Cuban Invasion

The Peanut Vendor (El Manisero), with its hot, catchy rhythm between a jig and a tango, has started an invasion. Don Azpiazu's Havana Orchestra brought the song north last year, played it with other Cuban tunes at RKO's Palace Theatre in Manhattan, afterwards at the smart Central Park Casino. Then Don Azpiazu went back to Cuba to entertain U. S. tourists. He left his tunes behind. Manhattan's Leo Reisman learned to lead them. Reisman's drummer mastered the four complicated beats which Cuban orchestras emphasize with the bongo (a double-headed drum held between the knees and played by the fingers of both hands), the claves (two sticks of a rare Cuban wood, which make a clicking sound when struck to gether) and the maracas (gourds filled with seeds which make a swishing sound) Vincent Lopez took up Cuban things and so did other jazzmen.

Last week while music publishers were haggling over Cuban copyrights, Leader Reisman returned from Havana with an other sheaf of Cuban scores. In Havana he had a rest from The Peanut Vendor, which is seldom played there. But he heard many times Ay Mama Inez, Te Odio (I Hate You), Me Odias (You Hate Me).

He went into Cuba's interior and studied the primitive rumba dance, a series of writhings and twistings too lewd for fastidious eyes. A modified version of the rumba, the danzon, is the craze in Havana, a potential craze in the U. S. It has easy, lazy steps and, in its authentic form, an interim of a minute or so when the tempo changes and dancers stop for conversation or for the lady to sway her fan.

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