Contradanza
Contradanza was brought to America and there took on folkloric forms that still exist in Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Ecuador.
[3] The most conventional consensus in regard to the origin of this popular Cuban genre was established by novelist Alejo Carpentier, in his book from 1946, La Música en Cuba.
[4] However, according to other important Cuban musicologists, such as Zoila Lapique and Natalio Galán, it is quite likely that the contradanza had been introduced to Havana directly from Spain, France or England several decades earlier.
[6][7] Certain characteristics would set the Cuban contradanza apart from the contredanse by the mid-19th century, notably the incorporation of the African cross-rhythm called the tresillo.
[11] The contradanza, when played as dance music, was performed by an orquesta típica composed of two violins, two clarinets, a contrabass, a cornet, a trombone, an ophicleide, paila and a güiro.
[13] The New Orleans born pianist/composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) wrote several pieces with the rhythm, gleaned in part from his travels through Cuba and the West Indies: "Danza" (1857), "La Gallina, Danse Cubaine" (1859), "Ojos Criollos" (1859) and "Souvenir de Porto Rico" (1857) among others.
Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo (1958) makes prominent use of the rhythm as a clue to the film's mystery.In Andalusia (especially Cádiz), Valencia and Catalonia, the habanera is still popular.
An accented upbeat in the middle of the bar lends power to the habanera rhythm, especially when it is as a bass[17] ostinato in contradanzas such as "Tu madre es conga".
[18] Syncopated cross-rhythms called the tresillo and the cinquillo, basic rhythmic cells in Afro-Latin and African music, began the Cuban dance's differentiation from its European form.
[27] Carpentier states that the cinquillo was brought to Cuba in the songs of the black slaves and freedmen who emigrated to Santiago de Cuba from Haiti in the 1790s and that composers in western Cuba remained ignorant of its existence: In the days when a trip from Havana to Santiago was a fifteen-day adventure (or more), it was possible for two types of contradanza to coexist: one closer to the classical pattern, marked by the spirits of the minuet, which later would be reflected in the danzón, by way of the danza; the other, more popular, which followed its evolution begun in Haiti, thanks to the presence of the 'French Blacks' in eastern Cuba.Manuel disputes Carpentier's claim, mentioning "at least a half a dozen Havana counterparts whose existence refutes Carpentier's claim for the absence of the cinquillo in Havana contradanza".
A danza entitled "El Sungambelo", dated 1813, has the same structure as the contradanza – the four-section scheme is repeated twice, ABAB[10] and the cinquillo rhythm can already be heard.
[34] As the consistent rhythmic foundation of the bass line in Argentine tango the habanera lasted for a relatively short time until a variation, noted by Roberts, began to predominate.
[37] For example, Aníbal Troilo's 1951 milonga song "La trampera" (Cheating Woman) uses the same habanera heard in Georges Bizet's opera 1875 Carmen.
Whether the rhythm and its variants were directly transplanted from Cuba or merely reinforced similar rhythmic tendencies already present in New Orleans is probably impossible to determine.
In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.Although the exact origins of jazz syncopation may never be known, there's evidence that the habanera/tresillo was there at its conception.
