Cuban N.O.

Cuba N.O.

By Alison Fensterstock

Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish tinge” — and whenhe described jazz to folklorist and field recorder Alan Lomaxduring the pair’s famous 1938 Library of Congress recordingsessions, the piano man made it sound like a recipe.

“In fact, if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes,” Morton explained to Lomax, “you’ll never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”

Morton’s seasoning was in the right-hand syncopation that turned blues and ragtime into something else. What he called “Spanish” was more accurately Cuban. These were the tresillo and habanera rhythms, both with African and European ancestry that had become something else in the New World in the 18th and 19th centuries. And now, after traveling north to New Orleans, was influencing what would be one of the greatest developments of the 20th: jazz.

The commonalities between New Orleans and Cuba began evolving long before the habanera put its stamp on jazz music, though. Cuba was under Spanish colonial rule for close to 400 years, and for 40 of those, at the end of the 18th century, so was New Orleans. The architecture of the French Quarter shows Spanish influence in its ornamental wrought-iron gateways and balconies, colorful stucco, tiled roofs, and courtyard oases, since rebuilding after two major fires in the 1780s and ‘90s took place under Spanish rule. It’s no accident, then, that if you squint a little bit in the streets of Havana, it can feel very much as if you’ve been transported about 600 miles northwest across the Gulf of Mexico to Jackson Square. Two of the most impressive buildings in the French Quarter, the Cabildo and the Presbytere (flanking St. Louis Cathedral), were built under Spanish rule and have clear architectural siblings in Havana.

The culture share between the two functioning sister cities isn’t a thing of the distant past, either; closer to New Orleans than Louisville, Kentucky, in mileage, for example, Havana was an important and consistent commercial partner to New Orleans up until the trade embargo of the early ‘60s. According to a piece looking back on the ties between the two cities by historian Joshua Goodman in the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ quarterly magazine, then called Lousiana Cultural Vistas, just before the Eisenhower administration’s embargo came down in 1960, Mayor Chep Morrison sent Fidel Castro several invitations to visit New Orleans. Castro never accepted, and Morrison never got to take him to Galatoire’s (where, one would assume, he would have had to borrow a house sport coat to wear over his everyday military uniform). But when the revolutionary leader begged off, Morrison traveled himself to Castro’s Carnival de Libertad in Havana with three floats from the Rex organization, plus jazz bands from Bourbon Street, marching band majorettes, and more entertainment.

Long renowned for its diligence in retaining jazz traditions in the city where those sounds were incubated, trad jazz and brass band music have been on the nightly menu at Preservation Hall, the historic nineteenthcentury carriageway building on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter since its earliest days. To its many fans, Preservation Hall is roots – but in recent years, this keeper of an old flame has also been exploring its own roots, and that path has led to Cuba. In 2015, the band sojourned to Cuba for a gig at the Santiago Jazz Festival and found themselves swimming in what felt like their own history. The trip gave rise to the heavily Afro-Cuban album “So It Is” in 2017 and set them on a

path across the Gulf they’d travel again and again; the award-winning 2018 documentary A Tuba To Cuba follows the band on that initial group trip, from the city jazz festival to small villages, where drummers raised on parade rhythms slip easily into step with their Cuban counterparts, and a conga parade in Santiago de Cuba could easily be mistaken for a second line.

More recently, New Orleans bands — including funk-rock’s Tank and the Bangas, Trombone Shorty, and others — along with students from the Trombone Shorty Foundation presented instruments to Cuban schoolchildren, jammed in the classroom, and broke out in a raucous second-line parade together in the streets of old Havana during a five-day cultural exchange visit to Havana.

“It was just a wonderful, unexplainable feeling,” Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews told NPR’s Alt.Latino, whose crew covered the events. “A lot of joy and love and conversations, musically, through the instruments.”

“And I forgot that I was here, because some of the dance moves and the way people were moving their bodies to the rhythm is exactly what I experience in New Orleans, when we do second lines. I saw this guy – he looked exactly like my one of my uncles in Treme.”