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Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider,
Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Other Jazz
- Chapter 1: Why call it Latin Jazz? Afro-Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Cubop, Caribbean Jazz, Jazz Latin, or just... Jazz: the politics of naming an intercultural music
- Chapter 2: Caribbean and Latin American Reverberations and the First Birth of Latin Jazz: New Orleans and the Spanish Tinge
- Chapter 3: The Second Birth of Latin Jazz: Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington Do the Rumba
- Chapter 4: El Tema del Apollo: Latin American and Caribbean music in Harlem
- Chapter 5: The "Othering" of Latin Jazz
- Chapter 6: "More Cowbell": Latin Jazz in the 21st Century
- Epilogue
- References
About the author
Christopher Washburne is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University and the Founder and Director of Columbia's Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program. As a trombonist, he has performed on over 150 recordings and leads his own SYOTOS Latin jazz band and the Rags and Roots jazz band.
Summary
Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz uncovers Latin jazz's rich intercultural heritage, exploring its Caribbean and Latin American musical roots, its ability to transcend genre boundaries, and its inseparability from issues of ethnicity and nation.
Additional text
The jazz world is both unified and fractioned. It presents itself as a tradition, and yet, the question of what is or is not jazz continues to be asked. In his book, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz, ethnomusicologist Christopher Washburne teases out the separation of Latin jazz from the rest of the jazz world by tracing the overlapping aspects of jazz and Latin jazz histories from the colonial to the contemporary era...To do so, he focuses on the processes of globalization, canonization, race relations, and genre construction and how they intersect with Latin jazz history and, more broadly, jazz history.
