[Dixielandjazz] Latin influences on early jazz--reset button

[Charles Suhor]

Thanks for the many and varied responses to my original query on this strand. I read them all, listened to YouTube sites, and read reviews of some of the books cited. It was all good, but my query wasn’t about bands playing particular songs from Spanish and Latin American sources—which might be called ad hoc or incidental inclusion. I was skeptical about what seem to have been exaggerated claims of Latin music being a "widespread or pervasive influence in early jazz,” aspects that became part jazz as we know it today. The most frequent attribution is the tango rhythms employed by Morton. It shows up often in many individual songs and performances, but the tango is a very limited rhythmic background rhythm, lacking the energy and thrust of syncopated jazz that’s often superimposed in solos over it. 

Early bands in N.O. played waltzes, marches, polkas, quadrilles, and other danceable music that came from a variety of sources. These, again, were incidental inclusions that don’t rise to the level of influences that shaped in enduring ways the vocabulary, syntax, and nuances of the music that came to be known as jazz. Dan Hardie in his excellent “Ancestry of Jazz” book makes a game attempt at ID-ing many musics that were part of the pre-20th century influences on jazz. While he cites musicological elements that appear in some ways in jazz, I didn’t see convincing evidence that Scotch-Irish music, for example, was actually heard in abundance, let alone digested and transformed, in early jazz and sustained as a thread in the music.

Getting back to Latin influences, they became part of the mainstream of jazz in non-inciodental ways in the late forties, when Dizzy Gillespie brought Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo into his big band. Stan Kenton hired Jack Constanza, an American who leaned bongo playing in Cuba. Machito’s rhythm section sparked Les Baxter’s otherwise commercial Sacre du Savage LP in 1952.  Soon, varied Latin rhythms (beyond the standard rhumba, tango, etc., beats) became part of the repertoire of every versatile young jazz drummer. I remember learning the guaracha beat around 1953 after hearing Max Roach perform on an Howard Rumsey LP. Afro-Cuban beats and other variations came to be employed in jazz settings and are staples of the modernist repertoire today. But again, these late arrivals to jazz, unknown in early years. 

At the risk of overextending this, it seems to me that that the Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians in particular assimilated jazz more readily than American jazzers assimilated Cuban and other Latin influences. Fast forward—there’s a wonderful “Latin Jazz” station on my Direct TV—a really refreshing option. (Sadly, pre-swing jazz, aka OKOM,isn’t among the channel selections)

Charlie 

Earlier query:
> I’ve always wondered if the claims of Spanish and Caribbean influences on 
> early jazz were exaggerated. The tango craze and Morton’s few left hand 
> tango rhythms are cited, but I don't hear a more widespread or pervasive 
> influence in early jazz The Spanish flamenco dance rhythms, with tapping 
> and castanets, seem a good candidate, but the where do those show up in 
> early jazz? I’d like to be convinced otherwise, but it seems that ragtime 
> syncopations that carried over to jazz and the fluid triplet feeling of 
> jazz phrasing are dependably derived from African sources. Any help from 
> you-all would be appreciated.
> 
> Charlie