Cool Stuff 2: Black America and South America

For this blog, I researched on some articles regarding various interesting music styles in South America and the Black America.

1: One interesting thing about South America was the Huayno (called as Waynu in Quechua by the Peruvian Andean people) for a popular genre of music and dance. Apart from Peru, this music is common in Bolivia, Argentina, and also  Chile. This music and dance is practiced by an ethnic group of people called the Quechua people. This was basically started during the colonial period in Peru and is a combination of rural traditional folk and urban popular dance music. The origin of this style of music is from the pre-colonial Andes, especially from the Incan Empire.

The dance of this genre involves a man who invites a women to dance with him. This action is called “waynukuy” (the act of inviting the women to dance waynu) in Quechua. He then puts his handkerchief on her shoulder and they walk together to where they need to dance. Their dance begins with a vigorous stamping and eventually the man follows the women by dancing in a rhythm with the music.

The music is usually sung in high pitches and is accompanied by various instruments including Quena (flute), Harp, Siku (Panpipe), Accordion, Saxophone, Charango, lute, Violin, Guitar, Mandolin.

Quena

Siku

All Andean Musical Instruments

Huayno Dance

2: As we have already seen a long documentary on the role of women in the blues during class, I found another interesting personality named Sam Myers in the article “All about blues music”. As a kid of seven, his cataracts made him functionally blind. He was born in Mississippi and sooner was recognized as a musically talented kid and his school in Chicago gave him a scholarship to study trumpet and the drums. He soon began working as a drummer with Elmore James in Chicago. During the 60s and 70s, he began his own band named “the chitlin’ circuit” on the Southern club scene. He was well known for this full-throated voice and some memorable harp solos. Also, for nearly 20 years, he was a popular vocalist for the “Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets”. Well recognized by the people during that time, Myers and the Rockets had won nine “W. C. Handy Awards”, including 3 from the category Band of the Year and the Best Traditional Album of the Year in 2004. And in 2005, Myers’s traditional Coming from the Old School was nominated as the Traditional Blues Album of the Year.

Sam Meyers's Coming from Old School

3: As we know Salsa is a very popular genre of dance music which is a basic fusion of Spanish Cancion (Cancion meaning popular genre of Latin American music, especially from Cuba) and guitar and Afro-Cuban percussion  with North American music styles like Jazz. Puerto Ricans dominated the first Salsa bands and then the music spread across Colombia and the rest of America. In Spanish, Salsa means “sauce”. Later in the 20^th century, salsa was described as word with “vivid associations”. In New York, Puerto Ricans and Cubans associated this word for “swing and soul music”. On a common term is was denoted as term for “hot” and wild dance moves that depict the culture of Latin America as a whole.

The most commonly used instruments used to accompany this style of music are Congas, Bongos, Bass, Piano, Tres. Some hand held percussion instruments include claves, guiro or maracas are played by the singers. They also use trumpets and thrombones are often used in Salsa.

Congas

Bongos

Tres

Claves

Guiro

Salsa Music Band