Cha-cha-cha

AH Smeets - Cha-cha-chá is a genre of Cuban music. It has been a popular dance music which developed from the danzón in the early 1950s, and became widely popular throughout Cuba and Mexico, New York.

As a dance music genre, cha-cha-chá is unusual in that its creation can be attributed to a single composer, Enrique Jorrín, then violinist and songwriter with the charanga band Orquesta América. (Orovio 1981:130)

As to how the cha-cha-chá came about, Jorrín said:

"I composed some danzones in which the musicians of the orchestra were singing short refrains. The audiences liked it, so I kept it up. In the danzón 'Constancia,' I inserted some well-known montunos and when the audience joined in singing the refrains; it led me to compose more danzones in this style. I asked all the members of the orchestra to sing in unison. This accomplished three things: the lyrics were heard more clearly and had greater impact and also the [poor] vocal quality of the [instrumental] musicians (who were not actually singers) was masked. In 1948, I changed the style of 'Nunca,' a Mexican song by Guty de Cárdenas. I left the first part in the original style and I gave a different feeling to the melody in the second part. I liked it so well that I decided to separate the last part, that is to say, the third trio or montuno, from the danzón. Then I came up with pieces like 'La Engañadora' (1951), which had an introduction, a part A (repeated), a part B, a return to part A and finally, a coda in the form of a rumba. From nearly the beginning of my career as a composer of dance songs, I watched how the dancers danced the danzón-mambo. I noted that most of them had difficulty with syncopated rhythms, owing to the fact that their steps fell on the upbeat (contratiempo), or in other words, the second and fourth eighth notes of the (2/4) measure. The dancers dancing on the upbeat and the syncopated melodies made it very difficult to coordinate the steps with the music. I began to compose melodies to which one could dance without instrumental accompaniment, trying to use as little syncopation as possible. I moved the accent from the fourth eighth note- where it was normally found in the mambo- to the first beat of the cha-cha-chá. And so the cha-cha-chá was born- from melodies that were practically danceable by themselves and a balance between melodies on the downbeat and the upbeat." (Orovio 1981:130-2)