In essence, clave can be defined both as a “rhythmic pattern” and as an instrument, its name derived from the Spanish for “key” (in music) or “clef”, and is as term often related to Cuban music.
The confusing thing is maybe that in present, modern-day Spanish the word for “key” is “Llave” (so starting with double L), derived from original Latin for key Clavis. The Italian and Catalan words for “key” still have this original latin “k” sound: Chiave in Italian and Clau in Catalan.
Either way, it is meant as “entry” into a musical structure, in this case rhythmically, as opposed to notes and chords for the melodic and harmonic parts.
CUBA
In several descriptions I found online, and also in “offline” scholarly works (like “books”: remember those?) the connection with Cuba recurs.
More specifically – and crucially – with Afro-Cuban culture. It is actually a “key” (pun intended) to African retentions in Afro-Cuban music. The later well-known Cuban genres Rumba and Son (feeding into even better known Salsa) have their own “claves”: both the Rumba and Son clave are known for a 3-2 (or 2-3) pattern, divided in 2 parts (measures): with two beats on one side and three on the other half.
AFRICA
Musicologists – with some good arguments, I think – relate this to a simplification of bell patterns so common in traditional West African music: also those parts where from many enslaved Africans ended up in Cuba, and elsewhere in the West: southern Nigeria (incl. Yorubaland), and Congo.
Bell patterns are varied and common throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, though. They are also varied from culture to culture and ethnic group to ethnic group within Africa, with sometimes a much higher degree of complexity than the mentioned simplified 2-3 clave. I tried to study and play some (from Fon/Ewe culture) for instance, and it took certainly some time: I found that a nice challenge, though.
These more complicated bell patterns, of course, have a relation to the music they are supposed to lead or fit into in sub-Saharan African music: more complex polyrhythmic music, with several rhythmic patterns played at the same time, usually on different types of drums. Such bell patterns are in that sense the “key” (clave) - or “glue” - to connect all rhythmic patterns and instruments. Somehow related, that is the reason why e.g. in Yoruba culture the metal “bell” is music is metaphorically described as “the head”, as opposed to the “corporal”, the body the various drums then represent, after all made of animal skin. Bell or clave as “head”.
CARIBBEAN
Some of these original “bell pattern” complexity still survived more fully in the West, however. Notably in Haitian Vodou, or Cuban Santería. On my own instrumental song based on “Vodou” music (somewhat simplified) – fittingly named Apwoksimasyon, Haitian Creole for “approximation” - I play a more complex Yanvalou-based bell pattern. It took some time for me to learn it.. a pleasant time, but still, haha.
In the secular, “popular” music genres in Cuba – Son, Rumba, Salsa – on the other hand such key rhythmic patterns are a bit simplified. Not necessarily easy for non-Cuban novices to Afro-Cuban music, but definitely learnable.
These Cuban Rumba claves and Son claves got usually played with a wooden instrument, rather than with bells as in Africa. With that we’ve come to the other meaning of “clave”: that of the instrument.
INSTRUMENT
A “clave” - or rather plural: “claveS” - as instrument in Cuba, are two wooden sticks: one resting in the palm (the “female”), the other one – the “male” - used to hit it. They were made originally of tropical hardwood (rosewood, ebony, grenadilla), and have a sharp, high-pitched sound.
Some historians state that the wood was also used for shipbuilding, so there might have been difficulty for enslaved Africans to bring the bells from their culture to the West, using these woods instead for that musical function the bells had. Seems plausible, although I imagine “metal” must have also been used by Spanish, Portuguese, and other colonizers (though “metal” came a bit later to Iberia, when compared to other parts of Europe). Perhaps it was less available for the enslaved and their descendants.
These wooden sticks in any case obtained that African “bell” function in Afro-Cuban music forms that would develop: Rumba, Son, etcetera. The original Cuban claves still have the darkish red colour and texture of the ebony wood it is from.
VARIANT
In Cuba itself, other variants of the Claves instrument also developed, such as ones with differing sticks: one bigger (again the “female”) with some holes for resonance, resting in the hand palm, and another smaller “hitting” (“male”) stick. This one (often of rosewood) sounds nice and sharp too, and are usually called “clave africano” or “rumba clave”, as opposed to the “son clave”.
Though mostly made in Cuba, the “africano” in Clave Africano refers to its use in more directly African 6/8 rhythmic patterns. Their colour is often lighter (yellowish, light-red). It has a somewhat “deeper” and “rounder” sound than the original Claves, perhaps explaining its “raison d’etre” in Cuban music genres, like Rumba.
The smaller, darkish brown Claves still are more common, though. These even made their way into Western pop music (e.g. the Beatles’ And I Love Her – though it is no Cuban pattern played with them).
While the rhythmic guideline – or key – the clave carries, “glues” the instruments together, in my experience with live performances I saw in Cuba, or of Cuban music elsewhere, the clave sticks are not always played throughout the whole song, but at the beginning or at some other - ha! – “key” moments in the song. Fading in and out, so to speak.
FERNANDO ORTIZ
Cuban anthropologist scholar Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) wrote several then in a sense groundbreaking works on Afro-Cuban musical instruments, including also the Clave(s).
He pays much attention to its origins, and emphasizes its relative uniqueness for Cuba. Ortiz still points at similar “sticks”-like instruments in Africa, as well in Southern Spain, another region musically influential in Cuba (especially in the early colonial period), notably the castanets.
He even goes as far as to describe comparable instruments far away as Oceania and Eastern Asia. Eventually, Ortiz concludes that it eventually is a specific Cuban invention, based on older influences (Africa, Spain), but just as much on practical considerations, and local developments.
He also recognizes its rhythmic function derived from African bells, but also points out that it translated as well to more mixed or “white” Cuban cultures; the more rustic, less polyrhythmic folk music of descendants of Spaniards and Canarians (with still some African influences), often guitar-based. The clave played there tends to be more slowly and rustic, different from the “wild” polyrhythmic function it has in Afro-Cuban genres like Rumba, more like the bells in sub-Saharan Africa. These now, ironically, need that clave less, as drums and other instruments already know how to combine and merge.
The claves seem – as the Samba-like patterns but on guitar in Bossa Nova – a reference, but watered-down, to (also) African rhythms. Something like a “clave” (as rhythmic 2-3 pattern) can for that reason also be found in Brazilian music, like Bossa Nova.
The wooden instrument itself indeed maintains its cultural connection to Cuba, more than other places. Making its high, dry sound – especially of the son claves of two similar red-brown sticks – represent a Cuban or Salsa “feel”, also when – as said - slowing down to bolero or ballad-like songs.
Spanish poet Federico García Lorca described the sound poetically as “wooden drops”.
CULTURE
The “clave” is also used as a term for a rhythmic concept, in particular to describe sub-Saharan African polyrhythmic music. Even more particularly to the part author Ned Sublette calls “forest Africa” (South Nigeria, Cameroun, Congo), to distinguish it from “griot” Africa (Senegambia, Guinea), with more Islamic influences and string instruments, and the roots of the Blues.
Ned Sublette, and also a scholar like Robert Farris-Thompson – kind of spread this musicologist term and meaning of “clave Africa”.
The Spanish colonizers – at least in the early stages – had a policy to avoid importing “Islamicized” slaves (literally: “those raised with Moors”), instead getting them from forest Africa, more to the South. In the case of Cuba, relatively many from Yorubaland, the Calabar area (Nigeria/Cameroun), and Congo (present-day DR Congo) These brought the polyrhythmic music – with the clave principle – to Cuba.
English, French, and US colonizers and slave traders had not that policy, and instead made cynically use of the open market the Senegambia and Guinea represented for them as slave source. These enslaved Africans brought the “swing” and melisma musical styles to the US, feeding into Jazz and Blues. Mono-rhythmic – with “swinging” variation around it – and thus with no real use of the “clave” rhythmical “connecting” key.
CREOLIZATION
So, while the clave “whitened”, “watered down” a bit in some Cuban genres (not all), or at least “simplified”, it still represents a sub-Saharan African connection – even regarding wooden instruments used also in Africa, besides bells -, perhaps mixing with remnants of the castanets-culture of Spain, and the rhythms of Flamenco (often tapped on guitar case), and stick use of Canarian (Canary Islands) music, as Fernando Ortiz describes.
There were relatively many Canarian immigrants in Cuba, due to their experience with sugar plantations (unlike mainland Spaniards), and the first Spanish colonizers with and after Columbus tended to be relatively often from South West Spain (Andalucia, Extremadura) from where (Huelva, Cádiz) the ships set sail to the Americas, with some Basques and Castilians among them too.
Later there were Chinese contract labourers as migrants into Cuba, fleeing migrants from St Domingue/Haiti, Spanish migrants from other parts (notably Galicia and Asturias), and slave traders and owners from more industrial parts of Spain, like Catalonia (explaining the Catalan “slave” surnames of a part of the Afro-Cubans, losing – as in British and French colonies – their original African family names, replaced by their owners’ European (in Cuba Spanish, Basque, Catalan, and French) surnames. As slavery expanded some Senegambian/Guinea slaves still ended up in Cuba, with slight musical influences (as the Chinese and Haitians also had).
This was in the later 19th c., but Cuban music by then already had its mixed “clave” base.
The instrument itself – as related to shipbuilding – is of local, colonial origin. The rhythmic key it represents partly, but rooted in Africa, as a process of what Caribbean scholars call “creolization” in the Caribbean: local developments based on African (and other Roots).
CUBANNESS
All this, Ortiz argues, added to the typical Cubanness – of the instrument -, Cuba, with its relatively large percentage of Whites, and racial mixture, some Spanish-African cultural mixtures, with many mulattoes, besides a Black population. He stresses, relatedly, wooden “claves” as such could not be found on other Caribbean islands, until recently.
Moreover, the clave could thrive – both as rhythmic concept and as instrument - within the rich and varied musical culture of Cuba, continuing with its “spin-off” genre Salsa (mostly Son-Cuban-based). This increased its internationalization. In modern US-based Salsa - however - the Clave as instrument tends to be replaced by other "woodblock"-like instruments or by the jeniger plastic based "jamblock", often part of percussion sets.
An interesting history, anyway; a very Caribbean history of survival and creativity.
