Mozambique listening

Here is a YouTube playlist of the tracks cited in the Mozambique variations post, plus a few things:



After the break I'll give some brief notes on some of the tracks:

Conga to Mozambique

Let me say up front that I'm always a little paranoid about venturing into Afro-Cuban music on the blog— I don't have a lot of field experience playing it with knowledgeable people, and have had to get my information on it mainly by inferior means— by listening and reading. But looking at the Wikipedia entry for the topic here, after I had this piece mostly written, I was relieved to see that I was not horribly wrong in my own research, and that the entry confirmed some things I had surmised, but wasn't going to hazard putting in the piece.

So, I want to look at the background of what is for drummers basically a semi-popular Latin groove, the Mozambique. In Afro-Cuban music, Mozambique is a style that evolved when Conga de Comparsa— a folkloric parade style— was moved into the popular music and then Latin jazz realms.

With Pello El Afrokan, the originator of the style, the connection with the original Conga is pretty overt, with similar instrumentation— percussion, voice (lead and chorus), horns— and, seemingly, much of the flavor of the parade music:




In New York soon after, people like Eddie Palmieri were developing their own version of the style with a regular salsa band instrumentation, and we start getting the elements that are more familiar now, including the bell pattern that appears to be definitive:

The very emphatic bombo rhythm in the percussion and bass also seems to be a feature of the style:

Continued after the break: