Ned Sublette (born 1951) is an American composer, musician, record producer, musicologist, historian, and author. Sublette studied Spanish Classical Guitar with Hector Garcia at the University of New Mexico and with Emilio Pujol in Spain. He studied composition with Kenneth Gaburo at the University of California, San Diego. He grew up in Portales, New Mexico, moved to New York City in 1976, and has worked with John Cage, LaMonte Young, Glenn Branca, David Van Tieghem, and Peter Gordon.
As a performer, Sublette is probably best known for fusing country-western and Afro-Caribbean styles including salsa, cumbia and rumba, [1] as reflected on the 1999 album "Cowboy Rumba", as well as his 2012 second album Kiss You Down South. He is also a leading scholar of Cuban music. His label Qbadisc releases Cuban music in the United States and he has released music by Latin musicians including Ritmo Oriental and Issac Delgado and has co-produced Public Radio International's "Afropop Worldwide" show.[ citation needed ]
During the 1980s, he led the Ned Sublette Band, which played country with Cuban stylings. His "Cowboy Rumba" reached number one on World Music Charts Europe during December, 1999. [2] In 2006, Willie Nelson released Sublette's song "Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other" in the wake of the success of Brokeback Mountain . [3] He also performed an experimental radio "mash-up" in 1984 for the "Art on the Beach" series. [4]
His book on Cuban music, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo ( ISBN 1-55652-516-8) was published in 2004. [5] The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, ( ISBN 9781556527302) was published in 2008 by Lawrence Hill Books. [6] The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans ( ISBN 9781556528248) published in 2009 by Lawrence Hill Books continues the history of New Orleans cultures and music.
Sublette is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2012 he was a Knight-Luce Fellow for Reporting on Global Religion at the University of Southern California. He did research in Angola, which resulted in a four-episode Hip Deep Angola radio series, produced for the public radio program Afropop Worldwide. [7]
Sublette starred in Vidas Perfectas, a Spanish-language version of Robert Ashley's 1983 "television opera" Perfect Lives, which premiered on stage at Irondale Theater, Brooklyn in December 2011, and which was to be shot for television in 2012. [8]
In October 2015, Sublette and his wife Constance published The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry ( ISBN 978-1-61374-820-6), a comprehensive history of slave trading in the southern colonies and states.
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated within African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to African Americans, at a time when "rocking, jazz based music ... [with a] heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands usually consisted of a piano, one or two guitars, bass, drums, one or more saxophones, and sometimes background vocalists. R&B lyrical themes often encapsulate the African-American history and experience of pain and the quest for freedom and joy, as well as triumphs and failures in terms of societal racism, oppression, relationships, economics, and aspirations.
The music of Cuba, including its instruments, performance, and dance, comprises a large set of unique traditions influenced mostly by west African and European music. Due to the syncretic nature of most of its genres, Cuban music is often considered one of the richest and most influential regional music in the world. For instance, the son cubano merges an adapted Spanish guitar (tres), melody, harmony, and lyrical traditions with Afro-Cuban percussion and rhythms. Almost nothing remains of the original native traditions, since the native population was exterminated in the 16th century.
Bolero is a genre of song which originated in eastern Cuba in the late 19th century as part of the trova tradition. Unrelated to the older Spanish dance of the same name, bolero is characterized by sophisticated lyrics dealing with love. It has been called the "quintessential Latin American romantic song of the twentieth century".
Son cubano is a genre of music and dance that originated in the highlands of eastern Cuba during the late 19th century. It is a syncretic genre that blends elements of Spanish and African origin. Among its fundamental Hispanic components are the vocal style, lyrical metre and the primacy of the tres, derived from the Spanish guitar. On the other hand, its characteristic clave rhythm, call and response structure and percussion section are all rooted in traditions of Bantu origin.
African popular music, like African traditional music, is vast and varied. Most contemporary genres of African popular music build on cross-pollination with Western popular music. Many genres of popular music like blues, jazz, salsa, zouk, and rumba derive to varying degrees on musical traditions from Africa, taken to the Americas by enslaved Africans. These rhythms and sounds have subsequently been adapted by newer genres like rock, and rhythm and blues. Likewise, African popular music has adopted elements, particularly the musical instruments and recording studio techniques of the Western music industry. The term does not refer to a specific style or sound but is used as a general term for African popular music.
Yuka is a secular Afro-Cuban musical tradition which involves drumming, singing and dancing. It was developed in western Cuba by Kongo slaves during colonial times. Yuka predates other Afro-Cuban genres of dance music like rumba and has survived in Kongo communities of Pinar del Río, specifically in El Guayabo and Barbacoa, San Luis. Since the 1940s, yuka performances have been recorded by researchers such as Harold Courlander and María Teresa Linares.
Ricardo Lemvo is a Congolese singer of Angolan descent who lives in Los Angeles, California. His music is a blend of African soukous, kizomba, samba and Cuban salsa.
Congolese rumba, also known as African rumba, is a dance music genre originating from the Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo. With its rhythms, melodies, and lyrics, Congolese rumba has gained global recognition and remains an integral part of African music heritage. In December 2021, it was added to the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.
"Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other" is a 1981 song by Latin country musician Ned Sublette featuring a "lilting West Texas waltz", widely known as the "gay cowboy song". The song satirizes stereotypes associated with cowboys and gay men, with lyrics relating western wear to leather subculture: "What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?"
"El manisero", known in English as "The Peanut Vendor", is a Cuban son-pregón composed by Moisés Simons. It has been recorded more than 160 times, sold over a million copies of the sheet music, and was the first million-selling 78 rpm single of Cuban music. In 1933, artist Len Lye created a short film by the same name.
Rumba is a secular genre of Cuban music involving dance, percussion, and song. It originated in the northern regions of Cuba, mainly in urban Havana and Matanzas, during the late 19th century. It is based on African music and dance traditions, namely Abakuá and yuka, as well as the Spanish-based coros de clave. According to Argeliers León, rumba is one of the major "genre complexes" of Cuban music, and the term rumba complex is now commonly used by musicologists. This complex encompasses the three traditional forms of rumba, as well as their contemporary derivatives and other minor styles.
The music of New Orleans assumes various styles of music which have often borrowed from earlier traditions. New Orleans, Louisiana, is especially known for its strong association with jazz music, universally considered to be the birthplace of the genre. The earliest form was dixieland, which has sometimes been called traditional jazz, 'New Orleans', and 'New Orleans jazz'. However, the tradition of jazz in New Orleans has taken on various forms that have either branched out from original dixieland or taken entirely different paths altogether. New Orleans has also been a prominent center of funk, home to some of the earliest funk bands such as The Meters.
Rita Aurelia Fulcida Montaner y Facenda, known as Rita Montaner, was a Cuban singer, pianist and actress. In Cuban parlance, she was a vedette, and was well known in Mexico City, Paris, Miami and New York, where she performed, filmed and recorded on numerous occasions. She was one of Cuba's most popular artists between the late 1920s and 1950s, renowned as Rita de Cuba. Though classically trained as a soprano for zarzuelas, her mark was made as a singer of Afro-Cuban salon songs including "The Peanut Vendor" and "Siboney".
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was an American historian who focused on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana, Africa, and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana, she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana, as well as the process of creolization, which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught, adding to scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures throughout the Americas.
Moisés Simons, was a leading Cuban composer, pianist, and orchestra leader. He was the composer of El Manisero which is considered by many to be the most famous piece of music created by a Cuban musician and has since been recorded by other musicians from around the world hundreds of times.
The catá or guagua is a Cuban percussion instrument which originated in the eastern region of the island. It is classified as a directly struck idiophone, traditionally made out of a hollowed tree trunk, which the player hits with wooden sticks or mallets. The resulting sound is dry and penetrating, similar to that of the claves, although with a different pitch. Of Congolese origin, it is an essential instrument in tumba francesa, yuka and some rumba ensembles.
Tresillo is a rhythmic pattern used in Latin American music. It is a more basic form of the rhythmic figure known as the habanera.
Kontradans or the French-Haitian Contredanse, is creolized dance music formed in the 18th century in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) that evolved from the English contra dance, or, which eventually spread throughout the Caribbean, Louisiana, Europe and the rest of the New World from the Creoles of Saint-Domingue.
José Rosario Oviedo, better known as Malanga, was a Cuban rumba dancer. He is considered one of the most famous columbia dancers and his mysterious death has been the subject of numerous essays, poems and songs, most notably "Malanga murió", written by Faustino Drake and performed by Arsenio Rodríguez amongst others.
Coros de clave were popular choral groups that emerged at the end of the 19th century in Havana and other Cuban cities. Their style was influenced by the orfeones which grew popular in northern Spain in the mid-19th century, and their popularization in the island was linked to the emancipation of African slaves in 1886. The common instrumentation of the coros featured a viola, claves, guitar, harp and jug bass.
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