[Dixielandjazz] Latin Jazz Roots in New Orleans?

[Stephen Barbone]

There are some interesting parallels to OKOM here.

Cheers,
Steve

October 24, 2002 - New York Times

Historians Are Doing the Mambo

By BEN RATLIFF

      By one measure, the invention of Latin jazz could be dated to
1940, when Machito Grillo started his band, the Afro-Cubans, here in New
York City. Before long he would be famous for his glorious combinations
of jazz harmony and phrasing with Cuban percussion. By another, it could
go back farther, to W. C. Handy's composing "St. Louis Blues" over a
habanera rhythm. Or to Louis Armstrong's recorded version of "El
Manisero" ("The Peanut Vendor"). Or to the early years of the century in
New Orleans, when Cuban and African and Creole cultures mixed so
effectively.

Whatever the measure, until now there has never been any serious
movement to study it, canonize it, historicize it. As recently as five
years ago jazz bands were still playing a watery pseudo-clave rhythm and
calling it Latin jazz. And the enormous amount of jazz scholarship
activity since the 1970's biographies, discographies, documentary films,
CD reissue work — had no equivalent on the Latin-jazz side. Now several
long-flowing streams of interest in Latin jazz are running together, and
it seems that the form is becoming recognized as official culture in
America, ready for heritage-building, specialized analysis and
education.

Jazz at Lincoln Center has put its imprimatur on the music with its own
in-house Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, led by the pianist and composer
Arturo O'Farrill; it will play two concerts this weekend, tomorrow at
Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture in the Bronx and on Saturday at
Brooklyn Center
for the Performing Arts. And the Smithsonian Institution in Washington
has taken note: a traveling multimedia exhibition, "Latin Jazz: La
Combinación Perfecta," opened there last weekend and will go to 10
American cities by 2006. (In conjunction with the exhibition, Chronicle
Books has published an
illustrated companion volume, and Smithsonian Folkways has released a CD
anthology of Latin Jazz.) Another show on the local roots of Latin music
is currently at the Museum of the City of New York.

The parallel rise of Latin jazz as an increasingly bigger part of
college-level jazz education also suggests that America is finally
beginning to come to grips with a music that has been around for longer
than most have noticed. "I think there's a practical reason for why this
is happening," said Mr. O'Farrill, who is the son of the venerated Chico
O'Farrill. (The elder O'Farrill, who died last year, composed long-form
works like "The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite" and "The Aztec Suite," both basic
to the repertory of the Lincoln Center group.) "As we see in popular
culture with the acceptance of Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin," he
continued, "the Latino population is a heavy demographic, and people in
positions of money and power are realizing that this is an economic
force to be reckoned with."

But, Mr. O'Farrill said, the vision of Wynton Marsalis, artistic
director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, was central to the creation of the
orchestra.

"Wynton asked me to come and rehearse the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra
at its benefit concert last year," he said. "They were having trouble
with some of the phrasing in one of the Latin pieces, and Wynton's
wheels started turning. He understood then that you can't just put jazz
players in a Latin band. The guys that play this music the best, I'm
telling you, are the guys that really know how to phrase in clave."
(Clave is the primary Afro-Cuban rhythm.)

"It takes years just to stop being terrorized by the clave," he added.
"And then if you listen to the music of Machito, Chico O'Farrill, Mario
Bauzá, this is music on a very high level. It's sophisticated
rhythmically, but also in terms of harmony, orchestration, arrangement.
It's on a par with the best of orchestral big-band jazz. Wynton
understood that this is specialized music that's equal and worthy of
investment in terms of bringing the highest-quality performance to it.
In doing so, he's taken a very bold step."

The Smithsonian's touring exhibition — small, colorful and introductory,
in the manner of exhibitions produced by Sites, the Smithsonian's
traveling-show extension — makes an effort to get the terms right and to
have the audience see Latin jazz in almost participatory terms. One
section, complete with pillows on the floor, is dedicated to a video of
the drummer and educator Bobby Sanabria demonstrating aspects of the
clave rhythm; there are bongos, shekeres, clave sticks and guiros
available for anyone to play along.

The exhibition is not collection based, because Sites has no
collections; aside from a 20-minute video on the evolution of Latin jazz
and some display cases holding items like Tito Puente's set of timbales,
much of the space is given over to tall, conga-shaped kiosks with texts
printed on them. Some of that material draws on the Smithsonian's jazz
oral history project.

Raúl Fernández, curator of the exhibition, conducted some of those
interviews — traveling to Stockholm, for instance, to speak with the
great Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés. Mr. Fernández sees the exhibition as
part of a growing movement to preserve the history of Latin jazz. "When
it comes to jazz, I've read biographies dating back to the 1930's with
big repositories of photographs and documents," he said. "In Latin jazz
there are few collections of significance."

The practical challenges Mr. Fernández encountered during four years of
work on the exhibition taught him, he said, that conservation shapes
history. "We met people who said, `I used to have this instrument, but I
didn't know it was important, so I threw it away.' " Other sources had
extensive collections of film and photographs, but didn't know their
provenance, and the film was of dubious quality.

The short film in the exhibition — which includes brief but tantalizing
scenes of the bandleaders Pérez Prado and Mongo Santamaría — features
Mr. Sanabria as one of its chief narrators; Mr. Sanabria also
co-produced "The Palladium: Where Mambo Was King," a documentary for the
Bravo channel that was first broadcast last June.

It's noteworthy that Latin jazz is breaking into America's big cultural
institutions, but it is perhaps even more meaningful that it is becoming
a greater part of college jazz education. Jazz programs in universities
all over the country are starting Latin-jazz ensembles.

Justin DiCioccio, assistant dean at the Manhattan School of Music in New
York, created a full-fledged Afro-Cuban jazz curriculum within the jazz
division when he started there four years ago. He began with an
Afro-Cuban jazz orchestra, led by Mr. Sanabria, who also teaches a class
on history and percussion in Latin music. (For the last decade Mr.
Sanabria has filled a similar role with the Latin jazz program at the
New School University.) The Manhattan program now has two different
smaller Latin combos and provides private lessons.

Some well-recognized young players in New York from Latin-music
backgrounds — John Benítez, Miguel Zenon, and Luis Bonilla, for example
— have enrolled at Manhattan to start or finish degrees; their presence
enlivens and alters the school.

"Up until recently even professional jazz musicians were not playing
Latin jazz correctly," said Mr. DiCioccio, who is a drummer as well as
an educator. "They just didn't understand the importance of the clave.
The Latin music that most young people were coming up with was a fusion
kind of thing — a salsa approach, or a rock approach, as opposed to the
deep tradition of the son clave and the rumba clave."

Latin jazz is a history of border-crossings between white, black and
Latin cultures: Examples range from Handy's sojourn in Cuba to the Cuban
conga player Chano Pozo's entry into the New York jazz world in 1947, to
the jazz and mambo scenes in New York intermingling because the clubs
for each kind of music were set close together. Mr. O'Farrill sees the
possibility, and the need, for a new kind of border crossing, this time
on the part of audiences.

"I think it's important that the Latino community not be scared of
institutional culture," he said. "It's been too long that we've allowed
this kind of high culture-low culture mentality to permeate us."

If the concern is about bringing in sufficient audiences to support
Latin jazz in a high-culture setting, however, there should be little to
worry about. All of Jazz at Lincoln Center's 21 Latin-jazz-themed
concerts since 1991 have sold out. "It's like it was in the 50's again,"
said Chris Washburne, a trombonist professor of music at Columbia. "The
jazz record companies start saying, `All right, you're a jazz musician,
jazz isn't selling, do a Latin album.' And I've played in Latin-music
concerts at both Lincoln Center and Carnegie that have sold out. The
thing is this: Latino culture in general supports music. It's part of
Latino society."