Broken Melodies and Deep Grooves: Listening at the Limits of Cuban Music in Miami

Broken Melodies and Deep Grooves.

By Celeste Frazer Delgado

Such is the case in an ongoing series of albums released by Miami-based composer and violinist Alfredo Triff and a shifting roster of collaborators, including vocalists Roberto Poveda, Laugart, and Nuviola. From Twenty-One Broken Melodies, All at Once (2001) to Miami Untitled (2013), Triff and his ensemble dismantle all that is “customary” in the bolero and reform the “tissue of cultural values” that makes up Cuban love songs. A violinist trained at the National Conservatory of Music in Havana from age seven and later at Cuba’s Superior Institute of Arts, Triff left Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and made his living playing with a number of traditional Cuban dance bands in New York City. He also collaborated on more experimental projects with jazz impresario Kip Hanrahan, who produced Twenty-One Broken Melodies for release on his American Clave label. 

Every instrument on Twenty-One Broken Melodies can be said to have “grain”: limbs palpable in the bowing of strings, hands slapping congas, lips pursed on the saxophone. As the title suggests, the album breaks Cuban melodies into fragments, which, in fact, play consecutively. On the opening track, “Skies North,” Triff’s poignant, sustained bowing sounds like accompaniment stripped from some unheard song. Conga interludes throughout the album play like solos unmoored from dance numbers. On “La Sitiera” (“The Farm Wife”), the shiver and pluck of Triff’s violin competes with the deep-throated vocals of New York–based, Afro- Cuban singer Laugart as she sings a farmer’s plea for his wife’s return. But the wife will not return, Triff’s arrangement suggests, and these fragments of melodies will never knit together again. 

In the mid-1990s, Triff moved to Miami, where he established himself as a subtropical Renaissance man, serving for several years as the art critic for the Miami New Times; earning a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Miami and joining the faculty at Miami Dade College; and hosting tumiamiblog.com, where more than eighty contributors engage in a lively forum on Miami arts, politics, and intellectual life, which, of course, extends to Cuba and the Cuban diaspora. Since his move, the philosopher’s music has grown increasingly concerned with Miami as a generative site. 

The cover of Triff’s second album, Boleros perdidos (Lost Boleros; 2006), features a photograph of the Interstate 95 overpass above SW Eighth Street, Little Havana’s main thoroughfare. Boleros perdidos began as a live performance in April 2002 at Subtrop- ics, Miami’s annual experimental music and sound art festival, and expanded in May of that year into a monthlong series of concerts at Hoy Como Ayer. A song cycle after the tradition of European art song, where a composer sets a series of poems to music, usually for one singer, Boleros perdidos was composed for Roberto Poveda, a Cuban singer-songwriter who came to Miami via Colombia in the 1990s. The grain of the voice is palpable in Poveda’s impressive repertoire of rasp: from a nearly clear voice with a tickle in the throat to an intimate whisper to a whisky-soaked confession, to exhaling smoke or gulping for air. 

These lost boleros are, in fact, the unmaking of the bolero. Poveda’s persona agonizes over the memory of a woman lost. At times, he forgets her as he goes about his business (“Olvido” [“Forgetting”]); other times, he feels he is losing his mind (“Delirio” [“Delirium”]); alone, late at night, he sings to her (“Miami 3:00 a.m.”). At times, female vocalists Laugart or Nuviola double his voice, like an unshakable memory. Or they sing solo, warning the lover, “Duda tus certezas sobre mi” (“Di mi nombre” [“Say My Name”]) and reminding him that words say nothing: “La palabra no dice” (“Palabra” [“Word”]). In the last track, on what promises to be just another night, he believes that she has returned at last, only to force him to confess his own delusions: “Cómo puede ser que no existas?” (“Otra noche” [“Another Night”]). 

On Triff’s next album, Dadason (2009), the dismantling of popular Cuban dance music heralds new possibilities as the Alfredo Triff Trio simultaneously plays and unplays Cuban son. On the title track, the violin issues an invitation to dance that is rescinded by bebop sax and dirgelike bass. On “Dadaochun,” a mournful classical violin questions the conga’s worship of the Afro-Cuban deity of sensuality. On “La balsa de Duchamp” (“Duchamp’s Raft”), the conga evokes Yemaya, the deity of the ocean, while the violin, bass, and sax stutter and spit, never coalescing into a coherent groove. 

Having thoroughly deconstructed the bolero and the son, twin pillars of the popular Cuban musical tradition, Triff’s Miami Untitled (2013) shifts the terrain definitely to Miami. Though the song’s lyrics remain in Spanish, the titles are now in English. The instrumental interludes, untitled on earlier albums, now map South Florida geography: “Everglades Eventides,” “I-95 North,” “Key West’s Last Light of Day,” “Cutler Glides Like the Water into Sparkle,” and “South Beach Shootout” (a delightful duel between two tenor saxophones). Also in English, the CD jacket promises, “A love story from a sunny land of vice, broken dreams and obstinate exiles.” In this love story, Triff claims most of the vocals for himself, sometimes joined by his wife, poet,  and actor Rosie Inguanzo, often in a spoken-word style. Yet Poveda and Laugart return on key tracks. The album centerpiece, “Abusé (If You Only Knew How Much I Lied to You),” features Poveda in an extended confession of his infidelity over a lively Cuban son-jazz, punctuated again by Triff’s shivering violin. 

A video for “Abusé,” directed by Luis Soler, debuted at Hoy Como Ayer in July 2014, along with live performance by Triff and his collaborators of songs from his entire discography. Soler’s video draws from surrealist conventions of juxtaposition, most notably using the slicing of pig flesh to suggest a gruesome punishment for the singer’s infidelities. But in a reversal of the singer’s admission of philandering as macho privilege, the video shows Triff himself as cuckold, his wife Inguanzo acting the part of philanderer, while her husband sits beside the bed, stirring his whiskey in resignation. Over an insistent saxophone and conga riff, Inguanzo listens to a confession by Triff/Poveda, whose images are interchanged throughout the conversation. The woman insists that the man/ men clarify what abusive acts he/they has/have committed. As the music swells, then stops, she laughs at his vague transgressions: “Tu conciencia está maltrecha.” After a half-century of mutual accusations, forced confessions, and renunciations, laughter defeats the assignation of guilt. The litany of who abused whom is lost in a confusing swirl of shifting images.