A Dominican tambora is a bass drum that appears in various forms in various parts of Latin America but which is especially essential to merengue.
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. The most traditional tamboras are converted rum barrels. The tambora in this video probably didn’t have a previous life as a rum barrel, though we have no cause to complain.
Johnny Ventura, born as Juan de Dios, is a preeminent Dominican singer and band leader who Dominicans know for bringing American R&B and rock to merengue.
His greatest hit, which you’ll absolutely enjoy in this video, is an ode to the patacón, a flattened, fried green plaintain you’ll find in many Caribbean nations’ cuisine. Johnny Ventura is a popular musician to be sure, but he didn’t stop making friends with his tunes. From 1998 to 2002 Ventura was mayor of Santo Domingo, the DR’s capital and the largest city in the Caribbean.
This week our All Around This World online class gets quite a treat — we visit the Dominican Republic. The “D.R.” is a nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Despite having its own challenge, when the Dominican Republic compares itself to the neighbor on its Western border–which it seems to do often– it is proud of its relative prosperity and stability. As we’ll find when we look at the history of the Dominican Republic, those things have come as the result of great struggle, much of it at the hands of the famed “Generalissimo,” Rafael Trujillo. Over the thirty years of his rule, Trujillo–known as “El Jefe”/”the Boss” –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.” Today the Dominican Republic is known less for its dictatorial politics than for its beach resorts, merengue music (more about that through the week).
Merengue music evolved from Dominican folk music to become an infectious, mambo-inspired genre, inextricably bound to the merengue dance.
While the basic rhythm– 1-2, 1-2 — inspires the dancer to march, the real magic of merengue comes in the ways dancer keep constantly moving their hips. The Dominican Republic’s “Generalissimo” Rafael Trujillo, an avid merengue dancer who, once of humble origins, had been barred from elite dance clubs, declared merengue music as the music of the people and forcefully required urban dance bands to include it in their shows. Watch this video and dance along.
Luis Vargas is one of greatest stars of Dominican bachata, a form of bolero-based Dominican blues.
Bachata musicians sing about pain, struggle and the troubles of daily life, most often with a strong string of double entendres. Luis Vargas has been performing bachata since the early 1980s but only rose to the forefront of the Dominican music scene when he started playing bachata with an electric guitar. He and former-bandmate, bachata star Anthony Santos, have harbored a legendary rivalry; Santos is the more commercially successful artist and generally ignored Vargas, though Vargas hasn’t been shy about acknowledging Santos in some lyrical twists and turns on his albums. Enjoy this video as you ask the eternal question: “Can’t we all just get along?
