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welcome to twelve-tone if you've ever
listened to music from latin america
you've probably noticed that it tends to
be very rhythmically dense there's lots
of instruments playing lots of different
parts with everything woven together
into an incredibly rich tapestry of
sound but at the heart of it all you'll
often find to humble wooden sticks
playing one of the most important
rhythms in the history of music and it
sounds something like this
that's called a claw Vey or more
specifically a sewn claw they there's a
couple different kinds of claw is
associated with different styles of
Latin music and we'll get to those in a
bit but first I want to make sure you
understand just how important they are
claw phase are very old
they likely originated in Africa and
were brought to the Americas via the
transatlantic slave trade as far as I
could find we don't know for sure
exactly how far back they go or how they
evolved over those years as you might
imagine academics at the time didn't
devote much of their attention to
studying the rhythmic structures of
slave music but given the clave a
similarity to more modern African
rhythms it seems very likely they at
least share a common ancestor
well clubs are traditionally associated
most strongly with Afro Cuban music the
rhythm can be found across all sorts of
different styles even outside of Latin
America it shows up regularly in jazz
for instance and it's also common in
rock where it's sometimes known as the
Bo Diddley beat after it's used in the
song Bo Diddley by the artist Bo Diddley
really if you listen to any sort of
modern music there's a good chance
you've heard some version of it
somewhere so how does it work well
basically the clave a is kind of like a
wobbly metronome like in standard meter
we have regular quarter notes where each
beat lasts the same amount of time it's
completely symmetrical any one of these
could be the downbeat and nothing would
change but with a claw they each beat is
different and if you change which nodes
the downbeat you change the entire sound
afro-cuban music takes this uneven
metronome thing very seriously not all
parts play the claw they just like how
you might not play every quarter note
but every part is built around the claw
they filling gaps in between and
emphasizing the rhythmic structure of
the pattern it's the foundation on top
of which the rest of the rhythm is built
heck klava is literally Spanish for key
and scholars have compared it to the
keystone of an arch holding the rest of
the music together so
yeah it's a pretty big deal but let's
move on to the rhythms themselves
probably the most common version these
days is the song clave a named for its
use in the song Cubano style of music
this like the other Club is we'll look
at is a 2 bar pattern with three beats
in the first bar in two in the second
notice that that second bar has nothing
on the downbeat the clary rhythm
actually stretches across the bar line
obscuring the beginning of the second
bar this helps emphasize that it's one
complete rhythmic pattern that just
happens to take two bars to complete
structurally it starts out with these
three evenly spaced notes implying
normal quarter notes at a faster tempo
but instead of continuing that pulse it
pauses for a second here then turns
around and plays these two fast notes
before resetting it creates a sort of
lopsided feel with a tempo seems to keep
speeding up and slowing down and the
rhythm lurches back and forth instead of
proceeding smoothly shifting attacks
onto unexpected parts of the bar is
called syncopation and it makes it much
more interesting to dance to providing a
more complex structure with different
patterns of emphasis to move along with
the other common clave a patterns are
the rumba clave a and the bossa nova
clave a both of which are effectively
more complex versions of the song clave
a well that may not be historically
accurate the rumba clave a at least
probably predates the song clave a
although again the history is not well
recorded but structurally at least it
looks like a variation so for our
purposes that's close enough if we look
at the song clave a we see that of the
five hits four of them take place on
eighth notes is this one lonely little
sixteenth but that's it the other two
claw phase each shift one of those
eighths back a bit creating a bit more
syncopation to add some extra spice the
rumba clave a moves this third note
which kind of moves it into the second
half of the rhythm even though it stays
in the first bar with a bossa nova clave
a moves the fifth note instead mellowing
out that rushed ending in creating a
pattern that mathematicians call
maximally even where the notes are as
evenly spaced as possible across the
bars we can also combine these two
alterations to make what we might call a
bossa rumba clave a although full
disclosure I found no evidence that
anyone's actually used that rhythm still
it sounds nice
so those are the three main clubs but
there's still plenty of different ways
to use them for
since you may have noticed that in each
of the examples we had a bar with three
notes and then a bar with two but what
if we flipped them and put the two note
bar first this gives us what's called
the 2:3 clough a as opposed to the three
two ones we were looking at earlier note
that traditionally you wouldn't flip
back and forth between them in a single
song like I just did
once the club a is set you tend to stick
with it again it's basically a metronome
so changing it mid song can be confusing
of course we can also make two three
versions of the Rumba clave a and the
bossa nova clough a where you can really
feel that maximally even spacing another
thing we can do here is drop the two
note bar entirely and just loop the
three part like this this gives us a
rhythm called officio which is Spanish
for triplet because it's a three note
section of the bar this can cause some
confusion because sucio is also used in
Spanish to describe the rhythmic figure
that English speakers called triplets
where one beat is broken up into three
even parts instead of two but in the
context of Cuban music Traci Oh usually
refers to this slightly uneven version
instead to make things even more
confusing though actual triplets are
also involved in clop a theory or at
least triple meter is which is a
rhythmic field where every single beat
is divided into triplets and we can
fairly easily transpose our claw bass
into that field if we take the son clave
a and drop the second sixteenth from
each beat we get this which has
basically the same structure but in
triple meter we can do the same thing to
the rumba clave a but you don't tend to
see this with the bossa nova clave a it
uses all the different sixteenth so the
conversion doesn't quite work it's also
much newer than the other claw bass and
as far as I could tell these triple
meter versions actually came first so it
makes sense from a historical
perspective that the bossa nova wouldn't
have one so yeah claw phase are one of
the most important rhythms in music and
they show up all over the world in Cuban
music they hold a special significance
serving as the foundation on top of
which the rest of the piece is built but
the rhythms also see plenty of use in
other cultures as well I'd say
experiment with them but given how
prevalent they are there's a good chance
that even if you didn't know it you
proud
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