OK, Kevin wrote back about questions 1 and 4 but not a concise "here is the answer" and also pretty long so I'll add his comments probably in 2 posts.
KEVIN:
I've been watching all these hip hop documentaries - and it's amazing how specifically people like Grandmaster Flash spell out in words what I think the Cubans were doing with gears in a much less calculated way. To paraphrase, Flash says that as he spun whole tracks he noticed that people danced differently (and more enthusiastically) on the breaks (the equivalent of gears in funk and rock), and then he spent long hours figuring out how to use 2 turntables to bring those breaks in whenever he wanted. His goal was to be able to kind of control the dancers like the leader of a rueda. Then he tells this funny story about how he got his whole schtick together and unveiled it at a big dance party and everyone stopped dancing and just listened in amazement, so he was totally bummed out because he was trying to make them dance, but of course, it caught on and worked as planned.
With the Cubans, it's less articulated, but obviously "Manos p'arriba!!" means presión or pedal - the singer describes the change in the dancing and the band changes with the crowd. The best anecdote on this was from Tomasito. On Con la conciencia, the 1997 band had pedal/presión and bomba, but no middle gear - no "masacote" - so they were working one out, which Tomasito calls "songo con efectos" and which they used in amazing ways all through the live performances of 1998 - that was probably the key year for PFG and gears. So his story was that they tried it out (like other stuff they tried out periodically) at El Palacio or wherever, and the dancers went wild and that was when they knew they had a keeper, so Paulito gave it a hand signal and brought it in in almost every possible order with other gears. And built into this particular masacote was all this room for Yoel and Tomasito to improvise off of each other so it was just incredibly great and then if PFG really wanted to go nuts, he could go from that to bomba!
Every Cuban band has a different approach to gears (except of course that some just use somebody else's). Irakere's Bacalao con pan (1974) had definite rock concert style breakdowns but I don't think it was really gears in the sense of interacting with the dancers. NG had the first bomba, and that actually had some PR bomba stuff in it, but a much earlier source of what came to be timba bomba started in the Carter Administration's "thaw" when Jaco Pastorius played in Cuba with Weather Report (probably 1979 or so). He was using what we now think of as bomba slides in a soloistic way, but the Cubans used them as part of the whole dance/gear system and somewhere along the line the idea of playing them with that ferocity of the Iyá when the dancer is going into paroxysms of abandonment - that's really what bomba is in terms of timba - it's purpose in life is to make the girl tembleque herself to the point of orgasm or if you prefer a different analogy, to have a santería-like religious transcendent experience like they always do at those batá ceremonies where the dancer sort of loses control and gets "mounted by the santo", or whatever it is for each person - for me as a listener I just sit and lose my mind with ecstasy - but it's that ultimate emotional release and the bass slides are the driving force, but strangely, a lot of Cuban bassists either don't get this, or don't like it, or can't do it, but oh when they do! (Alain, Paceiro, Arango, that guy Gastón who plays with Chucho, Ernesto who was with CH and now is in the Bay ... who am I forgetting?)
Then of course you have to take into account how the band uses the gears.
- In CH and all their disciples like Maikel Blanco, the gears are written into the arrangement and done the same way at the same place.
- In Revé, Elito has one signal and that starts this long sequence of gears that works on most songs, with the same parts.
- In the classic late 90s Bamboleo, Lazarito gave a fist to start the presión and then in-between the phrases, the "captain" of the rhythm section (first it was bassist Rubio, then conguero Duniesky) shows a certain number of fingers which can make the breaks different each time - very cool - then it goes to bomba at a pre-determined time and then back to marcha, unless Lázaro does the fist pump again, which I call a "double dip", so you get presión-bomba-presión-bomba-marcha.
- Now we get to the really great ones - Paulito and Issac. Paulito 98 had hand signals for presión, masacote, marcha, marcha de mambo, muela and bomba and at his peak, he used them in only semi-predictable ways - in the others, each gear has to go to the next expected gear, but PFG had the capacity (which he didn't always use) to do unexpected things. PFG also had special pedal efectos for each song. So unlike Revé, where it's the same fantastic Uyuyui sequence on every song, Paulito had different ones for different songs, just like he had different piano and conga parts for specific songs. This was the great promise of late 90s timba: improvising form and having non-generic tumbaos in every instrument. But they dropped the ball.
- Issac was much looser but had all sorts of crazy gears that were different for each of the 3 great gear bands: Melón/Alain (97), los Yoeles (stolen from PFG) in 99 and the very short-lived band with Frank Rubio, Bombón, Pachá and Cucurucho. That band (the one from the Marina Hemingway live concerts on your youtube channel) had more stuff going that anyone ever. I think I counted nine different ways they had of getting into bomba. It was crazy. Then Issac made a rare mistake. He brought in Oscarito Valdés as musical director and all 4 of the guys I mentioned left or got fired and Oscarito (who had no affinity for gears - he was a bombastic jazz drummer) brought in his jazz rhythm section. The system wasn't passed down! I was physically present at Casa de la Música Miramar when Los Yoeles and Majá were leaving Issac for foreign countries, but doing so on friendly terms, so they had a gig with two pianists, two drummers, etc. and the old guys were showing the new guys the system, so nothing was lost, but the new guys (Bombón, Rubio) added on top of it and that's how that incredible band came to play those 2 incredible Hemingway concerts.
But in any case, the timba guys didn't have a Grandmaster Flash to articulate the theory behind all this - it was just the typical cuban thing were they just do what they do and everyone sort of subconscious understands how to do it without bothering to think about it, and so they also didn't think about how cool it could be to follow the timba innovations to their logical creative extensions, so timba sort of became a legacy genre, everything reduced to formulas. So now we have to wait for the next "named genre" to arise, as it always does. Of course, every time I say this, somebody sends me a YouTube of some new band and I start to think we might be about to explode again. Maybe they already are! I mean, by now, all the giants of the 90s are middle aged. Who knows what might come bubbling up out of la ENA!
As for merensongo, we should include Changuito and El Yulo because they were the first to come up with special parts for specific songs. Later these started getting reused on multiple songs, especially merensongo and that other one where the congas play two high tones followed by two low tones. When El Yup lo went to jail, the new guy stopped making up new parts.
