Sexteto Habanero

Sexteto Habanero did not succeed the Cuarteto Oriental — it was the Cuarteto Oriental, renamed. Tres player Ricardo Martínez had spent since the mid-1910s building the same four Oriente migrants from a quartet into a sexteto; when internal disputes drove him out in 1919, tres player Carlos Godínez took his chair, and by 1920, historian Senén Suárez Hernández writes, guitarist Guillermo Castillo took over direction of the sexteto, "which in fact took the name Sexteto Habanero" — the same musicians, one new name.

listen: upstream & heresource: Cubarte — "Sexteto habanero, pionero del son" (Senén Suárez Hernández, 2010) (founding narrative, Cuarteto Oriental to Sexteto Habanero transition) ↗share

1917

Oyeme nenaCuarteto Oriental

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1918

Mi nenaSexteto Habanero

listen forDiscographer Cristóbal Díaz Ayala found the turnover preserved on wax itself: "Mi nena," recorded by the 1918 Godínez sexteto, is, in his words, "the same son the Cuarteto Oriental recorded as Oyeme nena" — one melody carried from one name to the next inside a single year. No copy of that earlier "Oyeme nena" side is known to survive, but "Mi nena" keeps the whole shape: a tres introduction, a chorus-sung first verse, a tres bridge, then the solista-and-coro trade that would define every Habanero side after it.

When a Victor engineer needed a "grupo típico" to record in a Havana hotel room in February 1918, the soldier hired to organize it — tres player Carlos Godínez — filled the lineup out with the trovador Manuel Corona on guitar and second voice, one of the five names discographer Cristóbal Díaz Ayala lists from the session. A year later Godínez carried that same lead-and-chorus format into the group that became Sexteto Habanero, who later folded Corona's own trova standard "Aurora" straight into their touring repertoire.

listen: upstream & hereshare

AuroraManuel Corona

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AuroraSexteto Habanero

listen forCorona's own "Aurora" is bare trova: one guitar, one voice tracing a melody built for a single room. Sexteto Habanero's recording of the same song, still in the modern group's set list generations later, keeps his tune but pours the son sexteto's full apparatus around it — a tres answering the vocal line, bongó and clave locking a beat under what used to be rubato guitar time, and a coro entering to trade the closing lines Corona once sang alone.

On the same February 1918 Havana session, the lead voice belonged to María Teresa Vera. Discographer Cristóbal Díaz Ayala's blow-by-blow of "Amalia Batista" has the tres opening, then Vera taking the first line alone; once the chorus enters behind her, he writes, her voice "always stands out, singing not in unison with the chorus but a little ahead of it." That lead-just-ahead-of-the-coro balance became the vocal arrangement Sexteto Habanero built every recording around from 1925 on.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1918

Amalia BatistaMaría Teresa Vera

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1925

Maldita timidezSexteto Habanero

listen forListen for the same balance Díaz Ayala described in Vera, now carried by a different voice: "Maldita timidez," the first side the reorganized Habanero cut for Victor in 1925, opens with the tres, hands singer Abelardo Barroso the first line alone, then folds the coro in behind him — his voice, like hers seven years earlier, sitting just out front of the group rather than blending into it. The personnel turned over twice; the arrangement Vera set down on that 1918 session did not.