For the past ten years Danny Rojo’s Pornoson has been driving home the notion that Cuban popular music is humor wrapped in smartass poetry. After all, dancing is a metaphor of sex. And for Danny, there’s nothing like moving a dance floor, watching people shake their booties and cursing —just like in any good fuck.

I first interviewed the Cuban bassist and singer/songwriter in 1996, when he was beginning to fully enjoy the benefits of being «a free man» in the U.S. I was already a «Cuban honoris causa,» having gone to Cuba many times in the early ‘90s. Of course, working with Cubans in Miami, learning the feisty slang (Cuban Spanish is a totally different world) and being sympathetic to Cuban exiles fighting the bullshit of the Cuban regime, gave me the final entry into that culture.

And yet you’re not considered a Cuban by Cubans if you don’t understand the outrageously rich music coming out of that island and, most of the all, the corrosive humor that many display as a second nature. Both are intimately linked and have given Cubans of all stripes the weapons to resist. Heck, you can take their bread and give them long (and certainly boring) speeches about the progress of the revolution at Plaza de la Revolución. But when the night falls, music and laughter are a loud and proud «fuck you,» the only freedom Fidel hasn’t been able to suppress.

It goes without saying: without Cuban music there would be no such thing as NY salsa, a generic term for son, guanguancó, cha-cha-chá, mambo, pilón, guajira and danzón, among other styles. (Compay Segundo’s Chan Chan, a son, is only one of many synthesis of Cuban music. And son is the backbone of timba. Jelly Roll Morton called it «the Latin tinge,» but I am sure he meant «la clave.» You can hear it as a nod in Monk’s Bye-ya —who deep down was really a rumbero.)

I am reminded of all this every time I go to see my buddy Danny performing at Harlem’s Red Rooster —or any other venue in the city. Danny is a badass bassist, guitarist, pianist and percussionist. He can play classical music like any other pro. But he is in his element playing all kinds of styles of Cuban music, and letting loose that wonderful Cuban humor. In Cuban Spanish this is known as «tirar todo a bonche» (translation: to turn anything and everything into a big, fat joke). And believe me, that «bonche» comes from the high ranks of the mind.

I have seen many times how stiff bodies can move at ease when Danny’s band is playing. And when a set is over, not a single soul is able to resist repeating the shout: «A singar toel mundo!» Call it a wise revolutionary slogan. |≡|