Latin Jazz

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.

"Latin Jazz: the Other Jazz is an issue oriented historical and ethnographic study of Latin jazz that focuses upon 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 in 18th and 19th 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. As the book title suggests, Latin jazz is explored both as a specific sub-genre 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' 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. Jazz is a product of the black, brown, tan, mulatto, beige, and white experience throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. This book acknowledges, pays tribute to, and celebrates the diversity of culture, experience, and perspectives that are foundational to jazz. By doing so, the music's legacy is shown to transcend way beyond stylistic distinction, national borders, and the imposition of the black and 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"--

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