Clave is a two-bar rhythmic figure — five strokes spread across eight beats — that organizes most Afro-Cuban music. But it didn't stay in Cuba. Once you know what clave sounds like, you start hearing it everywhere: in the Bo Diddley beat, in countless Chuck Berry tunes, in the swing of "Killing Me Softly," in half the New Orleans second-line vocabulary, in the shuffles of Texas blues, and quietly underneath dozens of pop and rock songs that nobody would call "Latin." The clave was the secret rhythm of much of 20th-century American popular music. Once you hear it, you can't un-hear it.
This lesson teaches the ear-training task of finding clave inside non-Latin music, and gives you exercises that make the connection explicit. The notation below uses two-bar layouts (bars: 2) with each clave hit at its natural note value. The point isn't to play Cuban music. The point is to recognize that the rhythmic gravity behind Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones and a thousand other records is the same gravity that organizes a son montuno. The drummer who hears clave as feel — not just as a written rhythm in a Latin chart — is operating at a higher rhythmic resolution than the drummer who doesn't.