by jorge » Wed Mar 20, 2013 10:07 pm
The only effective way I have ever seen to teach people to really play rumba is the old Cuban teaching style, rough and "inhumane" as it seems. There is no Juilliard or Berklee for the rumba, universidad de la calle is all we have and it works. Zero tolerance for off time, crossed clave, wrong pattern, wrong feel, and other less obvious infringements. Very few non-Cubans (and not all that many Cubans) actually learn to play rumba well, playing in clave, knowing how to make the songs swing, playing well with the singers and with a good (drum) vocabulary, originality (in clave), impeccable timing, and the right feeling, really playing the essence of the rumba. Kids growing up in Cuba, hanging with the right people (usually family) and surrounded by good rumba, bata, abacua, and other Afrocuban music may not have to fight as hard to learn it right, but lots of Cubans don't get it either. Outside Cuba, you get yelled at, shredded (hopefully not physically hit or stabbed), kicked off the drum, sticks taken away, and subjected to other rumba-saving behavior modification techniques hundreds of times. You pick your ego up off the ground again and again, go back and learn it better, you get occasional positive feedback, you keep learning, listening and figuring out more, you get really good rumberos to show you bits and pieces, you practice until you get it right then keep practicing until you can't get it wrong, and after many years, you can actually play rumba. No short cuts. The other day at a rumba a guy who actually used to play decent rumba, who had played and recorded professionally with Mongo and other commercial bands, was playing clave with uneven timing and we had to take the claves away from him, and kick him off the drum a few times. He was not happy. Nobody got stabbed but it was not pretty. Letting him continue to play off time would have killed the rumba. Asi es.