Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/21567417.67.2.10
ISSN2156-7417
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
Resumo“Jazz is a global music and transcultural in its stylistic scope. It has been so since its inception” (3). So states Christopher Washburne in the introduction to Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz. This is not a new idea for ethnomusicologists. However, as Washburne points out, many jazz historians have resisted “foreign” influences that complicate conventional narratives of jazz as a uniquely American, or African American, creation. Hence the “othering” of Latin jazz, and the subtitle of his book. Washburne aims to deconstruct this “othering” with evidence that offers “a corrective to the lacuna in jazz scholarship, acknowledging and celebrating the significant Caribbean and Latin American contributions to jazz” (5).Washburne is unusually situated to undertake such a task. He is a white, non-Latino musician from the rural Midwest who had little contact with Latin music or culture until moving to Boston where, in the late 1980s, he joined a salsa band as a trombonist. Since then, he has performed and recorded with scores of Latin jazz luminaries, and for three decades he has led SYOTOS, one of New York's premier Latin jazz bands. This experience, along with his training as an ethnomusicologist, positions him as an insider/outsider—a self-identified “constituent observer” (13)—who is deeply embedded as a performer in the music culture he studies and writes about as an academic.Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz deftly combines history, ethnography, and personal anecdote. The volume is not, by Washburne's admission, a comprehensive history of Latin jazz, but rather a big idea book focusing on the development (and othering) of this music in New York City, the primary site of his dual careers as performer and educator. The work is organized around fourteen case studies of influential practitioners, ranging from historical figures Don Azpiazú, Frank “Machito” Grillo, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo to contemporary band leaders Arturo O'Farrill, Bobby Sanabria, and Michele Rosewoman. These individuals are viewed through a series of theoretical frames that allow the author to explore the “central tropes” of the music: “the dynamics of intercultural exchange, the discursive practices associated with genre construction, and the social forces involved in canonization” (13).Chapter 1 delves into the conundrum of genre labeling by focusing on the travails of band leader Arturo O'Farrill and his struggles with Wynton Marsalis to name and maintain the Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra and percussionist Ray Barretto's efforts to pivot between the worlds of “modern” and “Latin” jazz. In chapter 2, Washburne turns to the history of early New Orleans jazz, offering an extensive review of the literature establishing the prominence of French and Spanish Caribbean rhythms in the city's early creole music. Jelly Roll Morton's “Spanish tinge” is interpreted not simply as an element of musical style but as a metaphor for the interplay of southern Black American and Caribbean island traditions in the multicultural space of the Crescent City.In chapter 3, “The Second Birth of Latin Jazz,” Washburne examines Don Azpiazú’s classic 1930 recording of “The Peanut Vendor,” a song that signaled the growing popularity of Cuban music in the United States. Azpiazú’s original recording and subsequent covers by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and others reveal how jazz artists from diverse cultural backgrounds created music that recast notions of race “from a simple black/white binary so prominent in jazz writing into a black/brown/tan/mulatto/beige/white universe, a blurred space that more closely resembles where jazz resides” (86). Discussions of cultural blending continue in chapter 4, where Washburne documents the history of Latin music at the cathedral of African American popular culture, Harlem's Apollo Theater, and the contributions of iconic Latin performers Mario Bauzá, Frank “Machito” Grillo, Chano Pozo (with Dizzy Gillespie), and Celia Cruz, who appeared there throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.Washburne devotes the bulk of chapter 5 to how and why Latin jazz has been omitted from the broader jazz canon. Late twentieth-century college textbooks in the United States seldom referred to Latin jazz or its major figures. Likewise, neither the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (1973), to which several of those textbooks are keyed, nor Ken Burns's documentary film Jazz (2001), with its widely circulated companion recordings, offers more than a glimpse of Latin jazz. Powerful canonizing forces such as DownBeat magazine and the New York/New Jersey jazz radio station WBGO were initially reluctant to cover and broadcast anything other than North American jazz. The reasons for such omissions, Washburne argues, were sometimes ideological. The move by Gunther Schuller and other mid-century scholars to reenvision jazz as a form of “art music” sought to separate “serious” modern jazz from its lowbrow, commercial forms, including styles associated with the Latin dance genres rumba, mambo, cha-cha, and salsa. Others feared that emphasizing too many outside sources—particularly Caribbean and South American musics—could undermine the distinctive African American legacy of jazz as promoted by Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Wynton Marsalis, and Ken Burns. The final chapter looks to Latin jazz in the twenty-first century, focusing on pianists Eddie Palmieri and Michele Rosewoman, bassist Carlos Henriquez, saxophonist Miguel Zenon, and drummer Bobby Sanabria. By highlighting the progressive work of these artists, activists, and educators, Washburne aims to expand the canon to include musicians who are exploring new directions and reinvigorating contemporary jazz with Caribbean and Latin American styles.Washburne proffers provocative conclusions regarding the global and intercultural nature of Latin jazz, but his evidence is drawn from a circumscribed set of musicians who are not representative of the much broader Caribbean and Latin American sphere he invokes. Indeed, except for North Americans Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, who incorporated Afro-Cuban genres, and Charlie Byrd, who explored Brazilian samba, all of Washburne's artists trace their roots to Cuba or Puerto Rico. We hear nothing of the practitioners of Vodou jazz from Haiti, merengue jazz from the Dominican Republic, calypso jazz from Trinidad and Tobago, or the myriad styles exemplifying the fusion of jazz and popular dance musics from South America. In fairness, Washburne makes it clear that his book is not intended to be exhaustive in scope. But new millennium Latin jazz in New York has diversified well beyond its core Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican roots, and widening the net would provide more evidence for his broader thesis. There will hopefully be future projects undertaken by jazz scholars inspired by the global perspective that Washburne has charted.Therein lies the greatest contribution of Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz. Washburne challenges us to construct a new and more inclusive narrative that envisions jazz as a process that is flexible, open to multiple influences, and constantly evolving. While greatly indebted to African American innovators, that process has never been totally defined by race or constrained by national boundaries; rather, it has demonstrated the ability to adapt to cultural settings across the Americas, the Caribbean, and beyond. This leads us back to Washburne's initial supposition that the story of Latin jazz reveals that all jazz, at its core, is global and intercultural in nature. Musicians, scholars, critics, educators, and students should take notice—“jazz as global music” is the foundation upon which future jazz histories must be built.
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