Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis

Reviews / Votes

Awarded an honorable mention at the Alan Merriam Prize, 51st Conference of SEM/Society for Ethnomusicology in Honolulu, Nov 2006. 'While the rest of the world was mesmerised by Buena Vista Social Club's fairy-tale image of Cuba, the island itself was rocking to a very different music. Far from the nostalgic sounds of Cuba in the 1950s, recreated by forgotten veteran musicians, Timba is the hot, eclectic, sensual, provocative, tense, and witty dance music of Cuba's Black urban youth. Perna's brilliant study documents this music and accounts for its controversial status both on the island and outside. He shows how timba is a bricolage nurtured in the Black neighbourhoods of Havana by musicians trained in Havana's conservatoires, drawing with technical virtuosity and ingenuity on global and local styles as diverse as jazz, hip-hop, rap, rumba and Afrocuban religious music. Perna analyses, for the first time and with remarkable insight, the ways in which this music comments on and challenges the reality of life in late-socialist Cuba, intersecting with contentious issues of race, religion, political ideology and ultimately, Cuban identity. Using methodologies from the fields of ethnomusicology and popular music studies, this book fills a major gap in our knowledge of dance music in Cuba since the Revolution'. Lucy Duran (BBC Broadcaster and Lecturer in African Music, SOAS, London) 'Timba is a first-class study of the contemporary Cuban dance-music scene. Written in a manner that is both rigorous and engaging, Perna's book explores the rise of this hot new music genre and the controversies it generated, and situates it in relation to other current socio-musical developments and the contemporary economic crisis in general. For those interested in Cuban culture and Latin music this is a must-read'. Peter Manuel (Professor, CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College, US) 'This is a book made necessary not only by its topic, but also by its methodology, by the density of