Ran-kan-kan: Long before I could name the source of my excitement, my body responded to the strident signature of Latin dance music. The cowbell strikes like a drum but rings like a horn, the high pitch piercing through salsa’s dense thicket of overlapping patterns. Just when I feel myself drifting from the dance-floor herd, the cowbell summons me back to the rhythm’s raw nerve. Musicians call this function el amarre, from the Spanish amarrar — to fasten, to moor, to seal the deal. A paradox, maybe, that the instrument that brings all the others in line should incite the most euphoric feelings of freedom. I’m already sweating through my silk, so why resist the cowbell’s erotic revelation? When the fever reaches a certain pitch, complexity must give way to relentless repetition — one just-right note, catechized precisely like a prayer. Eso es. Just like that.
Prayer, I learned recently, might be the right metaphor: The cowbell we know today is a direct descendant of instruments that spread through West Africa with the early iron-making technology of the Bantu migrations, and that continue to structure the diaspora’s ritual music, from the double-mouthed agogô of Yoruba bembé ceremonies to the triangular ekón of the secret brotherhood known as Abakuá. Like a god, the bell lays down our shared timeline. The sharp attack puts you in your place — enter here, act now — amid the din of drums and dancers. The job of the bell, I’ve been told, is to stay steady.
Maybe that’s how these timelines survived the apocalyptic chaos of the Middle Passage. When diverse captives converged on the Caribbean, they sought out substitutes for the instruments they no longer had the freedom to craft. In Puerto Rico, they fashioned bomba drums from rum barrels; in Cuba, they turned the humble wooden crate, used to pack salt cod, into the cajón, whose special resonance later found a place in Spanish flamenco. Soon enough, free people of color gained access to forges for smithing bells from scratch, so I sometimes wonder if it was not only necessity but sheer virtuosity that compelled musicians to play most anything: hoe blades, machetes, paint cans and, yes, ranchland cowbells, struck with the handles of decapitated hammers.
In New York City, the improvisations continued: Fania’s Johnny Pacheco stalked the carts in Central Park to steal the copper cowbells hanging from the horses’ necks. Eddie Palmieri, salsa’s founding father, told me how the drummer Manny Oquendo would take his cracked cowbell to a body shop for repair: “What is it with the cowbell?” the welder, used to mending fenders, finally asked. “Well,” Oquendo grunted, “that’s what gives the swing to the band.” By the 1950s, Latin music had become big business, so it’s no surprise the cowbell was perfected and mass-produced right here in the Bronx, by a Puerto Rican auto mechanic named Calixto Rivera: first in his apartment, then, after noise complaints, in a workshop behind Yankee Stadium. If you don’t make the cowbell by hand, Rivera once told The Times, “it doesn’t go coo-coo — it goes blegh-blegh.”
When I tell people I’ve been thinking about the cowbell, they usually laugh. I’m tempted to blame “Saturday Night Live.” In a popular sketch from 2000, Christopher Walken plays a record producer talking Blue Öyster Cult through several takes of “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Walken’s feedback is always the same: “More cowbell!” Will Ferrell chimes away, switching his hips-don’t-lie to the head-splitting sound while the rest of the band winces. Is the cowbell inherently stupid? Or, at least, unserious? Unlike the piano with its alphabet of keys, the cowbell is not well suited to storytelling. And unlike the saxophone or violin, it’s not there for your sentimental education. If high culture tends to associate wisdom with nuance and restraint, then maybe the cowbell’s demand seems shrill, even shameful. Plenty of people underestimate the rigors of rhythm. But in Latin bands, the cowbell is no joke: Only master drummers can touch the music’s molten center.
Lately I hear cowbell everywhere. It scores many of my favorite dance-floor jams: Marvin Gaye’s “(Got to) Give It Up,” Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady,” Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” It’s the first 20 seconds of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” hip-hop’s original breakout hit. Every time I hear its lucid signature, I’m back on track, alive to the music’s next move. Cowbell can’t tell a story, but it’s the sound that allows us to sustain one. To listen for the links between mambo and jazz, salsa and disco, funk and hip-hop. To stay in sync despite the traumatic breaks of history. Tito Puente and Machito knew what they were doing when they played in 6/8, that old bembé timeline from Ghana. Those rhythms will find you whether or not you care how far they’ve come.
I don’t go to the dance floor to think, but the Latin music I love best is too complex for passive listening. When the flute comes in, do I move like a bird? Do I follow the long roll down the piano with my feet, or do I let it shimmy through my torso? Salsa confuses as much as it consoles. Sometimes the crowded sound seems to reproduce the bitter conflicts of migration. So when the cowbell announces the coro’s call-and-response, we know we’ll have to work for this feeling of togetherness. The music doesn’t get simpler. The room doesn’t stop spinning. But now, the god we’ve made — must make again, from stolen scraps — homes in hard. It grabs us by the guts. It won’t let us lose our feel for mortal time.
The post The Rebellious Instrument That Gave Latin Music Its Swing appeared first on New York Times.
