Bridging South America and the United States in black music research.

Just as the idea of a "Latin America" as a symbolic construction of general identity is politically problematic, the concept of musical boundaries and borders within it is equally perplexing. Latin-American scholars have insisted on setting boundaries of musical traditions according to the existing social stratification at a given time and space. Most have perceived those traditions in a four-part model of stratification: "primitive" traditional indigenous communities, folk-rural-peasant groups, urban popular mestizo groups, and dominating elite urban groups. The basic difficulties with such a criterion of classification are that stratification is not fixed and stable and that sociocultural or ethnic identity can vary considerably in time and space, according to the various contexts in which it is negotiated and for what specific purposes. Boundaries and borders are clearly related to the question of identity and must be rethought with special attention to the various factors that contributed to forge an old or contemporary identity (Behague 2000). Actually, we must recognize as did Richard Morse, that the word "identity" keeps losing its edge and thus needs to be resharpened periodically. He writes, "identity is not 'national character' as diagnosed by detached socio-psychiatry but collective awareness of historic vocation." Identity "starts with tacit self-recognition" (Morse 1995, 1). What seems particularly relevant, therefore, is the articulation of the relationship between music and the various contexts of identity (self-recognition) construction.

In an earlier essay (Behague 1982), I called attention to the dubious benefit of previous searches for origins in Latin-American and Caribbean musical expressions in relation to the configuration of contemporary societies. I warned then that the general tendency in Europe and North America of viewing Latin America as a monolithic cultural area has often resulted in naive, simplistic, and reductionist generalizations about the traditional musics of Latin America, particularly in the writings of non-Latin-Americans. The actual diversity of the musics of the Latin-American continent has become clearer since the 1960s as a result of more field research being carried out by more scholars from Latin America, Europe, and North America. To this day we have not, however, accumulated enough empiric knowledge of the vast music corpora of the continent to allow meaningful and comprehensive cross-cultural comparisons among music cultures that share a common ethnohistory but have developed different cultural expressions, as, for example, in the case of Afro-Caribbean communities of Cuba and Haiti and those of western Colombia and northeastern Brazil. I also argued at that time that the significance of the prominent social stratification that typifies Latin America's social organization elucidates to a large extent the musical expressions that function as class identity symbols. I asserted that this stratification provides the keystone for accounting for the various musical and performative practices to be found in both rural and urban areas of the continent, assuming that the stratification is contextualized in very specific terms (time and space). Hence, the ways in which we have classified the musical traditions of the area need further reflection.

The question becomes exponentially more intricate in attempting to bridge Latin American and U.S. black musical boundaries and traditions. In 1998, when Samuel Floyd approached me with this very topic, my immediate response was that such a topic had never been dealt with before, to which he responded: "this is the reason, of course, that we want to address it." And furthermore, the idea of a session on "Traversing Musical Boundaries in Research and Writing" was precisely to encourage a bridging of the Latin-American-Caribbean-U.S. connections, as well as a bridging of the geographical boundaries that plague black music scholarship and inhibit our knowledge of those connections. Floyd wrote (1998): "Specialists are well aware of them, but others are not and tend to still view black music outside the Americas as exotic and unconnected to the field at large. We want ardently to play a significant role in correcting this state of affairs. Thus, our topic." Convinced and intense supporter that I am of the longstanding research philosophy of Samuel Floyd and the Center for Black Music Research, this was a welcome opportunity to reflect on this theme. However, my contribution here is limited to a few ideas resulting from many years of research experience in some specific aspects of black music research in Latin America (and more specifically in Brazil). Some of these ideas may appear temerarious at times, but it is my hope that they might prove of some benefit to future directions in black music scholarship conceived in comparative but holistic terms.

As a former doctoral student of Gilbert Chase at the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research in New Orleans, I discovered the richness and diversity of some of the expressions of American music but in no way would dare to claim special expertise in American music. I have kept abreast, however, of the state of Afro-Latin-American music research in American publications, which is closer to my own research endeavors. Incidentally, it is quite telling that in his well-known A Guide to the Music of Latin America (1962), Chase included the United States only to give some attention to what he called "Spanish-American musical traditions," with a separate section devoted to the New Orleans pianist-composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the "most important musician produced by the United States" (349) from the point of view of Inter-American musical relations. However, nothing specific about black music in the United States that could be related to black music in Latin America and the Caribbean is mentioned in the Guide.

The first step in the crusade to bridge the two traditions requires a consideration of the few apparent similarities and numerous differences of the wide-ranging cultural experiences of North and South Americans of black ancestry--chronologically, geographically, and musically. The twentieth-century anthropological and sociological literature concerning Afro-American studies initially had stressed the search for Africanisms in the Western Hemisphere diaspora (cf. Herskovits 1966). But even in the study of Africanisms, no attention has been paid to a comparative study of the relative presence of African "retentions" or "reinterpretations" in the area of expressive culture among various countries of the American continent. Herskovits' well-known scale of intensity of "New World Africanisms" identifies the music of many Caribbean islands (Guiana [Bush and Paramaribo], Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica [Maroons and Morant Bay], and Trinidad [Port of Spain]) as "very African." The same goes for several regions of Brazil. But for the Virgin Islands and the United States (i.e., Gullah Islands, rural South, and urban North), the level of retention is deemed "quite African." However, the scale that intended to show some similarities among New World areas tells us nothing about the potential reasons for the existence of "very" or "quite" African elements in such musics. Earlier, Herskovits recognized that, at least from a historical perspective, comparison among various countries would be useful. He writes (1996, 14):

   I have long been convinced that in studying the origins of the
   Negroes of the United States constant reference must be made to
   other Negro populations of the New World. For the United States was
   only one portion of the great slave-receiving area which also
   included the islands of the Caribbean and certain portions of
   northern and eastern South America, notably Brazil and the Guianas.
   The slaves were, indeed, often sent to continental United States
   only after a preliminary conditioning period elsewhere.

With a few exceptions, however, there has not been close attention to the other black populations of the New World on the part of expert musicologists or ethnomusicologists studying African-American music and culture. In this respect, and despite the criticism to which he was subjected, Melville Herskovits was a remarkable exception, for as the main voice of his generation in cultural anthropology to promote the recognition of Afro-American studies, his field experience extended to Haiti, Trinidad, Surinam, and Brazil (without mentioning his earlier extensive fieldwork in West Africa). Thus, he believed in comparative research and was profoundly knowledgeable of the contributions of a Nina Rodrigues or Rene Ribeiro from Brazil, or Fernando Ortiz from Cuba, among others. But the cultural consequences of that supposed "preliminary conditioning elsewhere" of black slaves in the United States has hardly been elucidated.

Whatever common cultural history these slaves could have shared during the colonial times with those in the Caribbean islands and northern and eastern South America does not seem to have had any concrete continuity in modern times, at least from a musical viewpoint. To be sure, we all know the few historical references to black music in the United States of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as the Sunday dance in New Orleans Congo Square, and other dances and musical instruments, almost all probably of Caribbean origin (at least in Louisiana) (Jean-Baptiste Labat, Moreau de Saint-Mery, Benjamin Latrobe, George Cable, etc.). But we have no similar references to black music in the United States clearly originating from the South American continent.

In our search for connections, it might be pertinent to consider the possible ways that the three folk traditions of the Black Americas developed in North and South America. These were identified by the famous French sociologist Roger Bastide (1967), who distinguished first an African folklore, faithfully preserved ("pure"), then a black folklore (creole, i.e., born in the Americas, either spontaneously or artificially but always according to specific cultural expressive or sociopolitical needs), and finally what he called a "white folklore," borrowed by black people in their wish for social ascension and assimilation (while the white people borrowed from the black people certain dances and musics and, through various manipulations, brought them beyond the "threshold of civilization").

The African folklore would include all religious survivals but also secular music and dance, including the New Orleans bamboula dance of Bantu origin (later known as cabinda or calinda) and other dances from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. No doubt, in his overview Bastide ended up making an amazing oversimplification of the African heritage and a misrepresentation of the actual Afro-American expressions. Black folklore, according to Bastide, "has a double origin: first, the existence of a process of creolization, which is a spontaneous movement, internal to Afro-American culture, through adaptation to the surrounding environment and assimilation of European elements" (61). But juxtaposed to it is another folklore created by the white people for their slaves, from elements borrowed from the African heritage but reinterpreted by them to facilitate the work of evangelization of the black people. This would represent the typical "plantation" slave culture that developed some of the most characteristic Afro-American musical and choreographic expressions, but also an "artificial folklore" (in the words of Bastide) developed mostly by the religious orders or denominations in the conversion process of the black communities. Thus, a number of dramatic dances representing aspects of Christianity incorporated various aspects of the African heritage as maintained in the slave quarters, such as the coronation of Congo kings (in the well-known Brazilian congadas, for example).

In opposition to the African and Afro-American folklores, Bastide recognized the presence of a significant European folklore, resulting from the dualism between the class of plantation owners and that of the slaves. The importance of this folklore was felt among the Afro-Americans particularly after Empancipation, the most notorious example cited by Bastide being the celebration of Carnival, especially in the southern United States, the West Indies, Guiana, and Brazil, in relation to which some of the most typical Afro-American music and dance genres of the twentieth century developed. Perhaps influenced by the Brazilian anthropologist Artur Ramos, Bastide emphasized the fact that the borders between black and white culture in Latin America and the Caribbean had no precise limits, promoting the interpenetration of institutions and the mixing of cultures. He also saw, however, a constant tension between the two cultures, which were competing with each other but also sharing a great deal in the process. A number of musical genres resulted from this struggle.

If we accept the existence of these folk expressions, their historical development would seem to differ considerably in North and South America, but the actual processes of African "survivals" and creolization would appear theoretically similar. Unfortunately, this is one area for which precise research is lacking, especially for North America as part of that pre-World War I "invisible music," to use Charles Hamm's term.

The presence of some U.S. black musicians in South America and of black Latin Americans in the United States during the late nineteenth century has been documented. The case of Lucien Lambert (1858-1945), for example, is quite telling. Lambert was a composer of French birth and black New Orleans parentage who grew up in Brazil and made his career mostly in France and Portugal. Although some of his works suggest a certain influence from the Louisiana of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, none seems related to anything specifically Brazilian. His name does not even appear in any source of Brazilian music history (as opposed to Gottschalk, who died in Rio in 1869 and has an article in the Encylopedia of Brazilian Music [Marcondes 1998, 345-346]). Conversely, the black Cuban composer and violinist Jose White (1835-1918) made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1876 but developed his career in South America and Europe. These examples illustrate the fact that a mere presence did not necessarily imply musical/cultural interaction.

It is more in the fields of popular music and jazz in the twentieth century that the U.S.-South American connections appear more obvious. Such connections represent a two-way stream at different periods of the century. At the beginning of the century, the Cuban habanera, the danza puertorriquena, and the Brazilian maxixe had in fact much in common rhythmically, formally, and melodically with American ragtime. Jazz had a particularly strong impact on some genres of popular music in Brazil in the 1920s. For example, the famous band Os Oito Batutas, made up entirely of black musicians and led by the exquisite Brazilian composer Pixinguinha, changed its name in 1928 to Jazz-Band os Batutas. The band had toured in Paris in 1922 and in Argentina the following year, with considerable success. However, the Parisian tour revealed the popularity of jazz bands and dance genres such as the fox-trot; immediately after the tour, Pixinguinha began to incorporate certain jazz elements in his arrangements of such "national" genres as the choro. The reaction by the music critic Cruz Cordeiro of a recording of the Orchestra Pixinguinha-Donga issued by the label Parlophon in 1930, in which the famous Pixinguinha choro "Carinhoso" figured prominently, was rather negative: "It seems that our popular composer is being very influenced by the rhythm and melody of jazz music, [a] fact that we have been noticing for some time now. In his choro ["Carinhosa"] whose introduction is a real fox-trot, he presents various combinations of the Yankee popular music. It very much displeased us" (quoted in Cabral 1978, 57). Regardless of the nationalistic motivation of the music critic, the influence of jazz in Brazilian urban music was felt subsequently--mostly in the type of instrumentation and orchestration (and instrumental improvisation) rather than in the rhythmic or harmonic practices of American jazz of a given period or style. Quite noteworthy in the case of Pixinguinha's Os Oito Bantutas is the fact that jazz awareness occurred while the band was touring in Paris rather than by direct exposure from the United States.

In his recent book Latin Jazz (1999a), John Storm Roberts gives a fairly accurate account of the real significance of Latin music's influence on American jazz, from the early tango to rumba, mambo, cubop, and bossanova. But with the exceptions of a few Brazilian and Argentine figures and genres, the greatest impact on jazz came from Cuba and Puerto Rico. Roberts's earlier book, The Latin Tinge (1999b), a much less satisfactory study, was prominently subtitled "The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States." Thus, the reverse stream, namely the impact of U.S. music on Latin America, is barely sketched and therefore constitutes an area urgently in need of research.

What seems particularly significant in the traversing of boundaries between the United States and South America in popular music since the 1960s, then the 1970s and 1980s, is the ready assimilation of some of the most typical African-American music genres of the period, namely rhythm and blues, funk, rap, and hip hop. However, the assimilation did not carry, in most cases, the original African-American sociopolitical messages despite obvious affinities with the "black aesthetic." James Brown had considerable impact on a number of Brazilian samba composers of the 1970s who were quite active in the local adaptation of African-American pop music trends. Interestingly enough, rock music in Brazil has been associated primarily with the white middle-class, whereas funk and rap, introduced in Brazil in a systematic way in the 1980s, are heavily supported in big cities by people (and especially teenagers) of the lower socioeconomic class, that is, primarily blacks. According to anthropologist Jorge de Carvalho (1994, 30), some of the musicians and singers of these styles "have associated themselves openly with the various black movements." In addition, funk musicians have frequently commented in their songs on the racial situation in Brazil and expressed black pride openly. In the mid-1990s in Rio de Janeiro, funk and rap were reported in the press as being used by the drug lords of the city. The "kings" of Rio rap, William Santos de Souza and Duda (Carlos Eduardo Cardoso Silva), who earned about $80,000 per month in 1995, recorded the famous rap around 1990 titled "Rap do Borel" (Rap of Borel, a slum in the Tijuca neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro where drug dealers operate) in homage to the gang. There are raps for almost all main favelas of Rio, and even the "Rap da DRE" (Rap of the Divisao de Repressao a Entorpecentes--the Division of the Repression against Drugs) as a challenge to that drug enforcement agency. The famous group of organized crime Comando Vermelho (Red Command) is known to have subsidized funk parties to recruit young kids for drug dealing. The more radical types of funk and rap, however, have been used mostly for sociopolitical messages about local, regional, or national issues, as demonstrated by the rap groups of Cambio Negro (Black Exchange) and that of Chico Science. Cambio Negro is one of the groups adhering to the trend of rap consciecia (consciousness rap) that is an opposition to hip hop, which it considers alienating. The noncompromising ideology of this current openly reflects a militancy against racism and social injustice in a deliberately shocking, cursing language.

The research carried out by a number of American (and a few European) scholars on South American black musical traditions has at times misrepresented the original communities because ideologies relevant to a particular discipline, or sociopolitical agendas that might be suitable to African-American studies, appear invalid to most Afro-Latin-American cases. The first thorny issue refers to the very difficult question of ethnic or racial identity. Although there may indeed be some commonalities across multiracial societies in the Americas, there are certain fundamental differences, such as the concept of hypodescent (the one-drop rule) as the main racial line of demarcation in the United States versus the more fluid notion of miscegenation applied in very subtle ways throughout the Latin continent. (1) The main result of these differences is a much more pronounced sense of ambiguity of self-racial identity in Latin America. The obvious consequences of such ambiguity is the blurring boundaries and borders of musical traditions, which has meant a much deeper integration (and sometimes even appropriation) of Afro-American musics in Latin-American contexts.

The second issue has to do with the very nature of Afro-American musics as opposed to the sole notion of African extensions or a unilinear view of the African diaspora. Many scholars focus on the African heritage of the musics of the Americas as an African extension overseas, which hides the dangerous implication that one cannot or should not consider Afro-American music in its own right, that is, as a tradition separate and distinct from Africa. To be sure, African and non-African influences on Afro-American musics have played out in very diverse fashions. The insightful historical account that Samuel Floyd gave us in The Power of Black Music (1995) refers to transformations, syncretization and synthesis, modernism, and so forth, providing a keen interpretation of the changing, multiethnic historical and modern contexts that define the numerous meanings carried by African-American music in a specific time and space. Concurrently, one should recognize that there can hardly be such a thing as a unified African diaspora throughout the Western Hemisphere for the simple fact that the ethnohistorical experiences of the AfroAmerican communities of the hemisphere differed widely.

Paul Gilroy's well-known study on cultural exchange among diasporic cutures The Black Atlantic (1993) considers "Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity" (2) in a rather provocative manner. He sees the black "invented traditions of musical expression" as having originated the development of a "distinct, often priestly caste of organic intellectuals" who flourished as "temporary custodians of a distinct and embattled cultural sensibility which has also operated as a political and philosophical resource" (76). He also recognizes music as a powerful alternative form of political process, particularly meaningful in black social experiences throughout the Americas. Although Gilroy does not examine the various connections between Afro-Cubans, Afro-Haitians, Afro-Brazilians, and African Americans, he does set down some substantial factors in the problem of theorizing black identity and the musics of the black Atlantic world. Thus, "weighing the similarities and differences between black cultures remains an urgent concern," and "diaspora is still indispensable in focusing on the political and ethical dynamics of the unfinished history of blacks in the modern world" (80). To be sure, those "Jewels Brought from Bondage" have been chiseled in many different ways despite some similarity of their primeval substance. Gilroy is acutely aware of this situation, because he warns, "The proposition that the post-slave cultures of the Atlantic world are in some significant way related to one another and to the African cultures from which they partly derive has long been a matter of great controversy.... The situation is rendered even more complex by the fact that the fragile psychological, emotional, and cultural correspondences which connect diaspora populations in spite of their manifest differences are often apprehended only fleetingly and in ways that persistently confound the protocols of academic orthodoxy" (81). These cautionary words are convincing enough as the basic requirement of a truly interdisciplinary focus in our study of transatlantic black music research.

Additionally, the similarities and differences in a musical anthropology of black communities in North and South America are to be sought in the actual processes of music-making and its symbolism, not in the end products. All black communities of the Western Hemisphere have their own Esu (or Legba) or equivalent, which assures their dynamic and frequently central place in the society at large and provides them with a strong and constantly renewed sense of creation and procreation and ultimately power. Then there is for both North and South American black music, to use Samuel Floyd's words, "the intercultural crossroads of black and white in the United States, without which the music and music making discussed in this book would never have existed and the understanding of which is crucial to constructive social, political, and intellectual discourse" (Floyd 1995, 270). The degree of mixing at the crossroads and the resulting products (musical genres, performance practices) vary a great deal between the United States and South America, but the process entails analogous agencies resulting in expressive means determined by adaptive strategies over time to marginality, racial and ethnic intolerance, segregation, oppression, and, to be sure, continued slavery through poverty.

As articulated by Anthony Seeger (1987, xiii-xiv), a musical anthropologist "looks at the way musical performances created many aspects of culture and social life ... [and] studies social life as a performance.... [I]t examines the way music is part of the very construction and interpretation of social and conceptual relationships and processes." Thus, the emphasis on performance should bring to light some of the points of convergence in a possible Pan-Afro-African-American aesthetic. At the same time, one must realize that there are many different levels of such an aesthetic, but until enough research has been carried out in the various Afro-American communities in South American countries, we will not be able to establish with any degree of accuracy the similarities and differences of those levels.

Finally, in my own study of the recent development of Afro-Bahian popular music (Behague 2000), I have frequently wondered if a musical genre such as the samba-reggae represents musically and culturally a truly hybrid product, or, as many believe, it is the result of a process of a re-Africanization of the Carnival and the music of Bahia. I believe, rather, that it was the result of an attitude of social and economic vindication, hence of political claim on the part of the Afro-Bahians. By borrowing the well-established power of Negritude or blackness of Jamaican reggae (by the 1980s and 1990s), the young Brazilian musicians reinforced that claim. In addition, the most significant sociopolitical message of the type of alternative bloco afro group Timbalada, as developed by Carlinhos Brown in Bahia in the early 1990s, was to create a form of socialization through musical performance and of individual affirmation and dignity through what has been called in Bahia the "estheticization of Negritude." A similar strategy of assertion is quite likely operating in numerous other black musical communities throughout the Americas.

(1.) Incidentally, the etymology of miscegenation does not imply a "mis-mate" or mate badly, as believed by some, but simply relates to the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race).

(2.) The title of chapter 3 is "Jewels Brought from Bondage': Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity."

REFERENCES

Bastide, Roger. 1967. Les Ameriques noires, les civilsations africaines dans le nouveau monde. Paris: Payot.

Behague, Gerard. 1982. Folk and traditional music in Latin America: General prospect and research problems. The World of Music 2: 3-21.

--, ed. 1994. Music and black ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America. Miami, Fla.: North/South Center.

--. 2000. Boundaries and borders in the study of music in Latin America: A conceptual re-mapping. Latin American Music Review 21, no. 1 (Spring/Summer): 16-30.

Cabral, Sergio. 1978. Pixinguinha, vida e obra. Rio de Janeiro: Edicao FUNARTE.

Carvalho, Jose Jorge de. 1994. The multiplicity of black identities in Brazilian popular musico Brazil: Departmento de Antropologia.

Chase, Gilbert. 1962. A guide to the music of Latin America. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1995. The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

--. 1998. E-mail message to the author, May.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.

Hamm, Charles. 1991. The USA: Classical, industrial and invisible music. In The late romantic era: From the mid nineteenth century to World War I, edited by Jim Samson, 295-326. London: Macmillan.

Herskovits, Melville. 1966. The ancestry of the American Negro. In The New World Negro: Selected papers in Afro-American Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Marcondes, M., ed. 1998. Gottschalk, Louis Moreau. In Enciclopedia de musica brasileira, 2nd ed., edited by M. Marcondes, 345-346. Sao Paulo: PubliFolha.

Morse, Richard M. 1995. The multiverse of Latin American identity, c. 1920-c. 1970. In The Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell, 10:1-127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, John Storm. 1999a. Latin jazz: The first of the fusions, 1880s to today. New York: Schirmer Books.

--. 1999b. The Latin tinge: The impact of Latin American music on the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suya sing: A musical anthropology of an Amazonian people. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

GERARD BEHAGUE is Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at The University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in Latin America, with an emphasis on the musical traditions of Brazil. He is the founder and editor of the Latin American Music Review, which has been published by The University of Texas Press since 1980.