A tambora is a bass drum that appears in various forms in various parts of Latin America. It is usually a double-headed drum, sometimes carried and sometimes fixed on a stand, sometimes with cymbals attached to provide for varying types of sound.
COUNTRY: Colombia, Dominican Republic, Peru
KEY GENRES: Cumbia, Merengue, Vallenato
COUNTRY: Dominican Republic
Over the last several decades another music of the people, bachata, a form of bolero-based Dominican blues, has developed in neighborhood bars and brothels. BACHATA musicians sing about pain, struggle and the troubles of daily life, most often with a hearty string of double entendres. The original Dominican bachata dance involves a lot of hip swaying and emphasizes the 1-2-3 and 5-6-7 counts of an eight count pattern, with the hips “popping” on beats 4 and 8.
See the King of BACHATA, Luis Vargas, performing a song called “Venom”
“The typical bachata group consists of five instruments: lead guitar, rhythm guitar, electric bass guitar, bongos and güira.The rhythm guitar is also known as a Segunda and serves the purpose of adding syncopation to the music. Bachata groups mainly play a simple style of bolero (lead guitar instrumentation using arpeggiated repetitive chords is a distinctive characteristic of bachata), but when they change to merengue based bachata, the percussionist will switch from bongo to a tambora drum. In the 1960s and 70s, maracas were used instead of güira. The change in the 1980s from maracas to themore versatile güira was made as bachata was becoming more dance oriented.”
A marimbula is a Latin/Caribbean percussion instrument that appears to be a cross between a cajon and a mbira (thumb piano). The marimbula has its roots in Africa but first appeared in Latin America in Cuba in the 19th century. Musicians used the thick metal strips that are attached to its wooden front to play bass notes in a developing genre of Afro-Cuban music known as changui. The instrument spread across the region and today appears in genres of music such as Dominican merengue and Mexico’s Son Jarocho.
COUNTRY: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico
KEY GENRES: Changui, Merengue, Son Jarocho
FEATURED ON: La Guacamaya (AATW: Latin America)
The Dominican Republic is known for Merengue, which evolved from Dominican folk to become infectious, mambo-inspired dance music. Dictator Rafael Trujillo, an avid Merengue dancer who, once of humble origins, had been barred from elite dance clubs, declared the genre as music of the people and required urban dance bands to include it in their shows. The basic rhythm– 1-2, 1-2 — is simple, straightforward and highly danceable. Let Joe and Sarah teach you all about it: “If you can walk, you can dance the Merengue.”
COUNTRY: The Dominican Republic
KEY INSTRUMENTS: Accordion, Bass, Guiro, Guitar, Saxophone, Tambora, Trumpet
SONGS ON THE AATW: LATIN AMERICA CD: Cachumbambe, Goodbye, We Are Happy
[mappress mapid=”16″ center=”-8, -60″ zoom=”3″]
The Dominican Republic is known for Merengue, which evolved from Dominican folk to become infectious, mambo-inspired dance music. Dictator Rafael Trujillo, an avid Merengue dancer who, once of humble origins, had been barred from elite dance clubs, declared the genre as music of the people and required urban dance bands to include it in their shows. The basic rhythm– 1-2, 1-2 — is simple, straightforward and highly dance-able.
“If you can walk you can dance the merengue….” So says Joe, the distinctly non-Dominican narrator of this merengue instructional video, and from the looks of it, he appears to be right. Merengue rhtythms are very straightforward — count one-two, one-two, step-close, step-close and you’ll get it.
In his YouTube video, Joe relates three important rules for dancing merengue:
1) “You must keep time with the music”, one step on each beat. “It’s just like marching.”
2) “You must move your hips” — “it’s not the moves you do but how you move that’s really important’
3) “walk through all patterns and keep moving your feet and hips”: DON’T STOP THE HIP ACTION!
And of course there’s unwritten rule number four:
“Keep your multicolored disco ball spinning at all times.”
In All Around This World class we dance the merengue and, no matter what, WE DO NOT STOP THE HIP ACTION!
The Dominican Republic is known for merengue, which evolved from Dominican folk to become infectious, mambo-inspired dance music. Dictator Rafael Trujillo, an avid merengue dancer who, once of humble origins, had been barred from elite dance clubs, declared merengue as music of the people and required urban dance bands to include it in their shows.
Over the last several decades another music of the people, bachata, a form of bolero-based Dominican blues, has developed in neighborhood bars. Bachata musicians sing about pain, struggle and the troubles of daily life, most often with a hearty string of double entendres.
More information:
Wikipedia on the music of the Dominican Republic | A history of merengue | “Propaganda Merengue”
Visit AATW’s Caribbean Musical Genres page, or explore these Dominican musical genres:
[mappress mapid=”16″ center=”18.9, -70″ zoom=”8″]
Spanish may be the official language of the Dominican Republic, but Dominicans have their own unique dialect with its own pronunciation and slang. For example,in Spanish a trash can is “bote de basura;” in Dominican its a “zafacón.” In Spanish, if you want call someone “wild” you’d say someone was “agresivo/-a.” In Domincan you’d say “guapo/-a.” If you go to the Domincan Republic and want to note a particularly aggressive trash can, you’d call it “un zafacón guapo.” And, according to DR1.com, you’d also say it really fast.
Wikipedia on Dominican Spanish
In 1492 Christopher Columbus landed on the eastern part island that’s now known as Hispaniola and laid the groundwork for Santo Domingo, the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. For the next four hundred years or so the Spanish held onto the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, even when the western third of the island became French-dominated Haiti. Soon after a brief bit of American rule (1916 to 1924, if you’re keeping track), a military man named Rafael Trujillo won a brutal presidential election with a very questionable 95% of the votes. (Miraculously, in some places Trujillo got thousands more votes than there were voters). Over the thirty years of his rule, before he was assassinated in 1961, Trujillo–known as “El Jefe”/”the Boss” and as the “Generalissimo”–renamed the capital Ciudad Trujillo, erecting a huge neon sign that read Dios y Trujillo/”God and Trujillo”, required churches to post the slogan “Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra”/”God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth” and eventually reversed the the order of the phrases, making it, “Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven.”
Despite his having some Haitian ancestry, Trujillo also struck out harshly against Haitians, making life very difficult for Haitian immigrants (and, for tens of thousands, making the end of their lives exceedingly premature). Simultaneously he opened the Dominican Republic’s doors to Caucasian immigrants and maintained decent relations with the U.S., the Catholic Church and some wealthy Dominicans, all of whom helped him grow the Dominican economy and maintain power.
After the Generalissimo’s demise and a several year civil war the Dominican Republic struggled through a number of leaders, eventually solidifying a democratic system. Despite losing about 1.3 million Dominicans to emigration from the ’60s through the ’80s (out of a country with a population of about six million), the Dominican Republic become economically and politically stable, thereby drawing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from its much poorer neighbor, Haiti. Today the Dominican Republic is known less for its dictatorial politics than for its beach resorts, merengue music, and the fact that the second-highest number of baseball players in Major League baseball, after U.S. nationals, hail from its shores.
More information:
Wikipedia on Trujillo: the archetype of a autocratic leader | Dominican emigration to the U.S–it’s substantial | What Dominican Major League Baseball players do on their winter break | Sugar: “the best baseball movie ever?” | A different kind of sugar…The Price of Sugar: a story of Dominican sugar plantations, Haitian illegal immigrants and the price people pay to keep our food sweet
We sing “We Are Happy” as our hello song at the beginning of every All Around This World Latin America class, changing the greeting to match the featured country of the week. “We Are Happy” didn’t start as a Spanish hello song, but instead as a mashup of two songs the Abayudaya of Uganda sing to greet important visitors to Nabugoye Hill, which is a small area a few miles outside of the Eastern Ugandan city of Mbale. The Abayudya of Uganda are a small community of about 500 Luganda-speaking Bagandans who have been practicing Judaism for over 80 years. Abayudaya community leaders Rabbi Gershom Sizomu and his brother JJ Keki wrote the two greeting songs and led the community in singing them for Jay when he first visited in late 1999.
Country Uganda (original)/ On CD:Dominican Republic
Language: this “Spanish hello song” was originally in English, Luganda and Hebrew
Genre on CD: Merengue
Instruments on CD: Piano, Trombone, Trumpet
[wpspoiler name=”Lyrics of All Around This World: Latin America version” open=”true” style=”aatw-video”]Ooh, bop bop bop! Ooh, bop bop bop.
We are happy, we are happy on this day.
¡Hola everybody! (“Hello” in Spanish),
Bom dia everybody! (“Good morning” in Portuguese),
Buiti binafi everybody! (“Good morning” in Garifuna),
Imaynallam everybody! (“How are things going?” in Quechua)[/wpspoiler]
Vocals: Jay Sand
Piano/Keyboard: John Stengel
Drums/percussion: Francois Zayas
Instrumental engineering: Mark Wolfe, AudioMind, Philadelphia
Vocals engineered by Erich Miller, Philadelphia
You can listen to the original verson of "We Are Happy" on the Smithsonian Folkways release, Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda.
"We Are Happy" and "Hello" © Gershom Sizomu and J.J. Keki, arrangement by Jay Sand with permission, Instrumental arrangement by Arturo Stable
