Latin Jazz

A Brief History of Latin Jazz

This article was written by Luis Moreno, a teacher in McAllen and genuine aficionado of Latin Jazz, at the request of the BSPA for the First Annual Brownsville Latin Jazz Festival in 1997.  Luis is the moderator for a Latin Jazz discussion group you can join though his website at www.jazzbuffalo.com.

By Luis Moreno

The diminutive black man brought both fists down at once in a mighty blow. It sounded like a thunderclap and the spirit of the water buffalo, from whose hide the drum was made, leaped and… LATIN JAZZ bounded onto the stage!

When Europeans begin arriving in Las Americas they bring with them the African slaves that they have been trading even before Columbus’ fateful voyage. The Africans bring with them the drums that they have been playing since the first dawn on the Savannah. Everywhere in Las Americas that the Europeans go and take their slaves they plant the seeds for an afro-influenced music to flower. This is referred to as the AFRICAN DIASPORA. While the afro-influenced music of the Caribbean, the United States, and Brazil have already achieved worldwide recognition and acceptance the afro-influenced music of Mexico, Colombia and Peru are only now emerging.

In Las Americas arose a fine tripartite mixture of African, European, and native influences: in the music as well as the people! European string and brass instruments and the piano combined with African and native drums and percussion to form the line-up used by LATIN JAZZ groups today.

But of course it didn’t happen overnight! For centuries the African and native influences were suppressed, persecuted, ignored. In the United States this inquisition resulted in the drum being taken away from the African slaves by masters fearful of rebellion. Fortunately this did not diminish one whit the afro-influenced music that flowered there. When the masters transferred their fears to the drum, the slaves merely transferred the rhythm to the cornet or the banjo or the clarinet or the fiddle... and thus arose the glorious sounds of NEW ORLEANS JAZZ.

From its inception NEW ORLEANS JAZZ has what Jelly Roll Morton called “the Latin tinge.” The physical proximity between Habana and New Orleans facilitated a confluence of styles between ports. Whereas JAZZ in the United States arose from black blues and spiritual traditions, in Cuba black musical traditions were preserved in the development of the syncretic religion known as santeria. The hallmark of both styles is a call and response, improvisational, approach to the music that is highly charged and interactive. In Cuban form, this improvisational approach is known as a descarga, and was evident in the sones played by septetos in the teens and twenties of the present century.

It was inevitable, then, that these two sister musics developed casting more than a few admiring glances at each other while sharing the same mirror, and fighting over who would dance with whom… and what shall we dance to next?

A ballroom was needed and New York City obliged. New York City built it and come they did. Wave after wave of musicians from every corner of Las Americas arrived bearing Afro-Latin percussive gifts that enriched New York much as galleons filled with New World gold enriched colonial Spain. Among the first to arrive from Cuba, on the heels of a RUMBA fever, and add their grain to this rich musical silt were Mario Bauzá, Frank Grillo “Machito”, Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill, and Israel Lopez “Cachao”. That was when GIANTS roamed the earth! They stepped back and forth between New York and JAZZ to Habana and Latin music with a facility and a fluency that is not strictly human. As musicians, composers, and arrangers, they contributed to the BIG BAND SWING of orchestras led by Benny Goodman, Chick Web, and Cab Calloway. At the same time they led their own orchestras and in their spare time invented the MAMBO!

In the JAZZ milieu they crossed paths with equally great innovators like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham, and Fats Navarro. A defining moment in the history of LATIN JAZZ occurred in 1947 when Luciano Pozo y González, the immortal “Chano” Pozo, joined Dizzy’s big band. There were CUBOP summits before and since but none so steeped in myth and bathed in pathos; when Chano was killed shortly thereafter in Harlem, some said it was because he had revealed secret rhythms of the Nigerian Abakuá cult.

The experimental CUBOP was never a match in popularity, however, for the MAMBO CRAZE of the1950’s. CUBOP, engaged in principally for its intrinsic pleasure by the musicians and enjoyed by a small cadre of fans, did not entice to the dance floor as the MAMBO did. The MAMBO, much more than a dance fad, is the war-horse that the declining BIG BAND ERA rode into its sunset. It is a marathon from which the last couple has yet to drop out. TITO PUENTE, whose career span parallels the development of LATIN JAZZ, is almost solely responsible for the MAMBO’s continued privileged position. It is impossible to discern who owes the greater debt: the MAMBO to TITO PUENTE, for its longevity, or Tito to the MAMBO for making him the KING OF LATIN JAZZ.

The Cuban embargo threw a boulder in the LATIN JAZZ current but after the splash, the eddies that flowed into the vacuum, nourished the idiom from two fresh sources. Just as JAZZ was created by blacks who were generations removed from slavery, in New York something qualitatively new was created by musicians generationally as well as culturally removed from the land of Jose Martí. It contained elements of Cuban music but with large dosages of JAZZ, SOUL, and even ROCK thrown in. The voices were different because the singers (as well as all the other members of the group) were just as likely to be of Puerto Rican as of Cuban ancestry.

More! In keeping with the times the sound was more electric and the lyrics laden with social content. To the Cuban descarga tradition, for which they had an unfathomable appetite, they added elements of Puerto Rican BOMBA and PLENA, and Dominican MERENGUE.

Larry Harlow, Ray Barretto, Willie Colon, Ruben Blades, Johnny Pacheco, Carlos Santana and Eddie Palmieri among others, were the architects of what the world came to know as SALSA.

The second source of fresh ideas in the 1960’s came from Brazil. Afro-Brazilian SAMBA and BOSSA NOVA gave jazz in general and LATIN JAZZ in particular a new impetus that is still ongoing. While Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank got there first, it was Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz that initiated jazz fans in the United States to the work of Joao Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Luis Bonfá. In all the important JAZZ FUSION groups of the seventies the sin qua non was the Brazilian percussionist. Among those distinguished for their service to jazz are Airto Moreira, Paulinho da Costa, Guilherme Franco and Nana Vasconcelos. What Brazilian musicians found when they came to the states was a well developed LATIN JAZZ concept and an audience primed to appreciate the lilting coolness of BRAZILIAN JAZZ by decades of Cuban fire.

LATIN JAZZ has in a very short time developed into the largest growth sector in jazz. It quickly outgrew its parents AFRO-CUBAN JAZZ and AFRO-CARIBBEAN JAZZ simply because it is being franchised at lightning speed from Argentina to Germany, Spain and France to Italy, and Panama.

LATIN JAZZ takes root. At international jazz festivals mainstream jazz artists can only look with envy at the enthusiastic response given LATIN JAZZ groups. In 1994 the subcategory of LATIN JAZZ was created in the Grammy Awards ostensibly in long overdue recognition of this phenomenon.

In effect, LATIN JAZZ has become the lingua franca of jazz enthusiasts the world over. In the United States the idiom has for decades vacillated between a more commercial and accessible salsa-jazz (for the dancers) and something closer to the CUBOP ideal (for the after-hours musicians and the initiated).

TITO PUENTE’s most laudable accomplishment is the finesse with which he has avoided this dichotomy. As a popularizer, Tito is peerless! But never in the decades of unwavering popularity has the integrity of his music lapsed. On the contrary, some benchmark Latin Jazz albums (“Salsa Meets Jazz”-Concord Picante,1988 and “Tito Puente’s Golden Latin Jazz All Stars In Session”-1994 RMM Records) are the result of Tito’s singular devotion to bringing together the best musicians from both camps.

In other countries where it has taken root, notably Argentina and Spain there are exotic varieties: one may now speak of a TANGO-JAZZ and a FLAMENCO-JAZZ as sub-genres. What happened to Cuba? LATIN JAZZ is alive and well in the country of its birth! Groups led by Chucho Valdes, the sorely missed Emiliano Salvador, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and most recently Jesus Alemañy, give credence to the belief that if CUBAN JAZZ appeared to magically stand still during the decades of the embargo, then it is just the eye of the hurricane!

The drummer arrives with Saint Peter and the music in the lobby is a piano and conga duet…

---

©2001 BSPA - All Rights Reserved