101 Montunos

The bottom line

I lead a Latin jazz quartet, so montunos aren’t an academic interest for me — they’re a nightly job requirement. For that job there is exactly one book I’d call the reference, and this is it. Published by Sher Music in 1999 as a fully bilingual English/Spanish volume, 101 Montunos collects over a hundred years of Afro-Caribbean piano — danzón, son, mambo, cha-cha-chá, salsa, songo, merengue, bomba, plena, on up to the two-keyboard grooves of 1990s Cuba — into 101 numbered patterns, each one marked for clave direction, most of the later ones with a bass tumbao printed underneath, and every single one recorded by the author on the companion audio (originally two CDs, 107 tracks; now a download from Sher).

Mauleón has the résumé to write it: she has played with Tito Puente, Carlos Santana, and Cachao, wrote the Salsa Guidebook for Piano and Ensemble, and has taught at Stanford and the Jazz School in Berkeley. More importantly, she writes like a working player. Her introduction spends two honest pages untangling the terminology — montuno vs. tumbao vs. guajeo, and why Cuban and New York musicians use the words differently — and then delivers the book’s real thesis: “Afro-Caribbean music is not merely a collection of patterns; it is a language which must be studied, and, more importantly, felt.” The book takes its own warning seriously. Every pattern comes wrapped in the history and the listening that make it more than notation.

Who it’s for — and who should skip it

Get it if you’re a jazz or classical pianist who keeps getting called for salsa and Latin jazz work and wants the real vocabulary instead of a generic “Latin feel.” It’s equally valuable for teachers (the bilingual text is a gift if you have Spanish-speaking students), for arrangers who need to write idiomatic piano parts, and — quietly — for bassists, since the salsa-era examples all include written tumbao lines. You should read music comfortably and have intermediate technique; the patterns aren’t virtuosic, but the syncopation is relentless.

Skip it if you’re a beginning pianist — start with Jeremy Siskind’s Jazz Piano Fundamentals and come back. Skip it if what you actually need is jazz harmony or voicing instruction; the harmonic language here is deliberately simple for most of the book, and Levine’s The Jazz Theory Book covers that ground. And temper expectations if you want a deep dive into modern timba: the book ends, by definition, in 1999, right as that style was taking off.

What’s inside

Five chronological parts plus an appendix, 151 spiral-bound pages, every page in side-by-side English and Spanish columns:

• Part I, “A Review of the Clave.” The 6/8 clave (forward and reverse), son clave, rumba clave, and clave campesina, then “The Clave’s Function” — how clave shapes rhythmic design, melodic shape, and even harmonic structure — plus the sections “In and Out of Clave” and “Jumping the Clave.” Mauleón defines clave as three things at once: an instrument, a rhythmic pattern, and a concept, and gives the sanest advice in the field: don’t become “obsessed” with it, study it and let taste decide. Clave direction (2-3 or 3-2) is then marked at the top of every exercise in the book.
• Part II, “Foundations of Afro-Caribbean Piano (1840s–1950s).” Danzón and its predecessors, the Cuban son, and the son montuno, then a crucial section on common harmonic progressions — I-IV-V-IV, I-V-V-I, ii-V-I, the dominant pedal — followed by afro, guajira, guaracha, mambo, cha-cha-chá (with the Enrique Jorrín / charanga backstory), pachanga, bolero, and the descarga. Ex. 7, “Basic Son Variations,” runs eight bars over a single C6 chord, and her comment nails the aesthetic: “Imagine, all of these possibilities, and we’ve only played one chord!”
• Part III, “From Son to Salsa, Latin Jazz & Songo (1960s–1980s).” Boogaloo, New York mozambique, the birth of salsa, salsa-style montunos, salsa romántica, Latin jazz, and Cuba’s parallel evolution into songo — with the Juan Formell / Los Van Van / Changuito story told properly. From Ex. 42 onward every example carries a written bass tumbao, and Mauleón states the challenge plainly: the pianist should be able to play the bass part in the left hand against the right-hand pattern.
• Part IV, “Other Caribbean Styles.” Merengue (where she points out the piano’s real model is the button accordion and sends you to Francisco Ulloa’s perico ripiao recordings), bachata, Puerto Rican música jíbara, bomba and plena, and a nod to Colombia and Venezuela. Almost no other piano book covers this.
• Part V, “The 90s and Beyond.” Altered chords, upper structures, quartal harmony (Ex. 88 puts “So What” chords over a bomba feel), beat displacement, and the two-keyboard grooves of NG La Banda — the roots of what became timba, including who plays what in those bands and why.
• Appendix A, “Exercises for Independence,” four pages of clave-versus-pulse coordination drills, plus suggested-listening sidebars throughout, short transcribed fragments from players like Peruchín, Eddie Palmieri, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and the full CD track sheet.

Strengths

• Clave discipline is baked into every page. Because each example declares its direction, you absorb the difference between a 2-3 and a 3-2 pattern by playing dozens of matched pairs, not by memorizing a rule.
• The bass tumbaos are the hidden curriculum. Playing the bass line in your left hand against the montuno is brutal at first and transformative after — it teaches you where the anticipations actually sit, and it makes you a far better listener to your actual bassist.
• History that earns its place. The prose explains why patterns changed — Arsenio Rodríguez building the conjunto, Jorrín inventing the cha-cha-chá, Formell plugging in Los Van Van — so the patterns stop being interchangeable licks.
• Listening lists you can trust. The sidebars send you to “Hay Fuego en el 23,” “Mambo No. 5,” “Tanga” — primary sources, not play-along pablum.
• Breadth nobody else offers. Merengue, bomba, plena, and bachata piano patterns in the same volume as songo and salsa, plus odd-meter montunos (Ex. 63 is in 5/4).
• The author plays every example on the audio, with rhythm-section accompaniment on the summary tracks so you hear the pattern in context.

Weaknesses

• The bilingual format halves the density. You’re buying 151 pages but reading roughly 75 — every paragraph appears twice. I understand the mission (and it serves the music’s community), but monolingual readers are paying for pages they’ll never read.
• Practice methodology is thin. Appendix A is four pages; there are no fingerings, no tempo targets, no graded routine. The book hands you the vocabulary and trusts you to build the gym yourself.
• It is not a harmony book. Until Part V, most examples live on I-IV-V-IV and ii-V-I by design. If your voicings are weak, this book won’t fix them.
• It stops in 1999. Timba’s explosion, the modern Cuban school, twenty-five years of development — absent, unavoidably. The book is a foundation, not the current state of the art.
• The solo transcriptions are teasers. The fragments from the masters are inspiring but short; you’ll finish them wishing for a companion volume of full solos.

How to actually practice with this book

Here’s the route I’d give a student — and roughly the one I took:

1. Spend two weeks in Part I before you play a single montuno. Do the Appendix A drills: clap son clave against a tapped pulse, both directions, then rumba clave, then the 6/8. Mauleón’s line — the piano is a percussion instrument, “so think of yourself as a drummer” — is the correct mindset for this entire book.
2. One style at a time, basic pattern first. Learn the plain son pattern, then work the variations until you can move between them without stopping. The whole tradition, as Ex. 7 shows, is the art of varying one simple cell.
3. From Ex. 42 on, do the hard thing: bass tumbao in the left hand, montuno in the right. Slowly. This is the single most valuable skill in the book, and the one most players skip.
4. Loop the audio and imitate the feel, not just the notes. The swing of a montuno lives in the eighth-note placement, and no notation captures it — Mauleón says as much in her introduction.
5. Train your ears on the progressions. Montunos outline their harmony as broken figures, and on a real gig the coro can shift from I-IV-V-IV to a ii-V vamp on a hand signal. If you can’t hear that motion, you’ll be lost mid-tune. This is exactly what I built Earonman’s chord-progression practice for — hearing changes move under a repeating pattern.
6. Transpose the core patterns to the keys your band actually plays in. The book stays mostly in friendly keys; the bandstand won’t. Barry Finnerty’s The Serious Jazz Practice Book mindset — everything through the keys — applies here word for word.

How it compares

• vs. Salsa Guidebook (Mauleón): her earlier book covers the whole ensemble — bass, percussion, horns, arranging. 101 Montunos is the piano deep-dive she points her own readers toward. Bandleaders should own both; pianists start here.
• vs. The Jazz Piano Book (Levine): Levine’s Salsa/Latin chapter is honest and useful — and was prepared with Mauleón’s help — but it’s one chapter. This is the book that chapter is summarizing.
• vs. The Latin Real Book (Sher): repertoire versus vocabulary. The Real Book gives you tunes; this book teaches you what your hands should do during the vamp — you need both halves for a working gig.
• vs. Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery: no overlap in content, but a useful pairing in spirit — Mauleón’s repeated insistence that this music must be felt, not just executed, is the practical, groove-level version of Werner’s argument.

Rating breakdown

Criterion	Score	Why
Clarity	5/5	Clean notation, clave marked on every example, history told in plain working-musician prose.
Depth	4.5/5	A century of styles across five countries; harmony stays intentionally simple, and the story ends in 1999.
Practicality	4/5	Patterns, tumbaos, and audio are gig-ready, but the practice plan is yours to build.
Value	5/5	101 patterns, two CDs’ worth of audio, and a reference you’ll consult for decades — in two languages.
Overall	4.5/5	The montuno book. Everything else on the subject is either a footnote to it or built on top of it.