Opinion

Sergio Ospina Romero is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidad de los Andes (in Colombia), and from the fall of 2021 will be Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research activities deal primarily with sound reproduction technologies, jazz, and transnationalism in the early twentieth century. He is the author of two books: Dolor que canta (2017) and Fonógrafos Ambulantes (forthcoming), and of various pieces that have appeared in journals and books across the Americas. Awards include Cornell University’s Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize, the Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and honorary mentions at the Otto Mayer Serra Award and the Premio de Musicología de Casa de las Américas.

 

“The danzón is a tropical ragtime” are the words of singer and songwriter Harry Belafonte in Roots of Rhythm, a documentary about the musical configuration of the Caribbean and the way North Americans were “captivated” by Latin rhythms. Statements like this are not only condescending. In the end, they are just another way of reaffirming old prejudices and cultural hierarchies. In other words, danzón is a legitimate musical practice only to the extent that it is comparable to ragtime, which ultimately contributes more to the legitimization of ragtime—and U.S. music more broadly—than to the characterization of Caribbean styles. Similar expressions have abounded also in relation to Latin American musicians. Consider, for example, when, in light of his abilities as a trumpet player, Colombian bandleader Pacho Galán (1906-1988) was nicknamed “the Colombian Harry James”. For many, a phrase like “Ragtime is a North American danzón” could be as outrageous or inconceivable as presenting Harry James as “the North American Pacho Galán”. Indeed, the recurrence of some expressions and the bizarreness of others is a symptom of the power imbalances in the narratives that usually link the musics of the global North and the global South.    

            The globalization of jazz offers a paradigmatic point for consideration. The imperial adventures of the U.S. around the world since the early twentieth century not only consolidated its political and economic supremacy in the global arena; the same (neo)colonial moves also enhanced the visibility and circulation of the products created by its cultural industries. In this vein, jazz shifted from being a universe of racialized and marginalized musical practices from New Orleans to becoming a “national” symbolic emblem and even a diplomatic tool in times of the Cold War.[1] Thus, at least two narratives have dominated the scholarly scenario about the worldwide dissemination of jazz. On the one hand is the portrayal of jazz as a quintessential U.S. American musical form, a portrayal rooted in the assumption that jazz originated and developed exclusively within the geographical and cultural coordinates of the United States. In this light, the international spread of jazz would be but its manifestation as a “unique gift to the world”—“an integral element”, as Taylor Atkins once said, “in a self-aggrandizing narrative of [U.S.] American ingenuity, dynamism, and creativity.”[2] Alongside most jazz histories, including emblematic texts like those by Gioia or DeVeaux and Giddings, few productions exemplify this narrative as clearly as Ken Burns’ infamous TV series Jazz. But the alignment of jazz histories with the ideological imperative of U.S. exceptionalism is not only fraught with asymmetries in terms of cultural prestige and cultural subordination. While often featuring U.S. performers as the only authentic innovators and rendering local musicians around the globe as mere imitators, jazz histories have frequently lost sight of the complex cultural scenario that made jazz possible in the first place, and that intricately connects jazz with other musics in the Caribbean and throughout the African diaspora.

            On the other hand, the second narrative seems to represent a challenge to the first one, but in the end, it mostly reaffirms it. Briefly put, it begins by bringing to the forefront other jazz scenes, from South East Asia to Europe to Latin America, appreciating them in their own right. Still, the narrative articulation between these scenes, notwithstanding the richness of a novel transnational approach, keeps dwelling, for the most part, in a framework that insists on distinguishing a “source”—the U.S.—from its diffusion, even when suggesting rather appealing ideas such as that of a “jazz diaspora”.[3] Thus, even while a burgeoning collection of studies seems to mobilize an interest to decenter U.S. jazz, the canonical force of the “source” continues to be the most significant factor to validate jazz activities elsewhere. Just as it happened with Pacho Galán half a century ago, the leitmotif remains unaltered whenever authors argue that such or such musician can be considered the Nigerian, Japanese, or Argentinian Charlie Parker. Furthermore, this second narrative has entailed, in some studies dealing with “global jazz”, a relativization—or even an erasure—of blackness for the sake of an argument that seemingly celebrates racial democracy in the international ventures of jazz.

            Taking advantage, in particular, of the cultural and musical proximity—and almost intimacy—between Caribbean musics and U.S. jazz, I think a different narrative might be possible. Rather than looking into a historical sequence that begins in New Orleans and then exerts its influence on the Caribbean and beyond, I am drawn to consider, to begin with, the extent to which both U.S. jazz and other dance musics across the Caribbean share the cultural history of the African diaspora. In my view, jazz in an afrodiasporic musical practice developed out of a series of transnational stylistic flows and exchanges, so that U.S. jazz is but one of its manifestations. Time and again, the use of a label like “jazz” to describe local musical practices is not necessarily an attempt to bridge the gap with U.S. jazz, but it can be a way to express their autonomy and their sense of belonging to a diasporic universe of hybrid musical forms.      

             Given my interest in the sonority of Caribbean dance orchestras from the 1930s onwards, many of them arranged in the fashion of big bands early in the day, my research has relied on what I can hear in their recordings. By listening in detail to recordings made by orchestras throughout the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, like those led by Bebo Valdés (1918-2013), Concepción “Cuchito” Castro (1907-1982), Billo Frómeta (1915-1988), Lucho Bermúdez (1912-1994) and Pacho Galán (1906-1988), I have identified some shared characteristics between them and U.S. big bands at the time. While sometimes these characteristics point towards definite musical and technical features—including voicings, the pitches in a chord, the melodic contour of improvisations, or some interpretative gestures like the use of vibrato—at other times they signal other issues which are much more difficult to describe, analyze or compare, such as the intentionality of expression, rhythmic elasticity, certain instances of musical humor, the groove, and “el sabor de la música”—or the music’s flavor. Clearly, not all these Caribbean musicians were in the business of performing jazz, even less so U.S. jazz. Yet their style developed within networks entangled with U.S. jazz and other improvisatory Afro-Caribbean musics, musics that were indeed crucial in the first place, as many authors have demonstrated, for the development of the type of musical practices that we call jazz.

            I am not trying to re-introduce these musicians and these orchestras as jazz, nor to think of them now as “the Cuban Bud Powell”, “the Colombian Benny Goodman”, or “the Dominican Stan Kenton Orchestra”. On the contrary, I think it is time to go past the framework of how certain traditions, and jazz in particular, have influenced others. Such an approach would imply accepting that jazz is an unchanging musical form, the exclusive prerogative of a country or a specific cultural context—stable enough as to determining prescriptive musical parameters. Although many jazz histories insist on portraying jazz in that way, my argument points to a different direction. U.S. jazz and Caribbean music do not only share a set of aesthetic traits via their common belonging to the legacy of the African diaspora. They also share a legacy of colonial domination, racial discrimination, and transoceanic exchanges between multiple and varied cultural constituencies; ultimately, a shared legacy of hybridity.

            At various points across the Caribbean, including the South of the United States, afrodiasporic music formations have been an ongoing testimony of these entanglements. Besides the ubiquity of improvisation, musical traditions from New Orleans to Barranquilla reveal a universe of stylistic and performative features rooted in African parameters of musicality, including but not limited to the simultaneity of rhythmic voices articulated along “claves” (or timelines) in pursuit of polyrhythmic patterns; musical textures based on mixed timbres and sonorities; sequences of “question and answer”; a certain preference for flexibility and ambiguity in matters of rhythm, harmony, and even tuning; a tendency towards syncopation; and rhythmic scenarios of double accentuation, that is, musical instances in which the simultaneous accentuation of downbeats and offbeats create an oscillating feeling in which the intensity of offbeats entail both a detachment from and a gravitation towards downbeats.[4]

            If the label “jazz” is useful to account for the diasporic configuration of a musical scenario associated with a deliberate game with the plasticity of musical materials, and even more so, with a deliberate effort to resist the establishment of normative musical parameters, then it would be wrong to assume that such a label is the exclusive prerogative of the United States. However, this is not an attempt to validate Caribbean dance orchestras or other non-U.S. American musicians merely as jazz musicians, and certainly not within the symbolic coordinates of most jazz histories. That would be but another iteration in the spirit of “the danzón is a tropical ragtime”. Rather, it is an attempt to rethink the jazz narrative by deconstructing the U.S. American exceptionalism at its core. It is also an attempt to zoom out and think about jazz from a broader historical and geographical perspective. Thus, what I have referred to here as a possible third narrative might not be actually more than a reminder, a reminder that jazz, as a Caribbean musical tradition and as any other Caribbean musical tradition, is primarily a manifestation of the African diaspora—notwithstanding the hybrid character of the Caribbean and its entanglements with other cultural traditions along the way. By extension, it is a reminder of the centrality of blackness to the emergence and continuity of musical formations such as jazz, Afro-Cuban music, Latin jazz, cumbia, calypso, merengue, salsa, and many more. Indeed, it is not a trivial reminder. In times when white supremacy keeps undermining so many voices and clinging on to old privileges and power structures, it is all the more crucial to keep in mind the historical struggles that connect generations of subordinated peoples across the Americas, and out of which an incredible musical landscape came into being.

 

    

[1] See, for example: Penny M Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Robin Brown, “Americanization at Its Best?: The Globalization of Jazz,” in Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture, and Politics, ed. Marianne Franklin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 89–109.

[2] E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 11.

[3] See Bruce Johnson, Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation (New York: Routledge, 2019).

[4] See Richard Waterman, “African Influence on the Music of the Americas,” in Acculturation in the Americas: Proceedings and Selected Papers of the Twenty-Ninth International Congress of Americanists, ed. Sol Tax (New York: Cooper Square, 1967); Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Egberto Bermúdez, “Las músicas afrocolombianas en la construcción de la nación: una visión histórica,” in 150 años de la abolición en Colombia. Desde la marginalidad a la contrucción de la nación, IV Cátedra Anual de Historia Ernesto Restrepo Tirado (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura/Aguilar, 2003), 706–25; Carlos Miñana Blasco, “Afinación de las marimbas en la costa pacífica colombiana: ¿un ejemplo de la memoria interválica africana en Colombia?,” in Músicas y prácticas sonoras en el Pacífico afrocolombiano, ed. Juan Sebastián Ochoa Escobar, Carolina Santamaría Delgado, and Manuel Sevilla Peñuela (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2010), 287–346.

 

 

Latest Articles

Most Popular