Yesterday was Valentine's Day so I have been listening to a lot of boleros. The bolero is one of those wonderful melodies from Latin America. Argentinean tango, Brazilian samba and bossa nova, the Cuban cha-cha-cha, mambo, rumba and salsa, Colombian cumbia and Dominican merengue are the ones most likely to be known to us, but that barely scratches the surface. The milonga, the Quecha folk music of Bolivia and the north of Argentina, the grandfather of them all, the incomparable son Cubano, Venezuelan joropo, bachata from the Dominican Republic and the crossover reggaeton are hardly ever mentioned.
Even though parang or Vene-zuelan Christmas music has been around for decades, and salsa, known locally as "Latin dancing," has recently entered our musical consciousness; a similar thing has not happened with the bolero. Despite our proximity to Vene-zuela and the number of Venezuelans who have always come to Trinidad whenever there is trouble in their country and despite the Trinis who emigrate there to work in the oil fields, there is a phenomenal cultural barrier, a sort of musical curtain, that comes down as soon as you mention joropo or gaita or rumba or calypso or any of its derivatives and prevents our music from penetrating there and theirs from gaining substantial popularity here.
Although it has various origins, for me the bolero comes from that unhappy land, Cuba, so full of music. The bolero is perhaps the first great Cuban musical and vocal synthesis to win universal recognition. It is a slow sensuous dance to words of great romantic meaning but which unfortunately are mainly lost to non-Spanish speaking people. The Mexican, Angel Augustin Maria Carlos Fausto Mariano Alfonso del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus Lara y Aguirre del Pino, better and thankfully known as Augustin Lara, is perhaps its best known composer. Granada and Solamente una Vez (You Belong To My Heart) are the songs most recognised in the English speaking world but to speakers of Spanish, he is better known for his extraordinary ode to women, Muje and to the love of his life, Maria Bonita.
The bolero is what people in the forties, fifties and sixties, before the appearance of Elvis, the pill and the Beatles altered our musical ear forever, used to call "rent-a-tile music." You danced it at three in the morning, when there were things called dances, and you went with a group of guys, spent most of the time holding up a wall and a cigarette, trying to look mature and sophisticated and the luckiest one of you, or the most bold-faced, finally picked up enough courage to ask the young woman who had been sending eye messages for the past hour, to dance, and an hour before the fete ended, found himself swaying tightly in a corner, while the rest of his friends gloomily waited outside.
The bolero is the musical experience par excellence of the old-time piano bars that once flourished in Caracas, places where one could go after dinner, sit down at a small round rickety table in the company of others, order a cocktail or Whisky con Agua (Whisky con Pepsi for the women), and carry on a civilised, seductive conversation in relative quiet while the piano tinkled around and over you.
The bolero is the music of the "serenata," the enchanting Latin American custom of serenading a girl in her home at five in the morning, just before dawn broke. Provided you used the correct window and the musicians you brought weren't too drunk, there were innumerable boleros that expressed what you felt in far more romantic terms than you could.
If you were lucky and the senorita wasn't sleeping too deeply, you might even be honoured with a glimpse of the woman herself, in her "baby doll." On one notable occasion, my sister being ill and having moved out of her bedroom to be with my mother, the serenaders received the wrath of my father and were lucky to get away with only a pitcher of water onto their heads. In older times it would have been a posy. The bolero, moreover, is the music of tabanca par excellence. Unlike Anglo-Saxons, Latins seem to be born with the knowledge that love is always treacherous. Even when the words are complimentary, there is often a hint of sadness in the music, a feeling that unhappiness is just around the corner, a bitter-sweet sensation of loneliness, that something will happen to end the affair.
The names of the classic boleros carry the nostalgia of lost loves: When I Return to You, sung by the jewel-voiced Mari Trini and the Panchos. This Afternoon I Saw it Rain, and You Were Not With Me! Besame Mucho, which needs no translation. If My Heart Could Ever Forge, and one can invent anything after that. And the incomparable Trio Siboney singing El Dia Que Me Quieras or The Day That You Would Love Me, the perfect ending of a serenata or a love story or of a short essay on the bolero.