Joe Boyd on the influence of Cuban rhythms and styles on American popular music

Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Maurice Chevalier, Édith Piaf, and Lena Horne were all brought to the island [of Cuba for a huge outdoor cabaret event] by Martín Fox and his competitors at the Hotel Nacional and the Sans Souci, but it was Nat “King” Cole’s week-long engagement under the Tropicana palms in 1956 that marked the apex of the era’s good times.

If there was one singer on which Cuban and American audiences could agree, it was Cole. A good jazz pianist with a successful bebop-inflected trio, Cole’s ballad recordings for Capitol Records generated hit after hit, keeping that label afloat during its lean rock ’n’ roll years; the company’s famous disc-shaped Hollywood tower is known as “the house that Nat built.”

Everyone who was anyone was there for opening night. Cole and his entourage were dazzled by the lush gardens, the huge cast of beautiful showgirls, and the spectacular modernist canopy Fox had built to protect his stage and gambling tables from tropical rainstorms.

For Cuba, the triumph of the dark and handsome Cole was the culmination of a half-century of racial revolution. Bola de Nieve was a Black star, but a camp and sexually unthreatening one. Cole’s velvety voice spoke to women of all colours and he peered at them over the piano with bedroom eyes, the first Black male sex symbol to cross those lines.

With Eartha Kitt often purring over at Hotel Nacional and pale Americans wooing or renting Cubans of all shades, mixed-race sex became a fundamental part of Havana’s allure. (Bebo Valdés would augment his musician’s pay by steering tourists to the best whorehouses; White southerners, he recalled, always wanted Black hookers.)

Cole fell so hard for Cuba and its music that he recorded a series of Cole Español albums that sold millions across the Americas (with many tracks arranged by Valdés). These albums represented the flowering of a second Cuban-Mexican-American musical triangle that had almost as great an impact as the mambo craze.

“What a diff’rence . . . . . . . adaymade”: Dinah Washington’s eloquent pause in the first line of her 1959 hit draws a neat circle around this triad. The song itself is the anglophone version of a 1934 Mexican bolero, “Cuando vuelvo a tu lado,” while Queen D’s phrasing is very habanera.

Boleros are a Cuban form that Mexicans adored even more than the danzón. Like son, the bolero came from the east, part of the repertoire of Santiaguero trova (troubadour) singers, who generally performed solo with a guitar. In the thirties, when most Cuban songwriters were preoccupied with dance numbers, the bolero baton passed to Mexican composers.

As American torch singers absorbed Cuban vocal delivery, Cubans were adding jazz chords to Mexican songs and Spanish translations of American ballads. When some Havana singers became enamored of the oft-encountered English word “feeling,” a movement was born and named: filin.

Much of filin’s power came from Cuban singers’ intimacy, in contrast to the operatic belting of Mexican balladeers. Cubans love words—books of poetry and literature have huge sales on the island—and the clear diction of Olga Guillot, Omara Portuondo, and Elena Burke was central to the success of filin.

Until Buena Vista forty years later, Portuondo et al. didn’t have much success in America and filin never became a byword outside the Latin world. In America, it blended with Neapolitan crooning to give us the “smoochie” records by Perry Como, Dean Martin, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra and Cole that fifties US radio played between mambos, novelty numbers, doo-wop, and rock ’n’ roll.

This is an extract from And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music (Faber & Faber, £30) by Joe Boyd. Buy a copy from Bookshop.org here.

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