bolero - Spain, Cuba and Mexico, American Style ballroom, Boleros in popular culture

A typical Spanish dance deriving from seguidillas. It is ordinarily sung and accompanied by one or several guitars.

Spain

Bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana . A number of classical composers have written works based on this dance: Frédéric Chopin wrote a bolero for solo piano, and Maurice Ravel's Boléro is one of his most famous works, originally written as a ballet score but now usually played as a concert piece.

Cuba and Mexico

In Cuba, the bolero developed into a distinct dance in duple time which eventually spread to other countries, while the dance itself gradually disappeared from Cuba, leaving behind what author Ed Morales has called the "most popular lyric tradition in Latin America" . The modern Cuban bolero song tradition originated in Santiago in the 19th century. this is actually quite plausible, as the traditional music of this region sounds very much like the bolero, having many similarities in melody, tempo, and vocal style. Though some scholars date the bolero to the early 19th century, Ed Morales dates it to José Pepe Sánchez's Tristeza, in 1885, which popularized the term bolero and is now considered the first classic in the field . The Cuban bolero traveled almost immediately to Mexico after its conception, where it became part of the repertoire of Mexican traditional music.

In the 1950s, sung boleros became extremely popular and have enjoyed enduring popularity as a popular song form throughout Latin America.

American Style ballroom

Another kind of Bolero is the American Style ballroom dance popular in the United States. The music is 4/4 time, and is danced to the slowest rhythms of the Latin ballroom dances (the spectrum runs Bolero, Rumba, ChaChaCha, Mambo).

Boleros in popular culture

The "Bolero of Fire" was a song in the popular Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. "Beck's Bolero" was a song written by Jimmy Page and performed by the Jeff Beck Group on the album Truth. Second part of "Lizard" suite from Lizard album by King Crimson was called "Bolero: The Peacock Tale" "Casi un Bolero" was sung by Ricky Martin in the 1990's "Bolero" is the title of the song played during the ending credits of the movie Moulin Rouge!. British post-punk band Bloc Party's second album will feature a song called "A Prayer to the Lord", which takes its inspiration from the bolero. British ice skating couple Torvill and Dean danced to Ravel's Bolero in the 1984 Ice Skating championships at Sarajevo, scoring maximum marks.