2011 – 2012

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Cubanoson

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Cubanoson • njpac.org

CONTENTSOn StageMusic with the power to move

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In the SpotlightThis bandleader carries a badge

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Did You Know?The roots of Afro-Cuban music

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Music TalkWords associated with Afro-Cuban jazz

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In the ClassroomTeaching Science Through Music and other activities

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More ResourcesRelated readings and other media

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FoundationKid Power!Through energy efficiency and conservation, kids can help preserve our planet’s rich natural resources and promote a healthy environment.

TIP OF THE DAY

Shut down to save up It is entertaining to listen to music (like the sounds of Cubanoson) on your computer or electronic devices. To minimize the amount of electricity they require to function, turn them off when you leave a room. Made possible through the generosity of the PSEG Foundation.

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The New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) Arts Education Department presents the 15th season of the Verizon Passport to Culture SchoolTime Performance Series.

Teacher’s Resource GuideThis resource guide will help you prepare your class for an enriching experience at our SchoolTime Performance. The guide provides discussion ideas, activities and reading resources that can promote arts literacy in your classroom. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this guide to any class attending a 2011-2012 SchoolTime Performance (all other rights reserved). You can find additional resources online at http://tiny.cc/njpacguides

NJPAC Arts EducationAt NJPAC, our mission is to join with parents, teachers and community to cultivate an appreciation of the arts in all children of New Jersey. We believe the arts provide an effective means of knowing and learning that helps children find the self-esteem, poise and confidence they need to succeed in every facet of life. Our innovative programs are designed to engage the artist in every child:

In-School Residencies Bring the joy of dance, music and theater directly into your classroom with teaching artists who create stimulating performing arts experiences that engage students’ imaginations and encourage their creative self-expression.

SchoolTime and FamilyTime Performances Open your students’ eyes to the worlds of music, dance, storytelling, theater, and puppetry through professional stage productions.

Arts Training Programs Students express themselves through after-school study of acting, dance, instrumental music, vocal music, and musical theater. Teaching artists with professional performing arts experience mentor the students at NJPAC’s Center for Arts Education.

visit NJPAC.ORGFind additional resources online at http://tiny.cc/njpacguides

On Stage

Roberto Rodriguez, Jr., who plays lead trumpet and is the band’s musical director, is a second-generation performer—his father played trumpet with the salsa supergroup The Fania All-Stars. In fact, the younger Rodriguez also has appeared with the All-Stars in recent years.

The tres player, Junior Rivera, has been performing in Latin bands for years. He found his biggest audience, however, when he was cast as famed guitarist Yomo Toro in the Marc Anthony-Jennifer Lopez movie El Cantante (2006), a biodrama about salsa star Hector Lavoe.

In addition to playing selections from its two CDs, Cubanoson will perform a guajira, or rural Cuban song, and a classic tune called Quien Sera, which the band will perform in Spanish and English. During that number, the brass section will demonstrate its improvisational talents, executing short solos as the musicians pass along the spotlight like a baton in a relay race.

As Leonel “Papo” Ortega and Cubanoson take the stage at NJPAC, they will play with a singular purpose: to get people moving.

Though the band members are veteran musicians, Ortega says, “We’re not there to show we’re geniuses. We put on a fun show.” The goal, he adds, is to energize audiences so even those “who can’t dance will at least sway to the music.”

Ortega formed Cubanoson to create a particular sound that is a bit different than a listener would typically hear in salsa. To get his unique sound, he added a trombone to round out the sound of the trumpets in a contemporary Latin or salsa band and uses two percussionists instead of the customary three.

In the band, Ortega takes piano and lead vocals; there is a standup bass player and a musician who plays the tres, an acoustic guitar that has three sets of two strings, for a distinctive ringing sound. Cubanoson also has two vocalists.

Music with the power to move By Marty Lipp

Though there will be no dance floor for Cubanoson’s performance, the insistent rhythms will undoubtedly get toes tapping.

“It’s really gratifying to get up on stage and make people dance,” Ortega says. “If they clap, even better, if they give you a standing ovation, even better.”

Marty Lipp has been writing and teaching about music from around the world for more than 20 years. He has written for The Star-Ledger, The New York Times, Newsday, Playbill and the Huffington Post. He lives in Maplewood, N.J.

The Cubanoson orchestra plays during a dance party at NJPAC. 3Cubanoson • njpac.org

For more about Cubanoson, go to cubanoson.com.

Leonel “Papo” Ortega showed musical promise from an early age. At 4 years old, until he was 11, he was classically trained on the piano. Before long he jumped to popular music, which meant salsa.

During the 1960s and 1970s, going out to a dance club often included listening to a live band, and Ortega began playing with a local band that often used high-school students to fill out its lineup. He recalls the first time he got people dancing. He was 15 years old and had been asked to play with a large, professional band from the area. It was a crowded dance at St. Augustine’s Church in Union City, and the bandleader suddenly turned to Ortega and asked him to take a solo on the 12-string tres guitar on the old Cuban song Guantanamera.

Despite his initial shock, Ortega, for the first time, experienced the thrill of a room full of dancers moving to the music he was making on stage. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world,” he remembers.

For many years Ortega played piano with different bands throughout the East Coast, whether it was merengue from the Dominican Republic or salsa, and drew heavily from the Afro-Cuban music that he heard as a child. Eventually, Ortega grew dissatisfied with the direction salsa was taking. He says “the sound was a little shocking, a little brusque.” He began to create a group of his own that had the sound he was imagining.

It would be danceable first and foremost, and it would be retro at heart, like the rootsy vibe of veteran performers such as musician and bandleader Johnny Pacheco and the long-established Cuban band La Sonora Matancera. But, Ortega says, “I wanted to add that New York sound to make it a little more contemporary.”

He pulled together like-minded musicians and Cubanoson was born in 2005. Since its inception, the group has recorded two CDs and has played at clubs, private parties and community festivals.

In parallel with his musical career, Ortega also became a police officer and is now a lieutenant in the Union City Police Department. Why would someone with a regular “day job” still continue to work as a musician?

“I do it for the love of it,” Ortega says. “But when the first note starts … it’s about the music, it’s about having fun.”

—M.L.

In the Spotlight

This bandleader carries a badge

Cubanoson • njpac.org4

Cubanoson founder and lead vocalist Leonel “Papo” Ortega also plays piano and keyboards.

Although the decades-long embargo of Cuba by the U.S. has restrained cultural crossover, the island-nation’s music has had a huge impact on American music. Afro-Cuban music is a melting pot, composed of elements from Africa and Europe and even from the native Americans who lived in Cuba prior to the island’s colonization.

The Spanish slave trade from 1522 through the 1880s brought so many Africans to Cuba that the population was almost half African by the 1840s. While the slaves were not allowed to practice African religions or celebrate their cultures, they combined Christianity with important aspects of their African heritage, principally from the Yoruba religion of western Africa. For example, Changó—the Yoruban Orisha, or deity of war, fire and passion—was twinned with the Christian St. Barbara in the Cuban religion called Santería. (African slaves also created the Voodoo religion in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil.)

Afro-Cuban religious music seeped into the island’s popular music, such as rumba, which was often played by dock workers beating out rhythms on cargo crates during their breaks. The country’s ruling class of Spanish colonialists brought their own musical heritage to the country’s sense of melody and instrumentation, for example, the Spanish guitar.

The music called son developed in the eastern countryside of the Oriente province in the late 19th century. It was initially perceived as music exclusively for poor blacks but eventually gained favor among the wealthier white population. It arrived in Havana around 1910, where it was performed by six-piece ensembles called sextetos.

The advent of radio popularized son and the music began to swing a bit harder in the late 1920s as it added the trumpet to create seven-piece septetos. It also became the music played prominently in nightclubs in Havana, an international tourist destination.

The basic format of the son stayed consistent: an opening verse followed by a section called the montuno, where the lead singer improvises as a chorus answers him.

The blind bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez was one of the most influential figures in Afro-Cuban music. Beginning in Cuba in the 1940s, he expanded the son style, giving it more drive with additional instruments, including piano and congas, and incorporating an improvisational instrumental section to the montuno, called a descarga.

Rodriguez helped seed the growth of Latin jazz in America, eventually moving to New York in 1953. A few American jazz big bands then began to experiment with Cuban rhythms, most notably trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who collaborated with the Cuban-born percussionist Chano Pozo. As jazz began to steer away from dance-oriented music, the void was filled somewhat by mambo, played by Latin big bands such as Machito and his Afro-Cubans or those led by percussionist Tito Puente.

With the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba in 1959, there came a U.S. embargo, so the direct influence of Cuban music in the United States came to an abrupt halt. However, the Afro-Cuban music on both sides of the Cold War continued to develop separately.

In the 1960s, rock music eclipsed the Latin big bands among Anglo fans. The music continued to be popular with Latino audiences, even as it sprung offshoots such as the boogaloo, which fused Afro-Cuban with soul music. During the 1970s, the record label Fania helped popularize what was beginning to be called salsa, though its audience was predominately Latin Americans of various nationalities. The high level of musicianship of early salsa began to be overshadowed by music led by pop singers, which became known as salsa romantica.

The hybrid sound of reggaeton took over Latin clubs for a time in the early 2000s, as did merengue from the Dominican Republic in thel’90s, but Afro-Cuban music has always had a core base of fans. The music entered the mainstream and saw a surprising return to its roots with the success of the 1999 documentary The Buena Vista Social Club and albums featuring veteran musicians who were assembled to revisit their “old-fashioned” style of Cuban music.

—M.L.

Did You Know?

The roots of Afro-Cuban music

Cubanoson • njpac.org 5

Three of the key players of Cubanoson: from left, trom-bonist Jose Leonardo Freire, Leonel “Papo” Ortega and lead trumpeter and musical director Roberto Rodriguez, Jr.

salsa — the name given to Afro-Cuban music in the United States during the 1970s. In Spanish, the word means “sauce.”

Santería — a religion derived from African religions brought to Cuba by slaves, who combined their beliefs in African deities with Christian saints. It is similar to Voudou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil.

son — a style of dance music from Cuba that melded Spanish and African elements. The son began to take shape in the latter half of the 19th century in Cuba’s Oriente province, and over the years took many forms, including what became known as salsa in the 1970s.

Yoruba — an ancient religion and language based in western Africa that was brought to the Americas by slaves. It is the ancestor of several Latin American religions, including Santería in Cuba, Voudou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil.

clave — the Spanish word for “key,” it is the basic rhythm underlying Afro-Cuban music. Also, the two round sticks that are used to beat out the rhythm.

coro/pregón — The call-and-response between the lead singer, or pregonero, and a chorus, or coro. In salsa, this takes place during the improvisational section called the montuno.

decima — a 10-line set of poetry put to music, found in Cuban son and rumba.

descarga — the Spanish word for “unloading,” it refers to an instrumental jam session.

groove — a stylish manner of playing standards or jazz, especially music with an insistent rhythm.

mambo — Afro-Cuban big-band dance music that became popular in the Americas in the 1940s and 1950s. It took elements of European instrumentation and harmony, as well as many features of Cuban son.

merengue — a popular kind of dance music from the Dominican Republic.

montuno — the second section of a son, where the singer, or sonero, improvises while answered by a chorus that sings the song’s refrain.

percussion — drums and other instruments that are played with hands or sticks to beat out the rhythms of a song.

polyrhythm — the interplay of two rhythms that, though different, work together.

reggaeton — a form of dance music from Puerto Rico, characterized by a fusion of Latin rhythms, dancehall and hip-hop or rap.

rumba — Cuban music that has drumming, dancing and call-and-response singing and contains African and Spanish roots. There are three styles of rumba: yambú, guaguancó and columbia.

Music Talk

Words associated with Afro-Cuban jazz

Junior Rivera, left, plays tres guitar for Cubanoson and Ruben Rodriguez is the band’s standup bassist.Cubanoson • njpac.org6

Cubanoson • njpac.org

Before the Performance Teaching Science Through Music (Grades 6-12) By Sharon J. Sherman, Ed.D.

Imagination and intuition drive the work of artists, and skill and discipline turn their ideas and notions into meaningful, quality creations. A similar case can be made for the work of the scientist who experiences the richness and excitement of knowing about the world and, with skill and discipline, understands how it functions.

According to the NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards, students in the middle grades should understand science explanations, generate scientific evidence through active investigation, reflect on scientific knowledge, and participate productively in science. These four practices represent the knowledge and reasoning skills all students must acquire to be proficient in science.

Here is an activity, incorporating music, that can help students strengthen their understanding of how scientific knowledge builds upon itself over time. It enables students to monitor their own thinking as they refine their comprehension of science concepts (5.1.8.C.1).

Have students in the middle grades predict the acidity of precipitation in the local area. After collecting data and graphing amounts of precipitation, pH levels and weather conditions, they can provide scientific evidence to support or refute their predictions.

After this initial exercise, your students can investigate the effects of rain on our environment. For example, many marble statues throughout the world are being ruined by acid rain. Have students search the Internet for examples.

They can create slideshows documenting the effects of acid rain on the environment and set them to music. Also ask them to research a poem on environmental responsibility and write an anthem. Performing the compositions for their peers enables students to analyze and critique their work together.

High school students studying earth systems science learn that natural ecosystems provide an array of basic functions that affects humans. In class, there is instructional focus on the role of human beings as part of the earth’s ecosystem. Human activities can alter equilibrium in ecosystems, either on purpose or inadvertently. Students can create podcasts set to music that provide examples and demonstrate understanding of this concept.

Sharon J. Sherman, Ed.D., is Dean of the School of Education and Professor of Teacher Education at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J.

The Teaching Science Through the Arts content of this guide is made possible through the generous support of Roche.

After the Performance1. Using the book Jazz A B Z by Wynton Marsalis and illustrated by Paul Rogers (Candlewick Press, 2005) as a guide, have students choose a Latin jazz musician for a mini-biography. Ask them to create an alliterative poem about that musician’s music, life or work, as employed in the book. (For example, “Papo’s performances are popular at parties.”) (1.1, 1.2, 1.3)

2. March is national “Music in Our Schools Month.” Ask students to write a class song with an Afro-Cuban beat. Then plan to make a video by listing the shots to be staged and finding costumes, instruments (or common objects that create rhythm) and props. Older students can participate in the editing of the video. (1.1, 1.3)

*Numbers indicate the NJ Core Curriculum Content Standard(s) supported by the activity.

1. Ask students to write on this topic: “If archaeologists found your music collection in 100,000 years, what would they be able to learn about you?” What would the format (MP3), language, rhythms, and words say about who you are? Have students “program” music to their life stories by organizing their text and musical selections with Thinkfinity’s Interactive Online Soundtrack, found under “In the Classroom/Student Interactives” on Verizon’s Thinkfinity.org. (1.1, 1.4) *

2. Cubanoson founder Leonel “Papo” Ortega grew up in Hudson County, New Jersey. He heard Cuban music at home, but what other kinds of music would he have heard in his youth during the 1960s and 1970s? Where would he have heard it? Have students use magazine photos to create a bulletin-board tree of musical artists from that period and the style of music they performed. Include other famous musicians from Hudson County, such as Paquito D’Rivera and Frank Sinatra. Post labels about each artist in English and Spanish. (1.1, 1.2)

visit NJPAC.ORGFind additional resources online at http://tiny.cc/njpacguides

In the Classroom

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8 Cubanoson • njpac.org

William J. Marino.……............................…………………………………………………………………….Chairman John Schreiber.............…....……..................…………………………………..President & Chief Executive Officer Sandra Bowie………….………........................……………………………………..Vice President of Arts Education Sanaz Hojreh.……………......................….……..………………………..Assistant Vice President of Arts Education Verushka Wray Spirito.............….………............………….........................…Associate Director of Performances Chamie Baldwin Graff.............….………............……………................…Director of Marketing, Arts Education Caitlin Evans Jones…………..........................……….………………………….…Director of In-School Programs Jeff Griglak......………......................……………….………………………………..……..Director of Arts Training Constance Collins........…….….........................Administrative Assistant and Office Manager for Arts EducationLaura Ingoglia…………........................….……………………....…………....Editor of Teacher’s Resource Guides Linda Fowler..…………........................…….…………………....…………....Editor of Teacher’s Resource Guides

Writer: Marty Lipp

Editor: Linda Fowler

Design: Pierre Sardain 66 Creative, Inc. 66Creative.com

NJPAC Guest Reader: Joshua Balber

NJPAC Teacher’s Resource Guide Review Committee: Judith Israel Mary Lou Johnston Amy Tenzer

Photo on page 3 and lead photo on page 4 by Marty Lipp

Copyright © 2012 New Jersey Performing Arts Center All Rights Reserved

One Center Street Newark, New Jersey 07102Administration: 973 642-8989Arts Education Hotline: 973 353-8009artseducation@njpac.org

NJPAC wishes to thank Cubanoson for assistance in preparing this guide.

More Resources AcknowledgmentsCDs

Recordando a Cuba. Cubanoson, 2006.

Rumba Nueva. Cubanoson, 2010.

Mi Tierra. Gloria Estefan, Sony, 1993.

Books for Students

Asirvatham, Sandy. The History of Jazz. Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.

Monceaux, Morgan. Jazz: My Music, My People. Knopf, 1994.

Books for Teachers

Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin-American Music on the United States. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Morales, Ed. The Latin Beat: The Rhythms and Roots of Latin Music, from Bossa Nova to Salsa and Beyond. Da Capo, 2003.

DVDs

Buena Vista Social Club. Lions Gate, 2001.

Websites

Cubanoson.com.

Thinkfinity.org. National Geographic’s world music website is an arts integrated resource of Verizon’s Thinkfinity.org.

as of 9/22/11 NJPAC Arts Education programs are made possible by the generosity of: Bank of America, The Arts Education Endowment Fund in Honor of Raymond G. Chambers, Leon & Toby Cooperman, The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey, Amy C. Liss, McCrane Foundation, Merck Company Foundation, Albert & Katharine Merck, The Prudential Foundation, PSEG Foundation, Marian & David Rocker, The Sagner Family Foundation, The Star-Ledger/Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Verizon, Victoria Foundation, Wells Fargo, John & Suzanne Willian / Goldman Sachs Gives and The Women’s Association of NJPAC.

Additional support is provided by: Advance Realty, C.R. Bard Foundation, Becton Dickinson and Company, The Frank and Lydia Bergen Foundation, Allen & Joan Bildner, Bloomberg, Ann & Stan Borowiec, Jennifer Chalsty, Chase, Edison Properties, Veronica Goldberg Foundation, Meg & Howard Jacobs, Johnson & Johnson, The MCJ Amelior Foundation, The New Jersey Cultural Trust, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Novo Nordisk, Panasonic Corporation of North America, Pechter Foundation, PNC Foundation on behalf of the PNC Grow Up Great program, The Provident Bank Foundation, E. Franklin Robbins Charitable Trust, Roche, TD Charitable Foundation and The Blanche M. & George L. Watts Mountainside Community Foundation.

Find additional resources online at http://tiny.cc/njpacguides or scan the QR code displayed here.

For even more arts integration resources, please go to Thinkfinity.org, the Verizon Foundation’s signature digital learning platform, designed to improve educational and literacy achievement.

visit NJPAC.ORG