Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz proves this rule perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record. Acclaimed musician and jazz scholar Christopher Washburne traces the roots of Latin jazz back to 18th and 19th century colonial New Orleans, and follows its evolution to the 21st century global stage. Washburne provides a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it. Along the way, he highlights the African American and Latin American traditions whose influence is still present in Latin jazz today, exploring cultural centers like New York and Cuba, moments like the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of pan-Africanism, and the careers of musicians like Chano Pozo and Tito Puente. Told from the illuminating perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz proves the genre's remarkable transcendence beyond stylistic, national, and racial borders.
Industry Reviews
"The volume is well organized and includes an extensive bibliography...Highly Recommended." -- J.C. Wanser, CHOICE
"Absorbing, illuminating, thought provoking, this is the scholarly work that Latin jazz knew it needed." -- Songlines
"Chris Washburne has put together an amazingly well researched and engaging book. It not only serves as an illuminating guide through the longstanding and complex relationship between Latin America and Jazz music, but makes the case for Latin American Jazz musicians as major players in the development and evolution of this genre. Highly recommended." -- Miguel Zenon , (Saxophonist, Composer and Educator)
"Dr. Washburne has the receipts! Informed by the author's decades as a working musician and bandleader, this passionate work of high-level scholarship counterpoints historical inquiry with lived ecstatic experience. In laying out his case for the multicultural nature of music, Washburne goes straight to the thorny issue of how racialized and nationalized genre divides have repeatedly erased the fundamentally modern, world-shaking, Afro-Latin music from the
overarching jazz narrative. Meanwhile, he's eager to introduce you to the rich world of musical geniuses who are living and creating in clave right now." -- Ned Sublette, author of Cuba and Its Music
"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." -- Ray Allen, Ethnomusicology
"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." -- Hannah Krall, Jazz and Culture 6.1
