Las Alturas de Simpson: The First Danzón

Every Cuban dance lineage traces back to a single piece performed one New Year’s Day in Matanzas: "Las Alturas de Simpson," widely regarded as the first danzón.^[2]

Faílde and Matanzas

The composer was Miguel Faílde Pérez (1852–1921), a cornetist and bandleader from the city of Matanzas who had formed his own orchestra in 1871 while still in his teens.^[1] His danzón premiered on 1 January 1879 at the Liceo Artístico y Literario of Matanzas — the hall known today as the Sala de Conciertos José White — and took its name from Simpson, a working-class neighborhood of the city.^[1] The piece caused an immediate sensation, and Faílde, later honored as "the father of the danzón," would go on to compose some 144 danzones over his lifetime.^[2]

The cinquillo and a new way to dance

What made "Las Alturas de Simpson" revolutionary was less its melody than its rhythmic foundation: the Cuban cinquillo, a five-stroke pattern of African origin that already pulsed through Cuban popular music but which Faílde foregrounded as the heartbeat of a new genre.^[3] The danzón itself descended from the European contradanza — brought to Cuba by refugees of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century — by way of the Cuban danza.^[5] What set the new dance apart was how couples moved to it: partners danced together in a close embrace, with pauses written into the music where they could rest, converse, and flirt — a sociable intimacy that scandalized some and delighted many.^[3]

In Faílde’s day the danzón was carried not by a string charanga but by an orquesta típica — a military-style ensemble of brass with a handful of violins, string bass, timbales, and güiro — the sound preserved in that first 1879 performance.^[4]

A national sensation

To conservative eyes the danzón was almost dangerous — an Afro-Cuban music that drew courting couples into a slow, sustained embrace — and its rise tracked the broader assertion of Black Cuban culture in the island’s musical life at the close of the colonial era.^[3] Yet within a single generation it had swept through every Cuban dance space, from the elegant sociedades of the cities to humble town squares, displacing the older danza to become the island’s unrivalled national dance.^[5] Faílde himself came from a musical family and led his Matanzas orchestra for decades, living to see the form he launched embraced from one end of Cuba to the other.^[1] Today Matanzas is still called the cradle of the danzón, and the city keeps his memory alive with an annual festival and a dedicated orchestra that carries his repertoire to new generations of dancers.^[2]

From contradanza to a national genre

The danzón proved astonishingly fertile. In the late 1920s it fused with the son to produce the sung danzonete, and in the late 1930s the orchestra of Antonio Arcaño — Arcaño y sus Maravillas — popularized a syncopated danzón de nuevo ritmo with a driving final section.^[5] From that closing montuno grew the mambo, which Dámaso Pérez Prado spun off into a genre of its own, and the cha-cha-chá, which Enrique Jorrín shaped into a worldwide craze in the 1950s.^[5] The same cinquillo that animated Faílde’s debut runs as a thread through the contradanza, the habanera, the danzón, the son, the mambo, and the cha-cha-chá — the rhythmic backbone of Cuban dance music.^[3] By the early twentieth century the danzón had even crossed the Gulf of Mexico to take root in Veracruz and Mexico City, where it survives as a cherished ballroom tradition to this day.^[5]

Why it matters

"Las Alturas de Simpson" did more than launch a dance; it gave Cuba an emblem of national identity that outlasted Spanish colonial rule.^[5] In 2013 the danzón was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Cuban Nation, and Cuban institutions have since worked to see it inscribed on UNESCO’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.^[5] Every danzón, mambo, and cha-cha-chá that followed is, in a real sense, descended from Faílde’s New Year’s debut in a Matanzas concert hall.^[2]