Méringue
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Méringue
Méringue (; ht, mereng), also called ''méringue lente'' or ''méringue de salon'' (''slow'' or ''salon'' méringue), is a dance music and national symbol in Haiti. It is a string-based style played on the lute, guitar, horn section, piano, and other string instruments unlike the accordion-based '' merengue'', and is generally sung in Haitian Creole and French, as well as in English and Spanish. History Méringue was heavily influenced by the contredanse from Europe and then by Afro-Caribbean influences from Hispaniola. The blend of African and European cultures has created popular dance music, music played on simple acoustic instruments by artists who don't need theaters or microphones to show off their art. The term ''meringue'', a whipped egg and sugar confection popular in eighteenth-century France, was adopted presumably because it captured the essence of the light nature of the dance where one gracefully shifts one's weight between feet in a very fluid movement, anima ...
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Compas
Compas, also known as compas direct or compas direk (; Haitian Creole: ''konpa'', ''kompa'' or ''kompa dirèk''), is a modern méringue dance music genre of Haiti. The genre was popularized following the creation of Ensemble Aux Callebasses in (1955), which became Ensemble Nemours Jean-Baptiste In 1957. The frequent tours of the many Haitian bands have cemented the style in all the Caribbean. Therefore, compas is the main music of several countries such as Dominica and the French Antilles. Whether it is called zouk, where French Antilles artists of Martinique and Guadeloupe have taken it, or compas in places where Haitian artists have toured, this méringue style is influential in part of the Caribbean, Portugal, Cape Verde, France, part of Canada, South and North America. Etymology and characteristics The word "Compas" means "measure" in Spanish or "rhythm", and one of the most distinctive characteristics of compas is the consistent pulsating tanbou beat, a trait common to ma ...
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Cadence-lypso
Cadence-lypso is a fusion of cadence rampa from Haiti and calypso from Trinidad and Tobago that has also spread to other English speaking countries of the Caribbean. Originated in the 1970s by the Dominican band Exile One on the island of Guadeloupe, it spread and became popular in the dance clubs around the Creole world and Africa as well as the French Antilles. Genres: Caribbean and Latin America. Gordon Henderson is the leader and founder of Exile One, and the one who coined the term ''cadence-lypso''. Performing the Caribbean Experience. History Dominican contemporary music, that is the music played by the dance bands from the 1950s, has played a very important role in Dominica national life. Dominica musical landscape has seen many changes in the intervening period from 1950. In the forties and fifties, there were bands such as the Casimir Brothers of Roseau. The Swinging Stars emerged at the end of the fifties. Their music was a dance-oriented version of many kinds of ...
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Cadence Rampa
Cadence rampa ( ht, kadans ranpa, ), or simply kadans, is a dance music and modern méringue popularized in the Caribbean by the virtuoso Haitian sax player Webert Sicot in the early 1960s. Cadence rampa was one of the sources of cadence-lypso. Genres: Caribbean and Latin America. Cadence and compas are two names for the same Haitian modern meringue. Ethnology Cadence rampa literally means ''rampart rhythm''. History Webert Sicot left Nemours Jean-Baptiste's compas band and called his music cadence to differentiate it from compas especially when he took it abroad, and so the rivalry between Sicot and Nemours created these names. Sicot created a new rhythm, ''cadence rampa'', to counter compas, but it was only in a spirit of competition. The rhythm of cadence rampa was identical to compas except for the addition of the second drum that sounded on every fourth beat. In the 1930s several biguine artists from Martinique and Guadeloupe moved to France, where they achieved great popul ...
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Mini-jazz
Mini-jazz ( ht, mini-djaz) is a reduced méringue-compas band format of the mid-1960s characterized by the rock band formula of two guitars, one bass, and drum-conga-cowbell; some use an alto sax or a full horn section, while others use a keyboard, accordion or lead guitar. Origin The 1915-34 US occupation introduced jazz music to Haiti. Local music bands were sometimes called jazz in comparison to the American big band jazz. The word "jazz" has become the equivalent of band or orchestra. The mini-jazz movement started in the mid-1960s, when small bands called mini-djaz (which grew out of Haiti's light rock and roll bands of the early 1960s that were called '' yeye'' bands) played compas featuring paired electric guitars, electric bass, drumset and other percussion, often with a saxophone. This trend, launched by Shleu-Shleu after 1965, came to include a number of groups from Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods, especially the suburb of Pétion-Ville. Tabou Combo, Les Difficiles, Les ...
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Haiti
Haiti (; ht, Ayiti ; French: ), officially the Republic of Haiti (); ) and formerly known as Hayti, is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and south of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island which it shares with the Dominican Republic. To its south-west lies the small Navassa Island, which is claimed by Haiti but is disputed as a United States territory under federal administration."Haiti"
''Encyclopædia Britannica''.
Haiti is in size, the third largest country in the Caribbean by area, and has an estimated population of 11.4 million, making it the most populous country in the Caribb ...
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Merengue Music
Merengue is a type of music and dance originating in the Dominican Republic, which has become a very popular genre throughout Latin America, and also in several major cities in the United States with Latino communities. Merengue was inscribed on November 30, 2016 in the representative list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO. Merengue was developed in the middle of the 1800s, originally played with European stringed instruments ( bandurria and guitar). Years later, the stringed instruments were replaced by the accordion, thus conforming, together with the güira and the tambora, the instrumental structure of the typical merengue ensemble. This set, with its three instruments, represents the synthesis of the three cultures that made up the idiosyncrasy of Dominican culture. The European influence is represented by the accordion, the African by the Tambora, which is a two-head drum, and the Taino or aboriginal by the güira. The genre was later promoted ...
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Twoubadou
Twoubadou (, french: Troubadour) music is a popular genre of guitar-based music from Haiti that has a long and important place in Haitian culture. The word comes from ''troubadour'', a medieval poet-musician who wrote and sang songs about courtly love. Like the troubadours of old, the Haitian twoubadou is a singer-composer who accompanies himself on songs that tell about the bitterness and humor of love, often using risqué or suggestive lyrics. History Twoubadou was developed in the early 20th century. It combined music derived from the ''guajiro'' traditions of Cuba, (which is related to the ''jibaro'' musical tradition of Puerto Rico) with a Haitian musical style called méringue. Twoubadou was brought back by Haitian migrant laborers who went to work as cutters on sugar plantations in Cuba who traveled back and forth to harvest the seasonal crop at the turn of the century. The instruments in the ensemble are portable, since most twoubadou had to carry all of their possessi ...
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Saxophone
The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument's body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to change the effective length of the tube. The holes are closed by leather pads attached to keys operated by the player. Saxophones are made in various sizes and are almost always treated as transposing instruments. Saxophone players are called '' saxophonists''. The saxophone is used in a wide range of musical styles including classical music (such as concert bands, chamber music, solo repertoire, and occasionally orchestras), military bands, marching bands, jazz (such as big bands and jazz combos), and contemporary music. The saxophone is also used as a solo and melody instrument or as a member of a horn section in som ...
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Dominica
Dominica ( or ; Kalinago: ; french: Dominique; Dominican Creole French: ), officially the Commonwealth of Dominica, is an island country in the Caribbean. The capital, Roseau, is located on the western side of the island. It is geographically situated as part of the Windward Islands chain in the Lesser Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. Dominica's closest neighbours are two constituent territories of the European Union, the overseas departments of France, Guadeloupe to the northwest and Martinique to the south-southeast. Dominica comprises a land area of , and the highest point is Morne Diablotins, at in elevation. The population was 71,293 at the 2011 census. The island was settled by the Arawak arriving from South America in the fifth century. The Kalinago displaced the Arawak by the 15th century. Columbus is said to have passed the island on Sunday, 3 November 1493. It was later colonised by Europeans, predominantly by the French from the 1690s to 1763. The Frenc ...
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Haitian Creole
Haitian Creole (; ht, kreyòl ayisyen, links=no, ; french: créole haïtien, links=no, ), commonly referred to as simply ''Creole'', or ''Kreyòl'' in the Creole language, is a French-based creole language spoken by 10–12million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other being French), where it is the native language of a majority of the population. The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Although its vocabulary largely derives from 18th-century French, its grammar is that of a West African Volta-Congo language branch, particularly the Fongbe language and Igbo language. It also has influences from Spanish, English, Portuguese, Taino, and other West African languages. It is not mutually intelligible with standard French, and has its own distinctive grammar. Haitians are the largest com ...
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Accordion
Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed in a frame), colloquially referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist. The concertina , harmoneon and bandoneón are related. The harmonium and American reed organ are in the same family, but are typically larger than an accordion and sit on a surface or the floor. The accordion is played by compressing or expanding the bellows while pressing buttons or keys, causing ''pallets'' to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel, called '' reeds''. These vibrate to produce sound inside the body. Valves on opposing reeds of each note are used to make the instrument's reeds sound louder without air leaking from each reed block.For the accordion's place among the families of musical ...
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Guitar
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A plectrum or individual finger picks may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant chamber on the instrument, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier. The guitar is classified as a chordophone – meaning the sound is produced by a vibrating string stretched between two fixed points. Historically, a guitar was constructed from wood with its strings made of catgut. Steel guitar strings were introduced near the end of the nineteenth century in the United States; nylon strings came in the 1940s. The guitar's ancestors include the gittern, the vihuela, the four- course Renaissance guitar, and the ...
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