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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004) 81-99



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Bauz�–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz:
Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean

Jairo Moreno


"Deehee no peek pani, me no peek Angli, bo peek African."
—Luciano "Chano" Pozo, as told by Dizzy Gillespie

In his autobiography, to BE, or not... to BOP, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (1917–1993) reckons that "very early, the tunes I wrote, like 'Pickin' the Cabbage' [1940] sounded Latin oriented or expressed a Latin feeling, like putting West Indian hot sauce in some black-eye peas or hot Cuban peppers in a dish of macaroni" (171). Immediately, Gillespie turns to figures who shaped his affinity with Latin music, noting that "this in part shows the influence of Mario Bauzá [1911–1993] and Alberto Socarrás [1908–1989]." "But instinctively," he continues, making an intensely subjective swerve, "I've always had that Latin feeling. You'd probably have to put me in psychoanalysis to find out where it came from, but I've always felt polyrhythmic from a long way back. Maybe I'm one of those 'African survivals' that hung on after slavery among Negroes in South Carolina." Gillespie's vivid metaphorical displacements (from palate to ear, from stove to music stand), the individual agency of his musical mentors, his allusion to a deeply buried [End Page 81] archive of cultural memory, and the specificity of his North American South Atlantic locality all form a set of mutually dependent elements in which he inscribes a known historical fact: the strong presence of what he calls "Latin" music in his practice as a jazz musician.

The historical embedding within jazz of musical forms and styles with roots in the Spanish Caribbean is the subject of much speculation. (The standard account of this relation, emplotted as a linear narrative, appears in John Storm Roberts's The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States and Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today. A more sensitive reading of the transformations and differences of the jazz/Latin music relation, albeit one that emphasizes continuities, appears in Chris Washburne's "The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation of an African-American Music." Geoffrey Jacques's "CuBop!: Afro-Cuban Music and Mid-Twentieth Century American Culture," argues for an increasingly organic coherence in African-American and Afro-Cuban musical mixtures throughout the 1940s and 1950s.) Cultural and economic ties between the Caribbean and New Orleans going back to the late eighteenth century placed music into the flow of exchanges among an assortment of black, creole, Spanish, French, and white North American musicians. The renewed force with which Latin musics emerge in jazz beginning in the late 1910s owes to a rapid migration of musicians from postcolonial Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Panama to New York City. (Roberts chronicles these musicians' work; Puerto Rican musicians are closely studied in Ruth Glasser, Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities from Our Perspective, 1917–1940.) From the 1940s on, the focus of Gillespie's reckonings, Latin music cannot be framed as a "tinge," after "Jelly Roll" Morton's widely circulated quip, but as an explicit part of musico-aesthetic experimentation by black Cubans and black North Americans. The personal stories I report come from that period. My commentaries look at these stories critically, with an eye to outlining the conditions of possibility for the emergence of Latin jazz as a distinct musical presence in New York. At the core of these stories is the encounter between Bauzá and Gillespie as a series of mutual readings and interested misreadings of cultural and identitarian ideologemes. The "Black Caribbean," as I call the cultural and historical space within which these developments take place (borrowing Paul Gilroy's influential insight in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness), is seen as constitutive of and constituted by a conception of identity inscribed in the particular temporal [End Page 82] and spatial dislocations of a North American modernity. It should be clear at the onset...

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