Clave (rhythm) - in Non-Cuban Music - in African-American Music - Tresillo Foundation

Tresillo Foundation

is an absence of drums and complex polyrhythms in early blues; there is, in addition, the very specific absence of . . . timeline patterns in virtually all early twentieth-century U.S. African American music, except in cases where these patterns were borrowed from Puerto Rico or Cuba. Only in New Orleans genres does a hint of simple timeline patterns . . . These do not function in the same way as African timeline patterns—Kubik (1999: 51)

While key patterns were absent from early twentieth-century African American music, tresillo, the first half of clave, has been present since at least the mid nineteenth century. Wynton Marsalis considers tresillo to be the "clave" of New Orleans. The use of tresillo and its variant, the habanera rhythm, in African American music was reinforced by consecutive waves of Cuban popular music, beginning with the habanera (Cuban contradanza). 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. Afro-Cuban music became the conduit through which African American music was "re-Africanized," through the adoption of figures like clave and instruments like the conga drum, bongos, maracas and claves.