 Rio's musicians played polkas and waltzes in their own syncopated way: this was choro, a virtuoso instrumental music in which the flute sings, the cavaquinho (a small four-string guitar) keeps the rhythm and the seven-string guitar traces the bass lines. Pixinguinha made it a refined art in the 20th century. In the early 20th century samba was born in Rio's Afro-Brazilian communities; it became the music of carnival and the emblem of the country.

In the late 1950s Antônio Carlos Jobim, the poet Vinícius de Moraes and the singer-guitarist João Gilberto slowed samba down, murmured rather than sang it, and added jazz chords: this was bossa nova (1958). It conquered the United States in the early 1960s, notably through saxophonist Stan Getz, and became a pillar of the jazz repertoire. On guitar or piano, bossa is a school of rhythm: bass on the beat, chords off the beat.

What to listen for

• Cuba: percussion (bongos, congas, claves, maracas), piano in repeated patterns (montunos), bright brass, call and response between soloist and chorus.
• Tango: bandoneon, violins, percussive piano, double bass; marked rhythm, dramatic contrasts.
• Choro: virtuoso flute, cavaquinho, guitars; lively tempo, melancholy joy.
• Bossa nova: soft voice, classical guitar, jazz chords, hushed rhythm.

Listening list

• Recordings by Ignacio Piñeiro's Septeto Nacional (Cuban son), Celia Cruz, Buena Vista Social Club.
• Carlos Gardel; Astor Piazzolla, Adiós Nonino, Libertango.
• Pixinguinha (choro); João Gilberto and Jobim; the album Getz/Gilberto (1964).