book reviews 205
New West Indian Guide
Published with license by Koninklijke Brill bv | doi:10.1163/22134360-09901034
© Jairo Moreno, 2025 | ISSN: 1382-2373 (print) 2213-4360 (online)
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license.

Sue Miller, Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2021. xix + 310 pp. (Paper US$ 30.00)

Improvising Sabor restitutes the style and tradition of Cuban charanga to its
rightful place in the development of “Latin” music in New York City during the
mid-to-late twentieth century. This compelling book argues that an influential
narrative of this music—namely, that the so-called golden era of 1950s big band
mambo jazz, associated with the Palladium, begets the musical explosion
that began in the late 1960s under the label of “salsa”—must be more inclusive
of the creative labor of other Cuban music and of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and
Nuyorican musicians. This is not about filling historical lacunae, but rather of
listening to the recorded archive in order to hear how specific music-stylistic
trademarks understood to come from the big-band sound both preceded and
accompanied that era and helped shape the music of the 1960s and into the
1970s. For Sue Miller, the history of Latin music in New York City is thoroughly
polyphonic; she shows in highly detailed analyses how musicians themselves
were nothing if not voracious listeners and perennial experimenters. Avoiding
a simplified linear historical account, she hears a constant musical and auditory
back-and-forth between Cuba and New York, certainly up to the Cuban Revolution.
Pre-Revolutionary sounds live on as they are transformed and in turn
transform the stylistic revolutions of New York dance music such as bugalú,
pachanga, and salsa. The approach is genealogical in so far as the book studies
the conditions of possibility behind the development of dance music. This
is strong historical work, joining a distinguished set of revisionary histories of
New York City “Latin” music such as Salsa Rising (Juan Flores, 2016) and Arsenio
Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (David Garcia,
2006)—research that offers a rich, inclusive, and diverse understanding of one
of the great musical developments of twentieth-century American, Caribbean,
and Latin American music.

Miller engages two methodological axes—one ethnographic, the other music
analytic. At the center lies the charanga flute style developed in Cuba, which
she treated in analytic depth in Cuban Flute Style (2013). Speaking to musicians,
promoters, writers, and dj s, or taking readers to where the music was played,
Improvising Sabor builds a strong sense of on-the-ground dynamics shaping the
music as it has been created, performed, recorded, danced to, and discussed—
a level she calls community grass-roots. Close readings of musical transcriptions
of mainly recorded charanga flute performances afford Miller (herself an
expert flutist in the style) to show how very specific stylistic traits and idioms
circulate and are reimagined by musicians. The devil is in the details, and there
are numerous analyses in nearly all of the book’s nine chapters to back the
musicological argument: many developments in the charanga style, harkening
back their Cuban roots, underlie musical innovations in dance music in New
York City.

Two concepts organize Miller’s history: Cubanía and its sounding corollary,
sabor. Cubanía refers to the entire set of musical and nonmusical values that
shape a musical aesthetics to which the “lived experience” of Cuban culture is
of the essence. Sabor names something tasteful and, for lack of a better word,
swinging realization in performance of those aesthetics. Because this realization,
beyond some predetermined parameters such as harmony, musical form,
and tonality, happens extemporaneously, Miller uses the expression “improvising
sabor” as the decisive contribution of this tradition to dance music. This
is not improvising with sabor, but closer to immanent properties to Cuban
dance music that sound on-the-spot. On-the-spot, to be sure, but always mindful
of the making and affordances inherited from earlier generations. Sabor
is a highly cultivated affair, one that, as Miller notes, dancers are uniquely
attuned to—both a form of deeply embodied knowledge in the music makers
and the dancers and a highly developed form of musical know-how shaped
by untold hours of practice. In this, the musical idioms that convey cubanía
and nurture improvising sabor are similar to what historical cognitive studies
of a very different but not unrelated musical tradition (European art music
from the later eighteenth century) call schemata. The idea is that culturally
developed idioms provide a substrate upon which musicians endlessly and creatively
constitute a musical style. These cultural redundancies and regularities,
are always tweaked, yielding for Latin dance music a kind of “changing same,”
a musical-cultural matrix that links sounds, places, and people, and does so
because musicians (and dancers) engage in cognitive acts, inseparably embodied
and mindful. Improvising Sabor gives us a real taste for what that feels like.

Jairo Moreno
Department of Music, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, U.S.A.
jairo@sas.upenn.edu