Tresillo (rhythm)

African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 1800s with the popularity of the Cuban contradanza (known outside of Cuba as the habanera). The habanera was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif (1803).^[18] Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform and not surprisingly, the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile city of New Orleans. The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States, and reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African American music.^[b]

From the perspective of African American music, the habanera rhythm can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.^[19]

Tresillo in African American music is one of the clearest examples of African rhythmic retention in the United States.^[c] There are examples of tresillo-like rhythms in a few African American folk musics such as the foot stomping patterns in ring shout and the post-Civil War drum and fife music.^[20] Tresillo is also heard prominently in New Orleans second line music. Wynton Marsalis considers tresillo to be the New Orleans "clave", although technically, the pattern is only half a clave.^[21]

John Storm Roberts states that "the habanera reached the United States 20 years before the first rag was published."^[22] Scott Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is considered a habanera. For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African American popular music.^[23] Ned Sublette postulates that the habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk",^[24] while Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass."^[25]

Early New Orleans jazz bands had habaneras in their repertoire and the tresillo/habanera was a rhythmic staple of jazz at the turn of the 20th century. For example, "St. Louis Blues" (1914) by W.C. Handy has a tresillo bass line. Jelly Roll Morton considered the tresillo/habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be an essential ingredient of jazz. Morton stated, "Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues", you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz."^[26] An excerpt of "New Orleans Blues" is shown below. In the excerpt, the left hand plays the tresillo rhythm, while the right hand plays variations on cinquillo.

James P. Johnson's influential "Charleston" rhythm is based on the first two strokes of tresillo. Johnson said he learned the rhythm from dockworkers in the South Carolina city of the same name. Although the exact origins of jazz syncopation may never be known, there is evidence that the habanera/tresillo was there at its conception. Buddy Bolden, the first known jazz musician, is credited with creating the big four, a tresillo/habanera-based pattern. The big four was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march.^[27] As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.^[28]

In Early Jazz; Its Roots and Musical Development, Gunther Schuller states:^[29]

It is probably safe to say that by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions. Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed. It may also account for the fact that patterns such as [tresillo have] ... remained one of the most useful and common syncopated patterns in jazz.

In the late 1940s, R&B music borrowed tresillo directly from Cuban music.

New Orleans producer-bandleader Dave Bartholomew first employed this figure (as a saxophone-section riff) on his own 1949 disc "Country Boy" and subsequently helped make it the most over-used rhythmic pattern in 1950s rock 'n' roll. On numerous recordings by Fats Domino, Little Richard and others, Bartholomew assigned this repeating three-note pattern not just to the string bass, but also to electric guitars and even baritone sax, making for a very heavy bottom. He recalls first hearing the figure – as a bass pattern on a Cuban disc.

In a 1988 interview with Robert Palmer, Bartholomew revealed how he initially superimposed tresillo over swing rhythm.

I heard the bass playing that part on a 'rumba' record. On "Country Boy" I had my bass and drums playing a straight swing rhythm and wrote out that rumba bass part for the saxes to play on top of the swing rhythm. Later, especially after rock 'n' roll came along, I made the 'rumba' bass part heavier and heavier. I'd have the string bass, an electric guitar and a baritone all in unison.

Bartholomew referred to son by the misnomer rumba, a common practice of that time. On Bartholomew's 1949 tresillo-based "Oh Cubanas", we clearly hear an attempt to blend African American and Afro-Cuban music.

Fats Domino's "Blue Monday", produced by Bartholomew, is another example of this now classic use of tresillo in R&B.^[32] On Bartholomew's 1949 tresillo-based "Oh Cubanas" we clearly hear an attempt to blend African American and Afro-Cuban music. In his composition "Misery" (1957), New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair (Henry Roeland Byrd) plays a habanera-like figure in his left hand.

The bass line on Elvis Presley's 1956 "Hound Dog" is perhaps the most well known rock 'n roll example of the tresillo rhythm pattern.

The first jazz standard composed by a non-Latin to play off of the correlation between tresillo and the hemiola, was Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" (1967).^[33] On the version recorded on Miles Smiles by Miles Davis, the bass switches to tresillo at 2:20. This type of African-based rhythmic interplay between the two pulse (subdivision) structures, was explored in the 1940s by Machito's Afro-Cubans. Those structures are accessed directly by Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums), via the rhythmic sensibilities of swing. Throughout the piece, the four beats, whether sounded or not, are maintained as the temporal referent.

In the example below, the main beats are indicated by slashed noteheads. They are shown here for reference and do not indicate bass notes.

Mongo Santamaria used the tresillo bass pattern in his 1958 jazz standard “Afro Blue”.

Tresillo written in divisive form (top) and additive form (bottom)

Tresillo is found within a wide geographic belt stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Tresillo is used in many different types of music across the entire continent of Africa. Use of the pattern in Moroccan music can be traced back to slaves brought north across the Sahara Desert from present-day Mali. This pattern may have migrated east from North Africa to Asia through the spread of Islam.^[34] In Egyptian music and music from the Levant, the Tresillo pattern is referred to as "Malfouf".^[35] African-based music has a divisive rhythm structure.^[36] Tresillo is generated through cross-rhythm. In Middle Eastern and Asian music, the figure is generated through additive rhythm, 3+3+2:

Although the difference between the two ways of notating this rhythm may seem small, they stem from fundamentally different conceptions. Those who wish to convey a sense of the rhythm's background [main beats], and who understand the surface morphology in relation to a regular subsurface articulation, will prefer the divisive format. Those who imagine the addition of three, then three, then two sixteenth notes will treat the well-formedness of 3 + 3 + 2 as fortuitous, a product of grouping rather than of metrical structure. They will be tempted to deny that African music has a bona fide metrical structure because of its frequent departures from normative grouping structure.

In divisive form, the strokes of tresillo contradict the beats. In additive form, the strokes of tresillo are the beats. From a metrical perspective then, the two ways of perceiving tresillo constitute two different rhythms. On the other hand, from the perspective of simply the pattern of attack-points, tresillo is a shared element of traditional folk music from the northwest tip of Africa to southeast tip of Asia. Today, through the global spread of hip-hop music, we hear the tresillo bass drum superimposed over traditional genres in dance clubs across the vast Africa–Asia "tresillo-belt".

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