A Clave Song

[Henry Gallagher]

Ittook me the best part of a year practising and performing on pretty much a weekly basis with bands that played Cuban music to get totally comfortable hearing and feeling clave. They were very patient with me, but I got a lot of dirty looks (and remarks) along the way from percussionists when I screwed up, and I screwed up often. Hopefully, this article will provide you with some shortcuts so you can get things together quicker than I did.

Okay, back to the elusive Mr Clave. So how do you chase the invisible man? You track his footprints and watch how the foliage around him moves. In short, you look for the effect he has on the environment around him.

But your understanding of the music will deepen and your clave sense will become more sophisticated if you take things further and listen for more detail. Some instruments play very freely (bongos), or clave-neutral patterns (maracas, guiro, bass). But the following patterns are clearly based on clave, and are well worth learning. Practise tapping or singing them against clave (and then add the pulse).

Montuno playing is stuffed full of variation and syncopation, but in its purest form it has the clear clave characteristic that there are downbeats on the 2-side only. The majority of the notes in the pattern are offbeats, apart from the first two, which hit one and two on the 2-side only.

Very well written! Will you put out another article showing how the instruments change their basic patterns for rumba clave? Is it safe to assume that the basic patterns may be reversed for 3/2 groves? Again, thank you for a great explanation.

Hey man.. very use article. I dance salsa and not a musician. The music notation are kinda difficult to follow. Maybe some sort of examples with audio would be really helpful or maybe an explanation in terms of counts and half beats.

Check out this site:

They have a great little app that has sliders for all the rhythm patterns given here, plus maracas, guiro, bass and spoken count. You can start with just clave and gradually dial in combinations of the others to get a feel for what they sound like individually and how they interlock. Then try the same exercise with the clave channel muted to start weaning yourself off having to hear the clave played.

Hi Jason, already have this but many thanks for recommending this. Your article was very useful and it was interesting that you mentioned about being able to play other instruments too. I have noticed that Cuban musicians are pretty good and have a good understanding of other instruments other than their initial chosen one. I have found it invaluable to learn some of the many percussion instruments to appreciate how the overall sound is achieved (I am a guitarist but opening myself up to the percussive side, good learning curve). Best regards.

The clave (/ˈklɑːveɪ, kleɪv/; .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-smallfont-size:85%.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-smallfont-size:100%Spanish: [ˈklaβe])[1] is a rhythmic pattern used as a tool for temporal organization in Brazilian and Cuban music. In Spanish, clave literally means key, clef, code, or keystone. It is present in a variety of genres such as Abaku music, rumba, conga, son, mambo, salsa, songo, timba and Afro-Cuban jazz. The five-stroke clave pattern represents the structural core of many Cuban rhythms.[2] The study of rhythmic methodology, especially in the context of Afro-Cuban music, and how it influences the mood of a pieceis known as clave theory.

The clave pattern originated in sub-Saharan African music traditions, where it serves essentially the same function as it does in Cuba. In ethnomusicology, clave is also known as a key pattern,[3][4] guide pattern,[5] phrasing referent,[6] timeline,[7] or asymmetrical timeline.[8] The clave pattern is also found in the African diaspora music of Haitian Vodou drumming, Afro-Brazilian music, African-American music, Louisiana Voodoo drumming, and Afro-Uruguayan music (candombe). The clave pattern (or hambone, as it is known in the United States) is used in North American popular music as a rhythmic motif or simply a form of rhythmic decoration.

Clave is a Spanish word meaning 'code,' 'key,' as in key to a mystery or puzzle, or 'keystone,' the wedge-shaped stone in the center of an arch that ties the other stones together. The rhythm also gave the name to the claves Afro-Cuban musical instrument which consists of a pair of hardwood sticks.[10]

Both clave patterns are used in rumba. What we now call son clave (also known as Havana clave) used to be the key pattern played in Havana-style yamb and guaguanc.[19] Some Havana-based rumba groups still use son clave for yamb.[c] The musical genre known as son probably adopted the clave pattern from rumba when it migrated from eastern Cuba to Havana at the beginning of the 20th century.

First is the set of concepts and related terminology, which were created and developed in Cuban popular music from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. In Popular Cuban Music, Emilio Grenet defines in general terms how the duple-pulse clave pattern guides all members of the music ensemble.[21] An important Cuban contribution to this branch of music theory is the concept of the clave as a musical period, which has two rhythmically opposing halves. The first half is antecedent and moving, and the second half is consequent and grounded.

The second branch comes from the ethnomusicological studies of sub-Saharan African rhythm. In 1959, Arthur Morris Jones published his landmark work Studies in African Music, in which he identified the triple-pulse clave as the guide pattern for many pieces of music from ethnic groups across Africa.[22] An important contribution of ethnomusicology to clave theory is the understanding that the clave matrix is generated by cross-rhythm.[23]

Only in the last couple of decades have the three branches of clave theory begun to reconcile their shared and conflicting concepts. Thanks to the popularity of Cuban-based music and the vast amount of educational material available on the subject, many musicians today have a basic understanding of clave. Contemporary books that deal with clave, share a certain fundamental understanding of what clave means.[failed verification]

In addition to these three branches of theory, clave has in recent years been thoroughly analyzed mathematically. The structure of clave can be understood in terms of cross-rhythmic ratios, above all, three-against-two (3:2).[26] Godfried Toussaint, a Research Professor of Computer Science, has published a book and several papers on the mathematical analysis of clave and related African bell patterns.[27][28] Toussaint uses geometry[25] and the Euclidean algorithm as a means of exploring the significance of clave.[29]

The most common clave pattern used in Cuban popular music is called the son clave, named after the Cuban musical genre of the same name. Clave is the basic period, composed of two rhythmically opposed cells, one antecedent and the other consequent.[d][e] Clave was initially written in two measures of 2

4 in Cuban music.[31] When written this way, each cell or clave half is represented within a single measure.

In Cuban popular music, the first three strokes of son clave are also known collectively as tresillo, a Spanish word meaning triplet i.e. three almost equal beats in the same time as two main beats. However, in the vernacular of Cuban popular music, the term refers to the figure shown here.

The other main clave pattern is the rumba clave. Rumba clave is the key pattern used in Cuban rumba. The use of the triple-pulse form of the rumba clave in Cuba can be traced back to the iron bell (ekn) part in abaku music. The form of rumba known as columbia is culturally and musically connected with abaku which is an Afro Cuban cabildo that descends from the Kalabari of Cameroon. Columbia also uses this pattern. Sometimes 12

8 rumba clave is clapped in the accompaniment of Cuban bat drums. The 4

4 form of rumba clave is used in yamb, guaguanc and popular music.

There is some debate as to how the 4

4 rumba clave should be notated for guaguanc and yamb. In actual practice, the third stroke on the three-side and the first stroke on the two-side often fall in rhythmic positions that do not fit neatly into music notation.[42] Triple-pulse strokes can be substituted for duple-pulse strokes. Also, the clave strokes are sometimes displaced in such a way that they don't fall within either a triple-pulse or duple-pulse "grid".[43] Therefore, many variations are possible.

The ethnomusicologist A.M. Jones observes that what we call son clave, rumba clave, and the standard pattern are the most commonly used key patterns (also called bell patterns, timeline patterns and guide patterns) in Sub-Saharan African music traditions and he considers all three to be basically the same pattern.[46] Clearly, they are all expressions of the same rhythmic principles. The three key patterns are found within a large geographic belt extending from Mali in northwest Africa to Mozambique in southeast Africa.[47]

When one hears triple-pulse rhythms in Latin jazz the percussion is most often replicating the Afro-Cuban rhythm bemb. The standard bell is the key pattern used in bemb and so with compositions based on triple-pulse rhythms, it is the seven-stroke bell, rather than the five-stroke clave that is the most familiar to jazz musicians. Consequently, some North American musicians refer to the triple-pulse standard pattern as "6

8 clave".[44][45]

Triple-pulse son clave is the least common form of clave used in Cuban music. It is, however, found across an enormously vast area of sub-Saharan Africa. The first published example (1920) of this pattern identified it as a hand-clap part accompanying a song from Mozambique.[51]

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