Just as there are ten ways of describing rain in England, snow in Alaska and Chile in Mexico, Cuba has many words for the varieties of cane that grow in different parts of the island. Cañambú is the bamboo cane that grows, sometimes three meters high, in enormous bushes in eastern Cuba and it has nothing to do with the more delicate caña brava that grows around Havana or the caña that is crushed into sugar.

Before the Revolution music, always an essential part of life in Cuba, was made difficult in the outlying communities of the monte because money was tight and didn`t stretch to buying instruments. In 1940 one of the cañambú cutters in San Luis, a small town in the province of Santiago de Cuba, resolved the perennial problem by discovering that when a bamboo water carrier fell to the ground it made a hard, dry sound almost like the bongo.

The cutter began to experiment. First he cut a piece of cañambú and adjusted the size of the opening in order to refine the sound. Once he`d found the exact tone he wanted, he began looking for a second bongo to make up the pair. He cut a bamboo the same length but that didn`t give the habitual contrast between the ¨male¨ and ¨female¨ drums so he left one cañambú longer than the other -one and a half segments instead of one and a third- and so managed to create the range of notes that he wanted. The bongo-player held one cane vertically in each hand and, by skillfully banging them against a wooden stool, was able to reproduce tone and rhythm remarkably similar to the bongos.

There was already a Spanish and a tres guitar in the village so the cutter, inspired by his success with the bongos, began to think about the bass. He tried cañambú canes of different lengths until settling for one with five segments, almost six foot high. He used a perfect cañambú unstained and unveined, cut from the center of an enormous bush. The cañambú was turned to perfect the sound and played by simply banging it once against the ground to produce a deep hollow note followed by two quick hand slaps against the body of the instrument. Later two different lengths of cañambú were cut and tied to the base of the long cane. A narrow bamboo stand, used to support a cowbell, was tapped with a percussion stick to provide the second note of the cañambú bass.

With maracas easily fashioned out of small pieces of bamboo filled with seeds and with the two guitars, the quintet was ready for business. The musicians who took up the instruments were brothers, all Ruiz Boza, sons of the same cane cutter. The band began to play the music that everyone listened to at the time, Cuban son, launching themselves with a son called, `Cañambú Con Los Cinco Hermanos.

`We played son campestre, with that special country touch` remembers one of the founders of Cañambú, Arístides Ruiz Boza, who is still the singer and main composer of the band. He remembers that, in the early days, they were enormously popular around the barrio where they lived, playing at parties and sometimes getting calls from further afield.

The band`s horizons expanded after 1978 when a young musician and teacher, Andrés Cardona, joined as technical director, also playing guitar and singing chorus. Cañambú now play in festivals all over Cuba and, as the island´s only bamboo band, have become something of a legend.

In 1993 Cardona added an acoustic bass to improve harmony but otherwise the original line up has not been changed. Although it is the cañambú percussion and bass that make this band unique within Cuban son, they are not the only distinguishing feature. Not many bands of soneros in Cuba are still fronted by a founder member from the ¨40s and fewer can boast a vocalist with Arístides¨ incredible soaring voice that, at the age of 63, has not abandoned him. Tall and slim and polished like a cañambú, Arístides, his voice charged with emotion, effortlessly moves from the most vigorous moments of the montuno to the restrained eroticism of the bolero-son.

Arístides style of singing is unusual within Cuban son although seems to be typical of the small town of San Luis where he comes from. Several vocalists from San Luis who`ve become famous soneros have a similar, high-pitched style, including Flor Evencio Garcia and Victor de los Santos Ginarte from the band Septeto Soneros de San Luis. These distinctive vocals, perfected by Arístides, will undoubtedly outlive him since the young bongo-player, Roberto Torres, who recently joined Cuarteto Patria, has taken the San Luis style to the Casa de la Trova in Santiago de Cuba.

Son montuno and bolero-son still make up the repertoire played by Cañambú but, whereas most bands arrange their own versions of the classics by composers like Miguel Matamoros and Manuel Corona, the majority of Cañambú`s sones are composed by Arístides himself.

In this, the band`s first CD, Arístides sings two classic sones, Ignacio Piñeiro`s, Mayeya and Mayari by Francisco Repilado as well as two bolero-sones, La Falsedad which is traditional and Matamoros` Olvido. Aristides composed Santiago together with Andrés Cardona who, as one of the younger generation of Cuban soneros, also wrote El Son no Morirá. All other tracks are composed by Arístides himself.

As the original members of Cañambú have left the band, they`ve been replaced by young musicians including the talented tres player Walfrido Alarcón and the bamboo bongocero Juan Pruna. Today the only founder-member is Arístides himself who continues to live in San Luis, on the edge of the fields of cañambú that he calls his music factory.

Buy CDs of Traditional Son in www.discuba.com