Page 22 - Ruminations

20. Parallel lines—and their meeting

Two (very arguable) points can be made about the relationship of
Cuban music and American jazz in their heyday.
First, until the compact disk era, very few 78-rpm recordings of
Cuban music could be heard and appreciated. Jazz from the same
period had already been widely available on LP. From the 1990s
forward, both have been available for audition and comparison. And
the parallels are striking.
The golden age of Cuban conjuntos was roughly the fifteen years
between 1938 and 1953 (examples are Miguel Matamoros groups;
Conjuntos Casino, Caney and Nelo Sosa; Sonora Matancero, Felix
Chappotin and Arsenio Rodriguez). And that is also the time frame
for great American combo jazz recordings, from Lionel Hampton to
Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Dizzy Gillespie.
The earlier son small group recordings (Sextetos Nacional, Machin
and Habanero) of the Twenties and early Thirties match the New
Orleans diaspora bands playing primarily in Chicago (King Oliver,
Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton).
The Cuban orquestas of the big band years (from Machin, Lecuona
and Antobal, to Hermanos Palau, Chepin-Chovin, Mariano Merceron
and Casino de la Playa) line up with American jazz orchestras (from
early Henderson and Ellington to Calloway, Basie, Clouds of Joy and
Jay McShann).
After the war both countries began a rapid decline in musical
*
innovation. The Cubans went from danzon to charanga (Orquestas
Aragon, Sublime and Belisario Lopez), while Americans listened to the
final developments of swing and hard bop (Milt Jackson, Sonny
Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and
Ornette Coleman).
The second point is that while the parallels ended, the lines met in
New York in the 1940s, producing music called “Afro-Cuban” or
“Latin” jazz. It is heretical, perhaps, to propose this, but the synthesis
did not work. More distance may be needed for it to become clearer
that the two kinds of music, despite many efforts, were not synergistic,
creating nothing more of value than earlier Latin-American infusions
into American popular music or later attempts to blend jazz with
European and Asian styles.

* See Histomap of Jazz (1973), reprinted in The Gluckman Occasional 5 (2017).