Bachata is popular guitar music from the Dominican Republic and is now overwhelmingly successful among Latin lovers around the world. Bachata took shape over a period of about forty years in the bars and brothels of Santo Domingo, not gaining acceptance in its native land until about thirteen years ago. Young groups like Aventura have a similar relationship to original Bachata as Rock & Rollers do to the blues, which has languished in the shadow of its more commercially viable descendant.
In fact, the parallel between Bachata and the blues is marked. Although Bachata developed out of bachateros play, a variety of different rhythms, notably including Merengue, the music that is specifically called Bachata are a variant of the bolero. The bolero in Latin culture has traditionally been a romantic type of music, dealing with themes like deception and lost love. The bachatero, like the bluesman, sings about pain and trouble; one difference, though, is that while the bluesman hops on a southbound freight and keeps moving, the bachatero gets as far as the neighbourhood bar and looks for solace in a bottle of rum in a dark corner!
The genre has passed through several phases since Jose Manuel Calderon recorded what is generally recognised as the first Bachata single ('Borracho de amor' and 'Que sere mi Condena') in 1961. Indeed, long before Calderon's guitar music was the music of choice in the places of ill repute, which became home to Bachata. The guitar and guitar music like bolero and son were also the staples of the campo (the countryside) and with the death of Dominican Republic's dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 a number of musicians left the 'campo' to record in the capital. At this point the music was not yet referred to as Bachata, but rather as 'bolero campesino' (countryside bolero). The word Bachata originally denoted an informal party where guitar music was generally played.
When Calderon recorded, Bachata was essentially a type of bolero, very little different from the Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian, Mexican and Peruvian music that inspired it. In subsequent years, the music began to define itself as a genre, which, while still based principally on the Bolero rhythm, is easily distinguishable from it. In order to understand these changes it is useful to divide the genre into the following categories, each of which roughly corresponds to a time period:
Bachata-Bolero
The tempos of Bachata's early period were invariably slow, the words romantic, and the style sentimental. In contrast to later Bachata, most Bachata-Boleros were not original compositions but remakes of classic Boleros and Valses. This being the case, they naturally didn't include the Dominican slang and regionalisms that would become a staple in the Bachata of later periods. The instrumentation of Bachata-Bolero was more varied as well; whereas later Bachata was played almost exclusively on two guitars, bass, bongo and guira or maracas, Bachata-Boleros often included wind instruments like clarinet or saxophone, a piano, or violins. Almost all of the earliest bachateros recorded in this style.
When it began, Bachata was not stigmatised as the music of poverty and prostitution that it would later be seen as. The earliest bachateros, like Calderon were simply Dominicans singing music which was already popular in the country, but mostly imported. As time went on that would change, although Bachata-Bolero, because of its formal, romantic language and because of the very fact that most of the songs were not original but remakes of already popular pieces, managed to escape some of the criticism which was directed at the music of other bachateros.
Cabaret Bachata
In the Dominican Republic, a cabaret is a brothel, and the brothel came to be Bachata's primary venue. Dominican guitar musicians from pre-Bachata generations relate that the guitar was always the instrument most closely associated with drinking and prostitution, and indeed that is the case throughout Latin America. But perhaps in no other guitar style has the cabaret taken such a central role. While guitar music may be the music of choice for the Latin American carouser, bachateros did not willingly stake out their territory in the brothel. Rather they were driven there, sometimes by social conditions and market forces, and sometimes quite intentionally by promoters of other kinds of music. From it's beginning, Bachata was the preferred music in the countryside. The guitar, already associated with songs of desolation and despair sung by people like Felipe Rodriguez, also began to be associated with poverty, and with the supposed backwardness of the rural population.
Merengue and Salsa promoters took advantage of this perception, and began to refer to Bachata as cachivache (something worthless, a trinket) and m' de guardia (soldier's music, the music that low ranking soldiers listened to as they drank in brothels). Between the public's perception of it as backward and the active campaign waged against it by the Merengue industry, Bachata was relegated to the cabaret and became a black sheep in its' own country.
Quite naturally, the music began to reflect the environment in which it was being performed. A whole generation of bachateros sing about lovers who are prostitutes, fights and jealousy over lovers, poverty and the problems of living in the worst, most dangerous barrios in the city, despair and debauchery.
It was with cabaret Bachata that the genre began to consolidate, as bachateros dealt with themes that could in no way be considered appropriate for bolero.
Musically, the Bachata, which came out of the cabaret, was generally rough, often recorded in one take through one microphone. The aesthetic called for sentiment and sabor (flavour), rather than a polished product; this was of course due in part to the poverty of many of the musicians and producers, who couldn't afford a second take. The music also became, for the most part, simpler and faster, this was due to the informality of the Bachata economy ' many bachateros recorded one another's songs, or recorded the same song several times, or simply changed the words to a melody, which had already been successful once.
As the eighties began, Bachata was becoming more and more danceable; again an innovation inspired by Edilio Paredes and other studio musicians in response to the public's taste.
Bachata Doble Sentido (Sexual Double Entendre) It was Cabaret Bachata that crystallised what Bachata was, and distinguished it from other Latin American forms. Within Cabaret Bachata, the sexual double entendre became extremely popular, and came to define the important period of the 1980s, when modern Bachata began to take shape.
Sexual double entendre, or doble sentido, has been ubiquitous in Latin music for as long as we have records of it. Performers of all genres and all levels of social acceptability have used sexual double entendre in songs that are now considered classics. Combined, however, with the Dominican middle class's already negative perception of Bachata, doble sentido provoked torrents of criticism out of all proportion to its actual impact ' at the same time that it made Bachata more popular than it had ever been. Ironically the bachatero was most despised by the mainstream and at the same time Bachata's first superstar, Blas Durwas was the undisputed king of doble sentido. He was also the pioneer, along with his guitarist Jesy Martinez, of the style of Bachata, which we hear today. By the 1980s Blas had already established a name for himself both as one of the better known singers of Cabaret Bachata and as a singer of Merengue.
Dominican culture at all class levels is full of sexual references and doble sentido, in conversation as well as in the music of such well-accepted artists as Johnny Ventura and Juan Luis Guerra. In the case of Bachata, however, it provoked an almost puritanical outcry in the press and among the middle classes. Musically, the doble sentido period (about 1982-1992) was certainly one of the most important in the genre's history; the tempos and rhythm changed, the instrumentation changed, and Bachata began to reach a much wider audience.
Tecno-bachata
In the late 1980s, as Bachata's popularity and notoriety simultaneously grew, a group of liberal middle class musicians began to take an interest in it. Sonia Silvestre, Victor Victor, Luis Dias and Juan Luis Guerra were the most prominent of this group, and they recorded songs in bolero time with varying degrees of similarity to Bachata proper. Guerra, particularly, was phenomenally successful, and his record, Bachata Rosa, was a hit in Europe, the United States and throughout Latin America.
Tecno-bachata has not made a voluminous contribution to the music's repertoire, having been rather a short-lived experiment (although Guerra inspired some later tecno-bachateros like Felix D'Oleo). Most of the musicians who recorded tecno-Bachata were not strictly or solely bachateros, and continued to record, as they always had, in a wide range of styles. The importance of tecno-Bachata lies in the fact that mainstream society began to accept at least some Bachata after the enormous success of Guerra's music. The fact is that the music had always had a significant audience, perhaps the most significant domestic audience in the Dominican Republic.
Frontier Bachata
After 'Mujeres hembras', other bachateros were inspired to record with an electric guitar. Blas Dur's most important successors, and among the most important founders of modern Bachata, were from the area of Montecristi, on the Northwestern frontier with Haiti. Luis Vargas, Antony Santos and Raulin Rodriguez dominated Bachata in the early 1990s, and Santos particularly helped to create the style, which we hear today. All three are still eminent figures in the genre. While some of Dur's most popular songs were Bachatas as such, his biggest hits were Merengues recorded with an electric guitar, and the frontier bachateros included as much Merengue as Bachata in their repertoire.
The influence of Merengue also began to be felt in Bachata proper. Bachata had become more danceable. Their bongoceros played with two sticks rather than their hands, and many of the fills and breaks, which they play on the Bongo, sound like tambora fills. The guiro and the bass began to play more syncopated, Merengue style lines, and songs began to include a 'mambo' section, based on the cha- cha-cha of earlier boleros, which was often for all intents and purposes a slow Merengue. It was at this point that Bachata definitively parted ways with bolero and became not only thematically but musically a genre of its own. It was also at this point that Bachata, beginning with Antony Santos' song 'Voy pa'lla', began to reach a much larger public, and to shed some of the stigma which had clung to the cabaret and doble sentido styles.
Romantic Bachata
The frontier bachateros, with Antony Santos at their head, continued to enjoy success throughout the 1990s, and Bachata continued to become both simpler and more romantic than it had been previously. The music's audience grew as well, and with each step towards a larger market the genre moved away from the cabaret and doble sentido styles, which had been so important in consolidating it. It was probably with Teodoro Reyes' album, 'El Cieguito Sabio', that the Dominican middle class began to accept genuine (as opposed to 'tecno-') Bachata as its own, both in the Dominican Republic and in New York. Reyes had been singing and composing Bachata for many years, and had written some of the most brazen doble sentido songs ever recorded.
In the middle of the 1990s Bachata took another turn towards romanticism with the rise of Joe Veras. Veras sang in a soft voice, which contrasted with the traditional, almost mournful style of singing Bachata, which had been popularised by Luis Segura. Veras is the author of the majority of his songs. His lyrics, while displaying the street savvy, which bachateros had always laid, claim to, be more carefully constructed and showed a more middle-class aesthetic. With the influence of bachateros like Veras, Bachata had become essentially a romantic music by the end of the 1990s. Many bachateros' songs deal with one theme and one theme only ' love, often unrequited. Two of the most successful interpreters of this style of Bachata have been Frank Reyes and Zacarias Ferreira.
Vallenato and Bachata
Throughout its history, Bachata has been a remarkably adaptable genre. While the fusion of Bachata with Balada has not been met with widespread acceptance, fusion of Bachata with certain other types of music have enjoyed a great deal more success. In the Dominican Republic, the new generation of bachateros are much more likely to be from the middle class than earlier musicians were, and many of them have studied music formally. In New York and other U.S. cities, young bachateros have been exposed to international styles, which their predecessors had known only from a distance.
Although not the best known, guitarist Martines de Leas probably been the most influential figure in Bachata from 1998 to the present. De Lea prodigiously talented guitarist, has dedicated himself to the study of a wide range of styles on the instrument. One of De Lea most commercially successful strategies has been the practice of recording Colombian Vallenatos as Bachatas. The first bachatero to successfully employ this practice was Luis Vargas, with 'Cenizas fr' in 1994, and even more convincingly with 'Volvi' dolor' in 1997, which became one of the most popular Bachatas of the decade. After Vargas' success, an increasing number of bachateros began recording Vallenatos.
Vallenato and Bachata are natural partners in both form and content. Vallenato, like Bachata, has a history as music of bitterness and lost love, and the rhythms underlying the two styles are readily adaptable to one another. The elegant poetry of Vallenato lyrics have, in De Le' view, brought Bachata to a new level and forced even those bachateros who write their own songs to come up with a more polished product. In the process, Bachata has lost some of its significance as an urban folk genre; at the same time it is now able to appeal to a wider and more diverse audience.
The New York School
Man and other Spanish rock bands have also had an influence on the music of the young generation of bachateros recording in New York City. The most important among these has been the group Aventura, whose music departs significantly from the earlier model of Bachata.
Aventura's guitarist uses sound effects which, although rudimentary when compared to what even amateur rock guitarists employ, are far beyond what other bachateros have had recourse to' extensive use of a wah-wah pedal, for example. The group's vocals are heavily influenced by R&B, an innovation that lead to the unprecedented success of the song 'Obsesion'. The song was a duo between Aventura's singer and a female vocalist, and began to exploit the potential of R&B, with its history of great female singers. Doubtless the ongoing success of Monchy y Alexandra's male-female combination also had its impact on the song's arrangers.
Although unquestionably innovative, Aventura's music remains in many ways traditional Bachata; except in certain sections of certain songs, the bass and the percussion mark a clearly defined, danceable bolero rhythm. What separates Aventura and the host of imitators they have inspired from the bachateros who came before them is more a question of image. During the 90s the bachateros remained quintessentially Dominican, and appealed to an almost strictly Dominican audience - until Monchy y Alexandra began penetrating into a broader market. Before Monchy y Alexandra, virtually the only Latinos who had heard of Bachata besides Dominicans were those who lived alongside a substantial Dominican community - in places like New York, Puerto Rico or Rhode Island.
With the advent of Aventura, the image of the bachatero has taken another turn towards the mainstream. The group doesn't play in the same small venues in which bachateros have traditionally played. One of the advantages of Bachata, which has made it so durable over the years, is that a group of five musicians can play almost anywhere. Aventura, however, has followed the rock and roll model of playing in arenas and larger local venues like theatres and major clubs. The way the band dresses and presents itself also reflects the extreme capitalism of the hip-hop culture around which these musicians grew up. Finally, Aventura is representative of a new generation of Dominican musicians with economic possibilities which bachateros like Marino P_z and Victor Estevez never dreamed of. At the time of the meteoric success of 'Obsesion' it seemed as though Aventura's stylistic innovations would mark the end of traditional Bachata, just as Blas Dur's use of the electric guitar had changed the genre forever. To this day, however, traditional bachateros like Raul Rodriguez and Joe Veras have experienced a strong resurgence of popularity, playing songs, which demonstrate little of the influence of the young group from New York. While Aventura's appeal to other markets is certainly stronger than that of traditional bachateros like Rodriguez and Veras, the group's impact on the genre has not been as profound as many expected it to be. They opened the way for a handful of musicians with similar ideas in both New York and the Dominican Republic. These groups have their own audience, essentially different from that of traditional bachateros, and they have drawn interest from sectors of the North American music industry.
