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Huayno
I see that John Cohen’s 1991 Film Dancing With The Incas is still out on DVD, for the low low price of $295.00. At 58 minutes of documentary, that’s five dollars and nine cents a minute. I saw it for ten bucks about a decade ago, complete with a discussion session with Cohen, and I’ll be first in line to get a copy on DVD if the price ever comes down to oh, I dunno. Thirty dollars? There is no better film in the English language that covers the phenomenon of huayno music, and this is, I suspect, because it is the only film in the English Language that covers the phenomenon of huayno music. I think. Soy Andina, Mitch Teplitsky’s documentary, may well come close when it’s released, but he covers a lot of good music other than huayno. (You can see Soy Andina’s trailer.)
Cohen is pretty much the guy responsible for introducing North Americans to huayno, though local boy Chris Strachwitz, Cohen’s long-time co-conspirator, shares a lot of the credit. Huayno isn’t the first genre Cohen helped to promote. His early-1960s folk band The New Lost City Ramblers — touchingly typoed in the first edition of the Rough Guide to World Music
Huayno is at its root a Pre-Columbian music form, paired with a highly formalized dance, that has persisted through five centuries of colonial influence. I will readily admit that I do not really know huayno, because the music and the dance are inextricably intertwined and my experience of the dance is limited to a decade-old memory of Cohen’s film, and occasional bits of YouTube clips showing huayno dancing from the rough and impromptu:
to the near-outlandishly formal:
But the music, in these days of web radio and global online commerce, is accessible without a plane ticket. It shares with several other Andean styles — Sanjuanitos, bailecitos, pasacalles — an oscillation between major and minor keys, a sensibility that sounds sad to new listeners. Rhythm varies. I’ve heard huaynos with two, four, and six beats to the measure just in the last few days. But the thing that distinguishes huayno from its close relatives the Sanjuanito and Marinera is its meter: a persistent dactylic beat, a heavily stressed first beat followed by two softer subsidiaries. In a month where I hadn’t used up three times my allotted bandwidth on one post, I’d put up a link to an mp3 to illustrate what I mean. But as long as I’m tapping YouTube’s bandwidth, here’s charangist Javier Lizares, playing along with some recorded huayno in his kitchen. You’ll get a good idea of the general feel of the genre from his playing, which is very pretty. The first twenty seconds or so are a typical flourish, the commonly used “V7-I-III-vi” chord progression. After that, the main theme follows a typical huayno one-four-one-four progression, resolving into the relative minor.
The predominant popular music in Peru, criollo, is a mix of European and African influences. People in the coastal cities dance to waltzes, albeit waltzes danced to the rhythm of the cajon — “the box,” a type of percussion instrument handed down from slave days that is essentially what the name makes it sound like. Huayno was once considered the music of rubes. John Cohen wrote in the 1980s that the AM radio stations in Lima played huayno late at night, when the maids and dishwashers and garbagemen got off work and wanted to listen to music that reminded them of their homes in the altiplano. The 20th century saw a massive migration of Incas from the highlands into sea-level cities, and huayno became a distinct minority music whose growth in popularity coincided with the rise of music recording technology. In mid-century record labels such as Discos Smith and IEMPSA sold hit after hit in the genre. It was as if, among the blues and jazz and rock of mainstream Black and White United States culture, a sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of Lakota or Navajo into the cities brought Canyon Records into the forefront of the American music business. Instead, we in the US import our Native American proletarians, and their music, from across the southern border.
In 1989, John Cohen compiled a number of the IEMPSA huaynos into a compilation, Huayno Music of Peru,
This is likely in part because huayno has never been exclusively the province of elíte musicians. Oh, to be sure, there were stars from the beginning. El Jilguero de Huascaran, a huayno star in the 1950s, is still inordinately popular today, as is his later contemporary Pastorita Huaracina, whose music is offered here:
but the vast majority of huayno music, even if it found its way into the cassette stalls, is less precisely played. It’s not that the musicians are incautious, or even that they have a cavalier attitude toward key. It’s just that the playing was usually impromptu, recording sessions done without repeated takes, and the jouissance of the moment deemed more important to the success of the piece than a martinettish adherence to the metronome. Whether played on violins, with huge high school brass sections, or by Casio bands, huayno has always seemed a little too authentic, a little too unpolished, a little too low-class for mainstream popularity in El Norte.
The song occasionally offered as a counterexample, the insanely overplayed El Condor Pasa, is no huayno despite the usual mistaken Wikipedia claims. Most versions of Condor Pasa played by the Bolivian panpipe bands in shopping malls and college campuses throughout the Northern Hemisphere do have a fast huayno fugue stuck in toward the end, but the tune itself, as commandeered by Paul Simon, is a yaraví-pasacalle hybrid. Those panpipe bands have been known to play an occasional authentic, if cleaned up, huayno, and it is by this route that most northern listeners may have heard something of the genre. I know that’s how I learned about them, through the band Sukay. Those Bolivian bands, whose style was created out of whole alpaca cloth as a conscious politico-cultural act during the Peña movement in the 1960s, have as much claim to huaynos as do Peruvians. The original range of the form coincides with the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking parts of the old Inca Empire, meaning that there are local huayno traditions in Ecuador, Chile and Argentina as well. Peru and Bolivia constitute the centers of diversity. Peru likely outweighs Bolivia in the sheer number of listeners, but I may be wrong about that.
As is perhaps inevitable in the wake of mass migrations, the rigid boundaries between this lower class music and the more refined criollo of the sophisticated classes eroded somewhat in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Young folks brought up on huayno and exposed to the international phenomenon of Colombian cumbia combined the two genres into Chicha, a cheerful electronic dance music with a relentless beat. On repeated backcrossing with Cumbia,, Chicha further metamorphosed into technocumbia (caution: cheesecake content may exceed workplace safety standards). Despite the dominance of Cumbia influence, the huayno roots shine through in technocumbia. During the dark days of the Fujimori regime, in which right kleptocratic repression and Maoist terrorism ratcheted inward on the common folk, technocumbia became a subtle form of political resistance, as rock was in the US in the 1960s. It was a banner youth flew to identify themselves, and it is still wildly popular today among Indios, Negros and Güeros alike.
But huayno still lives in its undiluted form. The genre has absorbed one instrument after another, from the strings and brass of the Spaniards to accordions and synthesizers, and now lives intact in the occasional rock and roll arrangement (above cheesecake warning applies, with Midriff Alert Level at Orange):
A damn good rock and roll song, and 100 percent huayno. Sung in Quechua, Aymara, Spanish, or World Slang, huayno is maintaining its identity in a Walmartized World Music industry, and I just have to love that. It will blend when it wants to, but it will not lose its identity in fusion to suit a foreign audience. It belongs to the Inca and their admirers, and the RIAA cannot have it.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Wow. I want more music blogging.
By: By Roxanne on 2006 09 26
Seconding Roxanne. Huayno got the funk!
By: By B.J. Corrido on 2006 09 26
wait a dang minute. i haven’t read this yet, but i’d like some zeke blogging, please.
By: By kathy a on 2006 09 26
Well, I’ve got a version of Track 11 here without the typo Amazon displays, Huayno 1-2-3-4, and it’s good.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 09 26
This is great stuff, Chris, thanks for sharing it with us.
By: By Joanna on 2006 09 27
I still regret that I did not try to buy the cassette tape that the bus driver listened to during the entire long trip between Andahuaylas and Abancay (I think-it might have been the Ayacucho- Andahuaylas leg of the trip) in 2000. Unfortunately, in the moment I sort of never wanted to hear it again. Then I had to try and find the most rube-ish huayno tape I could find later in Cusco (and without your knowledge of the genre to guide me).
By: By luolin on 2006 09 27
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