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“IN OTHER GENRES, YOU HAVE TOobey the laws,” says Pedro Valdez, a topmerengue session player based in NewYork. “But merengue is fun because youdo what you want. You don’t have to fol-low the rules.”
Tune into your local Latin music sta-tion and you’ll soon see that he’s right. Thepopular music styles from the DominicanRepublic—merengue and bachata—featuresome of the craziest bass playing you’llfind anywhere on the radio dial. Some-how, Dominican bassists have been givenpermission to let loose and pepper theirtracks with high-speed melodic riffs, ran-dom slap interludes, and advancedpercussive effects—all happening in musicthat is being sold as commercial pop.
Traditional merengue has been playedby small accordion-led ensembles in theDR for most of the 20th century, but thesound didn’t have an international impactuntil after the slick, horn-driven merenguebands arrived. Merengue displaced PuertoRican salsa as the dominant rhythm inLatin pop music in the ’80s and ’90s, set-ting hips into motion around the Americaswith its tight horn licks and driving, four-on-the-floor beat.
A typical merengue song has two parts.In the first, “straightahead” (derecho) sec-tion, the bass plays a quarter-note walkingline, usually outlining simple tonic-dom-inant progressions. The bass usesextremely short, percussive notes alter-
nating with occasional long tones used inthe walk-up to the next chord, as shownin Ex. 1. (Those short notes are believedto come from the sound of the marim-bula, a bass thumb-piano used intraditional merengue.) In the second sec-tion, called mambo, the percussion heatsup, the vocals go into call-and-response,and the bass plays a more syncopatedrhythm. In the mambo section, bassistsare allowed to go off-script and toss outsome funky licks.
That’s the old way of playing, at least.As Valdez explains, modern merengue,sometimes called pacumpá, emerged atthe end of the ’90s. It’s faster, more aggres-sive, and usually stays on a single minorchord throughout. The bass groove is justtwo notes on the “and” of two and four,but the bassist is also responsible for theheavy thump on every beat, almost mim-icking a kick drum, performed with amuted strike with the fingers or thumb ona low string (Ex. 2).
Within that simple structure, however,there’s a wide range of other things thebass does to keep things interesting. “Thebass often does a one or two-bar melodicsolo at the end of a verse or section, calleda llamada,” says Valdez. Little slap riffs arealso very common, as is tapping: Everyfew bars, a bass player may tap and slidethe right-index finger high up on the neck,as a percussive effect. Another merenguetechnique is called the redoble (Ex. 3). It’s
a lighting-fast muted octuplet doubling thefills on the tambora drum, and it’s playedby doing a muted left-hand tap, thumbslap, and double pop in quick succession—not a beginner’s trick by any means. All ofthe above elements are present in Ex. 4,transcribed from an improvised line byPedro Valdez (although I’ve presentedthem in a more concentrated form thanyou’d find on an actual song).
These days merengue players rarelyuse a bass with fewer than five strings.“Merengue has become very noisy. Youneed a lot of power to cut through,” saysValdez, who boosts his mids to get theextra punch needed for such percussiveplaying. After all, with no drum kit in theband, the bass becomes the rhythmicengine of the music. “When groups haveproblems keeping time, the bassist if usu-ally the problem,” says Valdez, adding witha smile, “It makes you feel important.”
Whereas merengue is high-energydance music, bachata is a slow, romanticsong genre, but that doesn’t make itsbassists any less active. The music is played
THE BASS IN LATIN AMERICA:
Dominican Merengue& BachataBY M A R LO N B I S H O P
E7Merengue derecho Mambo
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Ex. 1
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GET THESE LINKS AND MORE AT WWWWWW..BBAASSSSPPLLAAYYEERR..CCOOMM//MMAARRCCHH22001111
• “Weo” by Pedro Valdez.
• Tribute to Joe Nicolas, the father of Dominican bass playing.
• Check in with Max Santos and Aventura.
MOR
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LINE
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THE BASS IN LATIN AMERICA WOODSHEDL.H. tap Middle-finger pop
Thumb slap Index-finger pop
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Ex. 2Ex. 3
Marlon Bishop is an arts writer and radio producer who reports on global
music for a number of media outlets. He is an Associate Producer of Afropop
Worldwide and a Culture Producer at WNYC, New York Public Radio.
Am
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Ex. 4
Ex. 5
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