How Did Latin Americans Influence Jazz

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Early jazz musicians in New Orleans performed for a variety of reasons and audiences: private parties, dances, funerals, marches, and innumerable other more informal events situated in bars and honkytonks. (CarmeN)

“Latin music styles (i.e., Caribbean and South and Central American) have shared a common history with jazz, intersecting, cross influencing, and at times seeming inseparable, as both have played prominent roles in each other's development.” (Washburn) This quote from Christopher Washburn’s article “Latin jazz: The other jazz” sums up the issue that since the beginning of jazz, music from Cuba and the Caribbean has been just as important to the rhythm, melody and improvisation to jazz as the blues, ragtime, European or military …show more content…

Latin influence on jazz musicians spans much longer than a century ago when it was first recorded. The complex Afro-Cuban rhythms, dance and melodies have influenced American jazz artists such as W.C. Handy, Jelly Roll Morton, Buddy Bolden, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. The Afro Cuban rhythms used by these musicians essentially come from a popular danzon or dance beat that was used by musicians and is a product of many different types of cultures mixing with each other. The son clave rhythm is the foundation of the most popular Cuban music still used and popular today. The rhythm usually follows a 3 beat-2 beat pattern that occasionally is turned backwards for some of a song to a 2 beat-3 beat pattern. This pattern is a type of call and response structure that is very common in African and Afro-Cuban music. One simple way to understand and hear the beat applied is the classic “Bo Diddley beat” used in most of his songs. This example shows how the Afro-Cuban rhythms, a product of acculturation, is so adaptable and hidden in plain sight all over jazz and American music. In this essay, I will explore how Afro-Cuban …show more content…

In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.” (Lomax 62) This quote from Jelly Roll Morton explains that these Afro-Cuban rhythms that were so close to his home in New Orleans were essential in the creation of “America’s first Art form” The first example of Afro-Cuban music infecting jazz can be seen in what Morton called the “Spanish tinge”, his nickname for popular dance rhythm called the habanera. The habanera, as it is known outside of Havana and Cuba, stemmed from a fusion of African drumming and Spanish-European dance called the contradanza and now known as danzon. The contradanza was a traditional country dance from England in 18th and early 19th centuries that became popular across Europe. The word contradanza in Spain or contredanse in France is a transmutation from the word country dance. This dance was popular in Spain but it was “Franco-Haitian slaves seeking refuge in Oriente in the 1790s, however, not the Spanish, who introduced the genre to island, in the form of the French contredanse.” (PBS.com) This transmutation of words shows another example of the melding of cultures in the Caribbean and Cuba, this melding of culture is one of the main factors jazz melded in New

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