This is really an FQ but I’m putting it here because it’s a trivial culture question.
The style Paul Simon is using in “The Vampire” is (to me) extremely ubiquitous and recognizable. If you told me to sit down at a piano and play “random Cuban song”, this is exactly what I (not an expert) would plink out. But I can’t put a name to the style. I don’t feel it fits to salsa, mambo, rumba, merengue, son.
Going down the YouTube rabbit hole has already been very edifying for me, and I could probably learn a lot from continuing it, but I really would just like to cut to the chase and know what exactly we call this subcategory:
Waiting for the day when AI can identify a song from me going “doot doot doot but then it’s like Tito Puente is going to come in with the timbales but he doesn’t, it’s not him, it’s a different guy, instead it’s like this slow jam but there could be a muted trumpet like bap bapa dap and sometimes they even throw in a violin”
It sounds like what is played in the campo in Cuba; the folk music, in other words. It’s quite similar to what you can hear played by The Buena Vista Social Club.
BVSC is what I keep stumbling across over and over. Definitely they do a lot of what I’m trying to get at, but I had trouble turning up any kind of stylistic description than “Afro-Cuban”. If that’s it, that’s it, but I felt like maybe that’s an approximation for one or more specific things.
That video nailed it right on the head. I knew guajira is a thing, I knew son is a thing, but I didn’t realize there was guajira-son. So I think we can go with that.
Now that you pointed it out, and I’m listening to it, it should have been pretty obvious to me. You can actually hear them singing the phrase guajira-son in many of those songs.