A Latin Education:Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure.

"I've been listening to Latin music my whole life. But now .... I'm gonna pay attention" - Huey Morgan

BBC4's recent three part series Huey's Latin Music Adventure saw Six Music presenter and Fun Lovin' Criminal Huey Morgan visit Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico for a good natured yet informative look at the past, present, and possible future of those countries most influential and popular musical forms. You could argue a case for other countries (Colombia particularly) getting a look in but as a starting point for a musical journey into all things Latin I'm willing to accept that Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico make for a pretty good base.

Of course there were plenty of sun kissed golden beaches and even a handful of pretty girls in bikinis (though less, I'd wager, than if this show had been made at almost anytime in the past), there were lots of pastel shaded old American cars zipping around Havana, and there were lots of equally colourful painted houses in various barrios across Latin America. For fans of peeling paint and faded glamour the show was enjoyable, for fans (or even dilettantes such as myself) of Latin music it was near essential.

Though some don't warm to his schtick I found Huey Morgan a warm, empathetic, and enthusiastic presenter. I like his Six Music show and, though I'm not mad on them, the Fun Lovin' Criminals make for good festival fun. He was born in August 1968 like me but very much unlike me he grew up in New York's Lower East Side where exposure to Latin music was both constant and unavoidable.

Not that Morgan was complaining about that. He found the mixture of African beats and European melodies with the indigenous cultures of Latin America compulsive and when baked in the melting pot of New York City and played, I like to imagine, as backdrop to scenes of kids dancing in the water of open fire hydrants, it became irresistible. It felt like the music of romance, the music of heat.

As with anything so ingrained in life it's easy to take it for granted so Morgan's mission on this show was to visit the countries where the music began and dig a little deeper. He began in Brazil. The land of samba - and much more besides.

Samba, we learn, acts almost as a musical archive of Brazilian history and the carnival, especially in Rio de Janeiro, is the main event. On top of the huge crowds that attend in person over twenty million people watch carnival on television. The glitter and feathers mask a beating political heart that lies at the heart of a music that is the first truly urban, the first truly African music in Brazil. Manguiera (mango tree) is a favela in Rio and when Morgan joins their team's, or school's, samba practice it feels like carnival has already begun.

But while the drummers pound out their insistent beats there's time for a history lesson. We learn about Brazil's independence in 1822 and about the abolition of slavery, after nearly four hundred years under Portuguese and then self rule, in 1888 and we even hear about the Manguiera samba school's own history. They formed in 1928.

Like other samba schools their processions are led by a whistle and followed by a large group of drummers (bateria) in which the most important drum of all is the tambourine as, skilfully played, it provides the syncopation that gives samba its unique flavour, that makes it samba. But samba schools are more than just fancy dress marching bands you can dance to. They provide education, food, and an escape route from crime and poverty for kids growing up in the favelas.

In the 1930s, then president Getulio Vargas used samba to forge a distinctly Brazilian culture and identity in a country that was so vast and included so many disparate identities and cultures that it was hard for people to really understand what Brazil was all about. Vargas even went so far as to pay samba composers to write gentrified samba tunes celebrating Brazilian nationhood.

The suffering and sadness (saudade) at the heart of samba was not something Vargas necessarily wanted to signal to the watching world but it wasn't so much his involvement that changed Brazilian music but what happened when musicians themselves started experimenting by mixing samba with jazz and created the more blithe and urbane sounding bossa nova.

Songs like Mas Que Nada and Girl From Ipanema pared down the rhythmic complexity yet added harmonic sophistication and the music of Brazil, from now on, seemed to come more from the beach than from the ghetto. When Morgan interviews bossa nova and MPB (musica popular brasileira) singer-songwriter Joyce Moreno (so famous in Brazil she goes under her first name only) she talks of the beach life being so wholeheartedly adopted at the time that people would actually applaud sunsets!

Bossa nova was the first Brazilian music to gain serious success outside of its own country, Frank Sinatra covered Girl From Ipanema, but when a military coup overthrew the liberal government of Joao Goulart in 1964 songs about beautiful girls walking carefree and confident on the beach didn't really cut it any more. At best they offered pure escapism.

One innovation that did help Brazilian music move forward was, however, that in the sixties and seventies at least 85% of the music played on Brazilian radio had to be homegrown. Which led to a boost in the number of records being made to fill the schedules and led, at least partially, to the success of bands like Banda Black Rio (a samba infused funk outfit from Rio) and Novos Baianos who came out of Salvador in the state of Bahia with a brand of psychedelic rock which was, of course, given a flavour of samba and MPB to keep it authentically Brazilian.

Novos Baianos also incorporated a new sound into their music. That of the burgeoning tropicalia movement whose most famous exponents were Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and Os Mutantes (formed by Arnaldo Baptiste with his brother Sergio and Rita Lee in 1965 when all three of them were still teenagers). Whereas bossa nova showed a fantasy version of Brazil, tropicalia dealt in a cold hard but still often very beautiful reality and spread out beyond music to incorporate film, poetry, theatre, and the work of the amazing, and vastly underrated, openly gay visual artist Helio Oiticica.

With its borrowing of avant-garde and Western pop techniques it upset the status quo and with its direct criticism of the Brazilian military regime it outright angered the country's leaders. Soon many of tropicalia's main movers and shakers became enemies of the state. Both Gil and Veloso were sent to prison before, on their release, moving to London.

When Morgan interviews Gil, still looking youthful at 77, he talks of walking through Hyde Park and seeing the 'garbage' left over from a Rolling Stones gig that had just finished. It piqued his interest in how British festivals took place and soon he was playing at both Glastonbury and on the Isle of Wight.

The Brazilian psychedelia scene was one part of the tropicalia movement but it took its own very distinct flavour with ayahuasca and peyote seemingly proving very popular local alternatives to LSD and magic mushrooms. But the trips they went on weren't just into inner space, they were also interested in how a revolution in the head could become a revolution, a revolution of love, within Brazil itself. The tropicalia movement was not interested in entertaining the rich and powerful. It wanted to speak truth to power and in a country with a history as painful as Brazil's that would always be a challenge.

Nealy five million slaves, more than any other country in the world, arrived on the shores of Brazil over four hundred years before Brazil became the last of all countries in the Western world to abolish the diabolical trade. Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure can't avoid, at least prismatically, being a social history of the countries it visits (and I, for one, would love to learn more about Brazilian history) but as with much music there's only so much room for extemporising before we need to get back to the rhythm. There was never any danger, with this show, that they'd bore us but, still, the show's makers do always remember to get to the chorus.

The slaves arrived in Brazil with virtually nothing but the memories of their previous lives and although the participation in religious ceremonies celebrating their own Gods was prohibited on the sugar plantations where they were put to work, a syncretic blending of the Yoruba religions of Western African and Roman Catholicism was sneaked through in the form of Candomble where the use of drums (of course) were used to invoke deities known as Orishas who serve Olodumare, the Supreme Being of the Yoruba religion.

The religion had been hidden beneath the music and melded with Portuguese Christian belief to form a new religion and much the same would happen to the music of Brazil. It's a rotten cliche to suggest that people living in poverty enjoy a wealth of the spirit or a wealth of nature and it makes excuses for centuries of inequality but, nonetheless, it is Bahia, Brazil's poorest state where 2,400,000 live on less than a dollar a day, that is "the musical store room of Brazil" and we see arse shaking street parties taking place full of polyrhythms and tiny four stringed guitars called cavaquinhos.

Morgan speaks to Carlinhos Brown, a Baiano who has had thirty Brazilian chart topping records in the last decade and presents The Voice Brasil, about the four or five stringed Bahian guitar which, unlike the cavaquinho (which originated in Portugal) actually comes from Brazil and has become a crucial component of the sound of carnival and there's a look at emerging punk and hip-hop acts (some are good, some are powerful, but mostly they're a touch derivative) in the country but there's an overwhelming sense that Brazil, far from perfect anyway, is heading towards, and is in fact already undergoing, some very bad times.

President Jair Bolsonaro's denialism of Covid-19 has left Brazil with a death toll lower only than that of Trump's imploding America, his disrespect of indigenous cultures and willingness to sell off huge swathes of the Amazon could plunge not just the Brazil but the entire planet into a climate crisis that will make Covid-19 look like a teddy bear's picnic and, on top of that, he has shown no interest whatsoever in the formidable culture of the country he governs.

In Cuba, still a Communist state, the Covid-19 result has, so far, been quite different. Less than one hundred people have died in Cuba while more than 96,000 have perished in Brazil. Even weighing in huge population disparity you are four times more likely to die of coronavirus in Brazil than you are in Cuba (Johnson's UK is worse still but that's a whole different story and one I've already written about many times).

Cuba, of course, isn't perfect and it's own history is as colourful and varied as that of Brazil. It's music too. For a comparatively small nation Cuba punches well above its weight when it comes to global musical impact. Rumba, son, and trova all began in Cuba and we start in Cuba in its capital city, Havana. On the banks of El Malecon, the broad esplanade so regularly, and photogenically, soaked in seaspray that lines Havana's harbourside and where Cubans and tourists alike gather in the dusk to drink rum and cool down in the waves while musicians play Guantanamera to holiday makers briefly disembarking the floating tower blocks they call cruise ships.

With Cuba embargoed by the US for sixty years, most of what Morgan's learned about Cuba has come from Cuban exiles in America like Celia Cruz but, as with in Brazil, he may be majoring in music but he's also taking a history lesson so he, and we, learn how Columbus landed in Cuba in 1492 and how, until 1898, it remained a Spanish colony.

Like samba, rumba was brought to the Americas by slaves forced to work on sugar plantations. Like samba, rumba is based on drums and is heavily rhythmic with elements of call and response but where the samba is lead by the tambourine the heartbeat of the rumba come from the equally unlikely claves. Two short wooden sticks hollowed out and banged together.

In Cuba, that's enough to start a party and, in Cuba, that party often involves heavily sexualised dance moves - dancing, of course, being a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. Once, in Cuba, most of the partying was done by rich and famous Americans. Before the revolution American celebrities and mafia celebrated in Havana's many casinos and brothels and corruption, of course, was rife.

When Fidel Castro took over in 1959 and started reinventing Cuba as a country for Cubans - and for socialist Cubans at that - over one million (less socialist inclined) Cubans left for the US. Permanently. For those that were left on the island they found Castro putting not just health and welfare at the top of his agenda but also culture. Famous Cuban musicians would, and still do, drop in on schools to give kids music lessons.

Soon enough the Cuban music industry was nationalised and the huge success of the Buena Vista Social Club (Chan Chan plays in the background almost every time Cuba appears on TV and Huey and his team can't resist that bait either) created an opportunity for younger musicians like Roberto Fonseca (who was asked to play with BVSC's Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo) a chance to shine.

Fonseca's from Havana itself but a lot of Cuban music comes from the east of the island, the Oriente, and as we skim over an all too brief history of Santeria (Cuba's own African diasporic syncretic religion - again similarities with Brazil's Candomble) and Cuban/American relations post-Castro we soon find ourselves in Cuba's second city Santiago de Cuba. With a population of about a fifth of Havana's it has a far less hectic feel and a more Caribbean vibe.

It's where son music comes from so Morgan hits Casa De La Trova for a Saturday night on the town. With a beer in his hand and a shit eating grin he looks as if could barely be happier but he still breaks off from the dancing and partying to give us another lesson. Son appeared towards the end of the 19c in working class areas around Santiago de Cuba and soon evolved into a musical form that was based on the use of a rhythmic syncopated bass and a tres guitar to hold down the melody. When it comes to son, dancing in pairs is key so if you don't have partner I guess you'll have to grab a wooden chair.

Elsewhere in Santiago de Cuba, it's likely you'll hear trova music. Ballads played by one man and his guitar. Singing late at night about life, love, and experience. Morgan chats out trovador Alejandro Sanchez about this music that seems to perform the same role in Cuban life as the blues does in America, flamenco in Spain, tango in Argentina, fado in Portugal, and rebetiko in Greece.

Pouring your pain and frustration out in song is cathartic for both performer and listener but in recent years some musicians in Cuban have been arrested for a being a little too expressive. It's sad and it's wrong but greater misdeeds have been carried out in Cuba and not by Cubans. The next state along from Santiago de Cuba is Guantanamo and that's famous for the Guantanamo Bay naval base and detention centre. Famously under American control and infamously the site of torture.

The other thing Guantanamo is famous for could hardly be more different. It's a song about a girl that even if you don't think you know you almost definitely do. Most likely you've sung it. Based on a poem by 19c poet and Cuban liberation hero Jose Marti, Guantanamera ("there's only one Guantanamera") was covered by American vocal group The Sandpipers, popularised by folk singer Pete Seeger, and sent stratospheric by football fans who changed the female object of singular fascination to that of their respective teams and players.

At one point, US peace protestors sang it to show solidarity with Cuba. It truly appears to be a song for all occasions and it is, without doubt, the most famous piece of Cuban music ever. In the seventies and eighties Soviet money poured into Cuba and kept the economy afloat but when the Soviet Union broke up at the turn of the eighties/nineties that dried up and Cuba entered a "special period".

A euphemism that meant a very difficult time for those living on the island. Cubans, like so many around the world at that time, sought change and not just in their lives but in their music. Hip-hop mix tapes found their way on to the island with tracks like Public Enemy's Fight The Power on them. Morgan meets DJ Jigue who 'came up' at that time and he explains how it was, and still is, difficult to promote new, or 'inauthentic' music in Cuba. Not least when twenty-fours of Internet use costs the same as an average monthly salary.

Cubans improvise ways of hearing new international sounds using hacking and though Beyonce and the tv show The Voice are enormously popular in Cuba, reggaeton artists like Bad Bunny are huge and in Cimafunk, Cuba has its own Cuban accented reggaeton star. But for the real story of reggaeton we need to travel east, past Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to the much smaller island home of Bad Bunny, Puerto Rico.

And, for the final show of the series, that's exactly what we do. But we don't start with reggaeton. We travel towards it. Puerto Rico, with a population of just 3,500,000 is the motherland of the Latin dancefloor dominating sound of salsa. Salsa is the Spanish word for sauce and we're meeting with the leader of the pioneering Puerto Rican band El Gran Combo to try and discover just which ingredients make up this spicy sauce.

El Gran Combo were founded in 1962 by Rafael Ithier, who at 93 years young, still leads them. They've sold one hundred and fifty million records globally but when they started the genre of salsa didn't yet exist. Back then they called the music guaracha and it was a mix, as in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere, of African, Spanish, and indigenous sounds.

As a territory of the US, Puerto Ricans were free to move to America and, in the thirty years between 1940 and 1970, close to one million of them did. Many of them to Huey Morgan's home town of New York and particularly the already hugely diverse Lower East Side which became a predominantly Puerto Rican or, as they'd soon be known, Nu-Yorican area.

The Nu-Yoricans brought their music with them but in the melting pot of New York it mixed with soul and jazz and was so renamed and redefined as salsa. Aurora Flores talks of the importance of polyrhythms, "beats within the beats", in salsa music and remembers the early days of salsa when songs would tackle specifically New York subjects like riots, riding on the subway and the long hot sticky summers in the city.

It was the Fania label that cornered the market and it was Fania too who named it salsa. When The Fania All-Stars were formed, comprising musicians from New York and Puerto Rico, they were a sensation. There was swag, there was attitude. Flores claims fans would chant "bring out the hooch" and "bring out the blow". Salsa was not a genre noted for its abstemiousness.

But even before salsa took off in NYC there was another form of Latin music that had adapted itself to the city's blocks and that music was boogaloo. Morgan meets with Joe Bataan, one of boogaloo's pioneers, on a basketball court and Bataan tells of his time leading a gang called the Dragons, and doing time for stealing a car before eventually finding salvation, almost accidentally, in music.

In 1967 Bataan released his first record, Gypsy Woman, on Fania and boogaloo started taking off. Its popularity paved the way for salsa, a more complicated but equally infectious Latin sound, by showing Nu-Yoricans they had something to offer and there was an audience out there for it.

In Loiza, back in Puerto Rico to the east of San Juan, it's time, of course, for another brief history lesson. African slaves first arrived in Puerto Rico in 1513 and the music they brought with them inspired a style called bomba - the earliest native Puerto Rican music. Again, as with Brazil and as with Cuba it was plantation music, it was slave music and, as with those other Latin nations, dancing was key.

Forbidden by their plantation masters from performing them, rituals were embedded in music and dance and now, in Puerto Rico, each town has its own unique rhythm. A kind of musical postcode which is believed to be so ingrained in the culture of the area that even babies dance to it in the womb.

Equally important in the history of Puerto Rican music is the style called plena. Plena dates from 1873, the end of slavery on the island, and if bomba is the music of celebration then plena is the music of liberation.

If music was a salve during the days of slavery it's proved so much more recently too. In 2017 when Hurricane Maria hit the island it killed nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans and left almost the entire island in darkness. Some areas remained without light for nearly a year in what became the longest ever blackout in US history.

At night all ages got together to play music and celebrate the strength of both community and diversity. In that it echoed the story of Spanish farmers bringing lutes and cuatros to mix with the African rhythms of the slaves and forge a new music. The cuatro, based on a traditional Spanish guitar, began as a four stringed version but those strings seem to be breeding as they can now number up to ten.

The cuatro isn't a historical artefact either. It is, in fact, played on the most streamed track of all time. Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee has been streamed over five billion times and that song, and the genre that spawned it - reggaeton, has boosted tourism in Puerto Rico in such a powerful wat that it has helped, and is helping, the island bounce back from Maria.

Despacito makes use of a kind of doo-wop chord progression known, for reasons I can't fathom, as the "ice cream changes" that have been used by artists as disparate as Sam Cooke, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and The Clash to give it a familiarity but then the whole thing is powered with a reggaeton beat that works on the dancefloor.

I've not been on many dancefloors lately, and certainly never in Puerto Rico or New York, so it's hard for me to understand just why Despacito is so popular but it clearly is. To such an extent that it's displacing salsa as the number one Latin music worldwide. Not bad for a style that came out of a shanty town named La Perla on the outskirts of Puerto Rico.

Initially called 'the noise' after the club in which the sound was pioneered, Puerto Rican politicians and police were so unsure about reggaeton that they tried to ban it which, of course, only had the adverse effect of making it even more popular. DJ Negro talks of how he, reluctantly at the time but proudly now, gave a young singer and rapper Daddy Yankee his first break and it was Yankee's Gasolina in 2003 which took the music into the global mainstream. Yankee even takes credit for the genre's new name.

From the modern, thumping sound of reggaeton we jump back to a traditional bolero, imported from Cuba. It shows how far Latin music has come but it also shows how much has actually stayed the same. In Puerto Rico a woman is murdered every fourteen days - the highest rate in the world - and the sound of loss and longing that reverberates throughout the bolero speaks as strongly and as sadly now as it ever did. Bearing in mind that terrible statistic perhaps more so.

Brazilian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican music, Latin music in general, can talk about these tragedies and injustices because in these countries the music isn't just entertainment. It's where culture, identity, storytelling, and mapping a route to the future through increasingly uncertain times come together and if anyone's earned a right to make a song and dance about it it's these Latin musicians.

Like any journey, and this was a trip as much as a journey, the soundtrack is essential. Luckily Huey Morgan and the makers of Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure made sure it was not just an educational one but a banging one too. I paid attention.