Tresillo (rhythm)
Tresillo (/trɛˈsiːjoʊ/ tres-EE-yoh; Spanish pronunciation: [tɾeˈsiʎo]) is a rhythmic pattern (shown below)[1][2] used in Latin American music.
[10] The Cuban contradanza, known outside of Cuba as the habanera, was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif (tresillo and its variants).
"La Paloma" (1863) is one of the most popular habaneras, having been produced and reinterpreted in diverse cultures, settings, arrangements, and recordings over the last 140 years.
As used in Cuban popular music, tresillo refers to the "three-side" (first three strokes) of the son clave pattern.
Tresillo is the rhythmic basis of many African and Afro-Cuban drum rhythms, as well as the ostinato bass tumbao in Cuban son-based musics, such as son montuno, mambo, salsa, and Latin jazz.
For example, Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (1874) has a famous aria, "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" based on a habanera pattern.
In bélé, the cinquillo-tresillo is beat out by the tibwa, but it translates very well to the chacha (a maracas) when the rhythms are applied for playing biguine music.
[16][17] African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 1800s with the popularity of the Cuban contradanza (known outside of Cuba as the habanera).
[b] From the perspective of African American music, the habanera rhythm can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.
For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African American popular music.
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.
New Orleans producer-bandleader Dave Bartholomew first employed this figure (as a saxophone-section riff) on his own 1949 disc "Country Boy" and subsequently helped make it the most over-used rhythmic pattern in 1950s rock 'n' roll.
On numerous recordings by Fats Domino, Little Richard and others, Bartholomew assigned this repeating three-note pattern not just to the string bass, but also to electric guitars and even baritone sax, making for a very heavy bottom.
He recalls first hearing the figure – as a bass pattern on a Cuban disc.In a 1988 interview with Robert Palmer, Bartholomew revealed how he initially superimposed tresillo over swing rhythm.
I'd have the string bass, an electric guitar and a baritone all in unison.Bartholomew referred to son by the misnomer rumba, a common practice of that time.
On Bartholomew's 1949 tresillo-based "Oh Cubanas", we clearly hear an attempt to blend African American and Afro-Cuban music.
In his composition "Misery" (1957), New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair (Henry Roeland Byrd) plays a habanera-like figure in his left hand.
The bass line on Elvis Presley's 1956 "Hound Dog" is perhaps the most well known rock 'n roll example of the tresillo rhythm pattern.
The first jazz standard composed by a non-Latin to play off of the correlation between tresillo and the hemiola, was Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" (1967).
Those structures are accessed directly by Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums), via the rhythmic sensibilities of swing.
Use of the pattern in Moroccan music can be traced back to slaves brought north across the Sahara Desert from present-day Mali.
Those who wish to convey a sense of the rhythm's background [main beats], and who understand the surface morphology in relation to a regular subsurface articulation, will prefer the divisive format.
They will be tempted to deny that African music has a bona fide metrical structure because of its frequent departures from normative grouping structure.In divisive form, the strokes of tresillo contradict the beats.
Today, through the global spread of hip-hop music, we hear the tresillo bass drum superimposed over traditional genres in dance clubs across the vast Africa–Asia "tresillo-belt".
