Bobby Sanabria’s Secrets of the Clave

One of Latin jazz’s greatest bandleaders offers tips for unlocking the foundation of Afro-Caribbean music.

Many musicians who play “Latin jazz” or other styles born out of the Afro-Caribbean/Latin American experience grew up with those styles and internalized their rhythms—particularly the core five-stroke pattern known as the clave. They didn’t just learn the music, they lived it. That’s far from true for everyone, however.

The drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, educator and bandleader Bobby Sanabria, a native of New York’s South Bronx, is an acknowledged master of Latin rhythms whose dedication to authenticity is legendary. To illustrate how elusive Latin rhythms can be to some musicians, he recounts the story of a recording session with a jazz trombonist, now deceased, whose reputation straddles the borderline between well respected and legendary.

“We were working on a merengue, which is a Dominican rhythm,” Sanabria recalls, “and he had to overdub a solo on it. In this case, the merengue was in 3:2 clave and he kept playing in 2:3 clave for his whole solo. [We’ll explain what this means in a moment.] The producer in the control room turns to me and says, ‘It’s off, right?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ She says, ‘Go in there and do something.’ So I walk into the studio and I tell him, ‘Harmonically you’re right, but all your rhythmic figures are wrong. We’re in 3:2 clave and everything you’re doing rhythmically is in 2:3 clave. Which means you’re completely crossed with the rhythmic direction of the tune.’ He scratched his head and says, ‘Wow, this is really complicated. It’s a whole other world.’”

Sanabria pauses for a hearty laugh and continues the story: “I say, ‘Listen, I’m going to tap the clave on your shoulder, and you try to match your notes to what I’m tapping.’ He could not do it. The producer’s getting ready to pull her hair out. And then I say, ‘I got a solution. The solo is 32 bars, right?’ I wrote down rhythms on a piece of paper, 32 bars of 3:2 clave, and I told him, ‘Take this home tonight and put notes to it.’ And he did. The next day we came back, and that’s how he was finally able to record the solo.”

This anecdote just goes to show that yes, even great jazz musicians can have problems with the clave. But, as Sanabria notes, you don’t need to have lived all your life with its intricacies if you want to crack its code.

The Clave: The Basic Math

A standard 3:2 clave pattern, which is inherent in the music of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic—and in the Latin-derived styles spawned in American cities like New Orleans, Miami and New York—occurs over two bars of 4/4 time. In the first bar, two dotted quarter notes are followed by one regular quarter note; the dotted quarters give the rhythm syncopation. For the astute listener, the clave makes the music feel as if a 6/8 time signature is being superimposed on the 4/4—a result of the clave’s roots in 6/8 bell patterns from West and Central Africa. The final quarter note adds punctuation. In the second bar, a quarter-note rest is followed by two quarter notes and another quarter-note rest; the start and end of the bar are de-emphasized, giving a sensation of floating in space, while the middle of the bar is heavily emphasized.

“If you go down South,” Sanabria explains, “people will say, ‘Whoa! That’s “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”’ [In early rock ’n’ roll, it became known as the ‘Bo Diddley beat.’] But in Cuban music we call it the clave of son, the traditional folk style from eastern Cuba. It’s the foundation of what we call salsa today.” He raises his hands, claps out the five-note pattern described above while counting out multiple measures of 4/4, then says, “The way I was clapping over 1-2-3-4 was three notes followed by two. You can look at it as a mathematical equation. So instead of three plus two, you could turn it around to two plus three.” He claps his hands in that pattern, with the two quarter notes followed by the two-dotted-quarter/one-quarter combination: i.e., 2:3 clave.

“It’s the same thing, you see,” Sanabria adds, “it just starts in a different place. Every melody outlines a clave direction because every melody has a rhythm—right? Your job is to figure out what that clave direction is, which is determined by the rhythmic content of the melody. It’s part of the basic rhythmic alphabet that you hear in Cuban-based music, Puerto Rican-based music, Dominican-based music, Haitian-based music, rock, funk, jazz, R&B, New Orleans second line, whatever. But it all dates back to West and Central Africa, where this rhythmic building block originated. So every style of music I just mentioned is part of the African diaspora.”

Roots & the Art of Timbale Playing

In Sanabria’s opinion, there’s no better way for a drum set player to dive deep into the clave and Afro-Cuban/Latin music than learning to play the shallow single-headed drums known as timbales: “I’ll tell a prospective student, ‘Listen, if you’re not prepared to learn the fundamentals of the timbales, I can’t take you on as a student, because you have to learn that first, before you start applying this stuff to the drum set.’

“That’s because it all comes from the vocabulary of the timbales,” he explains, “and then you apply that vocabulary to all the extra accouterments you have with the drum set: the extra cymbals, the hi-hat, the bass drum, etc. From a purely mechanical point of view, you have to develop the coordinated independence to play these rhythms on the kit, and the foundation of that is the art of timbale playing. Taking it a step further, everything we do in these styles of music on the drum set is adapted from what was originally played on hand percussion.

“So I’ll get into demonstrating how the other percussion instruments—congas, bongó, hand percussion, etc., function within whatever style I’m showing the students. This way they become a well-rounded percussionist. There is no such thing in our world as someone saying, ‘I just play congas.’ At a moment’s notice, you have to be able to function on whatever instrument you’re called upon to play. In many ways it’s like being a percussionist in the world of classical music. In that world you have to be able to play timpani, marimba—whatever the music calls for. The same holds true for the other great stream of the Latin-jazz continuum, Brazilian music. You have to know how the percussion instruments function in that genre as well if you’re going to play the music authentically.

“But before we even get into that I get into the nuts and bolts of the clave and how it works within the music. It’s a deep thing because, again, it dates all the way back to West and Central Africa.”

With a wide grin, Sanabria continues. “Some people compliment me when I’m performing in a Cuban musical context and say, ‘Wow, you sound like a timbale player.’ I go, ‘Well, that’s what I’m supposed to sound like.’ I’m not supposed to sound like somebody faking the funk on the drum set. It’s supposed to sound authentic, and if you play authentically, then you get the most soul out of the music.”

La Cultura

This notion of authenticity connects to one of Sanabria’s other key points: the need for young musicians to be familiar with the cultures of the Afro-Caribbean/Latin American and Brazilian diaspora. As the longtime co-artistic director of the Bronx Music Heritage Center—a New York cultural institution that has recently expanded to include the Bronx Music Hall, an impressive new multi-use performance space in the heart of the South Bronx—he knows whereof he speaks. And he wants up-and-coming players to know it too.

“You really have to learn the culture and the history. Say you’re into Tito Puente,” he says, referring to the preeminent timbales player of the 20th century, and a noted composer, arranger and bandleader as well. “He didn’t just come from nowhere. Who were his influences? Carlos Montesino, who played timbales with a band called the Happy Boys [in 1930s NYC]. … He was also very influenced by [star swing-era drummer] Gene Krupa. So you listen to those musicians too, and the further you go back, the more you learn. A lot of young players today lack historical references. Everything that has come before is always the best teacher.

“And one more thing: Learn how to dance. Tito Puente was trained in ballroom dance and tap when he was a kid. [Drum session great] Steve Gadd was a child tap dancer as well. Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson, etc. And there are some great dancers who were great drummers as well—Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis Jr. come to mind. Believe me, you’ll thank me later.”

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