Los Van Van: The Cuban Hit Machine That Forged Songo

For more than half a century, the sound of a Cuban dance party has meant one band above all: Los Van Van, the orchestra that modernized the island’s music and helped invent the rhythm at the root of timba.^[1]

Formell’s new sound

Los Van Van was founded on 4 December 1969 by the bassist and composer Juan Formell (1942–2014), who had spent the late 1960s sharpening his ideas inside the orchestra of Elio Revé.^[2] Striking out on his own at the height of a national campaign to harvest ten million tons of sugar — whose chant ¿de que van? ¡van, van! ("are they going to make it? they’re going, going!") gave the band its name — Formell set about rebuilding the traditional charanga from the inside out.^[3] He brought in electric bass, electric guitar, and keyboards; he replaced the front line’s sweet flute-and-violin melody with a chorus of vocalists; and he later bolted a trombone section onto the strings, treating the violins as a rhythmic engine rather than a melodic ornament.^[3] The line-up was radical for its day, and conservative listeners accused Formell of corrupting the cherished charanga; dancers, however, embraced it at once, and within a few years Los Van Van was the most popular band on the island.^[7]

Songo

Fusing the Cuban son with rock, jazz, and later funk and disco, Formell and his drummer-timbalero José Luis "Changuito" Quintana developed a new rhythmic concept they called songo.^[4] Changuito’s innovation was to translate the interlocking conversation of the rumba and the drum kit into one continuous, danceable groove, layering tumbadoras, timbales, and drum set in a way Cuban dance music had never heard.^[5] The genius of songo lay in its flexibility: it could swing softly behind a crooned ballad or drive a packed dance hall into a frenzy, and it gave dancers a looser, more grounded way of moving that broke from the upright elegance of older Cuban styles.^[5] With pianist and songwriter César "Pupy" Pedroso supplying many of the band’s most enduring hits, Los Van Van’s recordings of the 1970s became the textbook of songo — and the fertile soil from which the harder, brassier timba of the 1990s would grow.^[6]

Five decades of hits

Across the decades Los Van Van produced an almost unbroken string of hits — Sandunguera, Muévete, La Habana no aguanta más — and remained, year after year, Cuba’s most popular dance band, earning the affectionate label "the Rolling Stones of Cuba."^[7] In 1999 the group won the Grammy Award for Best Salsa Performance for its album Llegó… Van Van ("Van Van Is Here"), and the Latin Recording Academy later honored Formell with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.^[8] Through every shift in personnel and every passing fashion, Formell kept the band restlessly contemporary, weaving in each new wave of Cuban street slang and rhythm so that Los Van Van always sounded like the present moment.^[9]

A national institution

Los Van Van became far more than a dance orchestra; over five decades it served as a kind of musical newspaper for Cuba, its lyrics narrating the humor, hardships, and slang of ordinary life on the island.^[9] The band toured the world as one of Cuba’s most visible cultural ambassadors, and its concerts abroad — sometimes politically charged, always packed — became occasions where exile feeling and homeland nostalgia met on the dance floor.^[7] Through it all the group kept evolving, absorbing each new wave of Havana rhythm so that, half a century after its founding, it still sounded like the cutting edge of Cuban dance music.^[12]

Why it matters

When Juan Formell died on 1 May 2014, at the age of 71, Cuba mourned a national figure: thousands of mourners filed past his ashes and his electric bass at Havana’s National Theater.^[10] He had directed Los Van Van for nearly forty-five years, and the songo he and Changuito forged is the direct ancestor of timba — the rhythmic bridge between the island’s traditional dance music and its modern dance-floor explosion.^[11] Few groups have shaped Cuban popular music more profoundly, or for longer, than the orchestra Formell built.^[12]