Jazz as Intercultural Dialogue at the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival

Chapter Four consists of an in-depth analysis of jazz in US-Cuban musical exchange along with an ethnographic description of Havana’s International Jazz Plaza Festival. Cuba’s relationship to jazz became complicated after the revolution. Performers on the island had to carefully negotiate their desire to play jazz with the Castro government’s descriptions of jazz as imperialist music. The 2012 Havana Jazz Plaza Festival and the US musicians who played at the event are analyzed in-depth to show how participants navigated US-Cuban relations to perform in a festival that uses jazz as a form of intercultural dialogue. Arturo O’Farrill, a New York musician of Cuban heritage who was regularly featured in the jazz festival, illustrates the significance of Latin jazz in musical diplomacy and how the definition of jazz is redefined through the festival lens.

Caribbean and Latin American Reverberations and the First Birth of Latin Jazz

This chapter documents the strong ties of the Caribbean and Latin America to the formative period of jazz and how that influence reverberated throughout the twentieth century. It argues that the strong foundational influence of Caribbean and Latin American music on pre-jazz styles makes the birth of jazz synchronous with the birth of Latin jazz. By building on the work of a number of scholars who have recently begun to tackle this complexity through historical studies of immigration patterns and the social and political development of New Orleans throughout the 1700s and 1800s and by conducting a “sonic archeology” of jazz styles throughout the twentieth century, reverberations of jazz’s pre-history are uncovered and shown to resound loudly. Along with a discussion of the social history of New Orleans, the focus is on the function of certain rhythmic cells in the jazz repertoire that are most typically associated with Caribbean and Latin American styles.

“More Cowbell”

This chapter is an ethnographic study of New York–based Latin jazz in the twenty-first century. It uses five prominent bandleaders actively shaping the future of Latin jazz as case studies—Eddie Palmieri, Michele Rosewoman, Carlos Henríquez, Miguel Zenón, and Bobby Sanabria—demonstrating how the historical specificities and developments discussed in the preceding chapters continue to reverberate and inform the music made in the present. Their voices and perspectives demonstrate how each of these musicians adopts unique strategies to navigate the terrain of inequity and adversity. They represent significant trends that will assert much influence on generations of musicians to come. Their combined perspectives suggest that Latin jazz is not, nor ever should it have been, an “other jazz.” Its presence can no longer be silenced or erased. All of the music and musicians associated with jazz deserve to be fully embraced and recognized.

The “Othering” of Latin Jazz

This chapter discusses various ways the Caribbean and Latin American music styles continued to share a common history with jazz from the 1940s to the 1960s, intersecting, cross-influencing, and at times seeming inseparable, as each has played seminal roles in the other’s development. Three case studies are discussed: the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, the Jazz Samba recording by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, and Mongo Santamaría’s “Watermelon Man” recording. In much of the jazz literature, these musicians and their seminal roles have been diminished or downright ignored. This chapter explores the reasons for these omissions and the systematic “othering” of Latin jazz. It examines the forces at play in their continued exclusion; explores how this omission is tied to the economic marginalization of jazz, racism, nationalism, tensions between art and popular music, and canon construction; and identifies what is at stake when Latin jazz is included.

Why Call It Latin Jazz? Afro-Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Cubop, Caribbean Jazz, Jazz Latin, or Just . . . Jazz

This chapter explores how Latin jazz is positioned and named and the primary discursive contestations associated with the genre. What is focused on in particular is how musicians exert agency by manipulating generic boundaries as a negotiative tool. With a focus on two prominent bandleaders as case studies, Arturo O’Farrill and Ray Barretto, discursive strategies embodying a complex of subjectivities are explored and serve as a lens into the fundamental political undergirding of intercultural production. What becomes apparent is that self-conceived notions held by musicians concerning how to label and perform this music prove to be neither static nor terminal in nature but rather must be imagined as mobile, fluid, and changeable, always strategic, and at times even seeming fickle. What is revealed is the pendular, self-positioning discourse that makers of this music engage in, in order to navigate through and strategically position themselves within this at times adversarial milieu. The politics of place, nation, class, economics, and race as well as the complex historical relationships inform their fluid dance of genre imaginings.

Introduction

Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz explores various theoretical framings that serve as the primary avenue through which to approach a number of case studies. These frames, broadly speaking, include the central tropes and social forces at play at the core of Latin jazz music making. They include the dynamics of intercultural exchange, the discursive practices associated with genre contestations, and the social forces involved in canonization. The beginning of the book maps out the various social terrains associated with Latin jazz and transparently demonstrates the author’s particular biases, assumptions, and hypotheses. It connects how broader issues of economics, nation, race, and ethnicity are uniquely tied to various sonic manifestations and performance practices of Latin jazz throughout the twentieth century. The book then narrows its focus for each of the following chapters, highlighting historical moments, individual musicians, places, and events that have played key roles in the trajectory of this music.

Latin Jazz

Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz is an issue-oriented historical and ethnographic study that focuses on key moments in the history of the music in order to unpack the cultural forces that have shaped its development. The broad historical scope of this study, which traces the dynamic interplay of Caribbean and Latin American musical influence from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial New Orleans through to the present global stage, provides an in-depth contextual foundation for exploring how musicians work with and negotiate through the politics of nation, place, race, and ethnicity in the ethnographic present. Latin jazz is explored both as a specific subgenre of jazz and through the processes involved in its constructed “otherness.” Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz provides a revisionist perspective on jazz history by embracing and celebrating jazz’s rich global nature and heralding the significant and undeniable Caribbean and Latin American contributions to this beautiful expressive form. This study demonstrates how jazz expression reverberates entangled histories that encompass a tapestry of racial distinctions and blurred lines between geographical divides. This book acknowledges, pays tribute to, and celebrates the diversity of culture, experience, and perspectives that are foundational to jazz. Thus, the music’s legacy is shown to transcend far beyond stylistic distinction, national borders, and the imposition of the black/white racial divide that has only served to maintain the status quo and silence and erase the foundational contributions of innovators from the Caribbean and Latin America.

Epilogue

This chapter serves as the epilogue and offers a new conception of jazz and Latin jazz that embraces a rhizomic model accentuating the entanglement of the histories of the Caribbean and the Americas (North and South) and how all manifestations of jazz/Latin jazz are intercultural, transnational, and multivocal at their core. Conceived of in this way, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Tito Puente, Machito, Mario Bauzá, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and every other musician discussed in this book are unified and interconnected on the most fundamental and foundational level. The music is a product of the black, brown, tan, mulatto, beige, and white experience throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. By paying tribute to and celebrating the diversity of culture, experience, and perspectives that are foundational to jazz, the music’s legacy is shown to transcend far beyond stylistic distinction, national borders, and the imposition of the black/ white racial divide that has only served to maintain the status quo in the United States.