While the roots of dance music in Latin America and the US go back many centuries and distinctive forms distinguished the music from Buenos Aires, Havana and New Orleans, there still remained a strong musical connection between these distant places due to a common source of influence: music brought into the Americas by African slaves.

In Buenos Aires the foxtrot was performed along with tango up to the first half of the 20th century, in La Havana the danzón, the son and the rumba co-existed with jazz at the dance halls, especially after the American occupation of Cuba following the Spanish American war. In New Orleans ragtime bands also included the habanera and other Cuban song forms.

In the US, musicians, especially in the south, performed a music in open spaces with military bands that would ultimately be known as ragtime. Ragtime is the predecessor of jazz. At night during the weekends, these same musicians would also perform at private parties, providing the music for people to dance.

Many of the musicians involved in these performances were Creole of color: they were of mixed European and African descent. Their African cultural heritage gave the music they performed a particular rhythmic quality, which would evolve in time into what we know today as jazz. One of the most remarkable features of this dance music was that musicians were often asked to extend the duration of the compositions to accommodate the needs of the dancers. Through this need to make the original compositions longer, they developed the skill to improvise (make up on the spot) new musical material into an existing dance, giving the compositions any length that was necessary.
This particular trait in American dance music distinguishes it from any other in the Americas and would evolve into one of the most salient features in jazz: a music that is mostly improvised rather than learned by ear or read off a music chart.

Although improvisation in this context (and in this early period) had little to do with African roots, it would ultimately be one of the elements most deeply connecting it to African music, which is almost totally improvised. Rumba is a salient example of collective improvisation coming from Cuba, but with a significant difference: it is drum-based music and therefore it avoids the pitfalls created by having to conform to the rules of European harmony.

When in the US ragtime led to early jazz, the ability to improvise became a must for any musician aiming for a career in such music.

In contrast, most dance music in Latin America did not use improvisation in any extended way. For example in the case of tango, musicians were (and are) asked to add ornamental notes to an existing melody, but it is still true today that most tango musicians lack the skills necessary for musical improvisation.

So, even though there is a common element in the music of the Americas due to their common African influence, jazz became a world apart because it required from the musicians a skill that not only is very demanding and difficult, but that needed an understanding of some theoretical musical elements, such as harmony and its related scales. It was common for Creoles in the south belonging to the middle class under French colonization to be sent to Europe where they could get a thorough education in music.

Cuba, a more ancient European outpost in the Americas, as well a place of transit for people going to other parts of the new continent, had well-established centers of music education and boasted musicians who would have careers in the most coveted cultural centers in Europe.

This may explain why Cuban musicians who moved to the US in the first half of the 20th century not only developed the necessary improvisational skills necessary in jazz, but also became part of some of the most distinguished jazz bands performing in the US at the time.

It is important to note that after a world craze for the music of jazz in the 1930’s, when it would experience the height of its popularity, jazz would lose its status as a mostly-for-dance music and become an introspective musical phenomenon that, with time, would attract only the initiated listener.

In the 1940’s a new style in jazz called Bebop appeared on the scene. Reflecting the war economy, it was a move away from big bands (and therefore big dance halls) and into small ensembles and dedicated jazz clubs: music to be listened to, rather than danced to. The music itself was intricate both melodically and harmonically and the rhythms did not lend themselves well to dancing.

By now hybrids derived from the mixture of the Cuban son and the big band era of the 30’s in the US gave form to the mambo, a highly charged dance music that took the US by storm. Record sales based on the appeal of music as a danceable form separated the music for the masses from the more intellectual pursuits of hard-core jazz musicians.

In this context one of the pioneers of Bebop music, Dizzy Gillespie, had the idea of using Latin drums with his Bebop-inspired big band. Gillespie thought that by adding touches of Latin flavor to the more cerebral modern jazz, this music could regain a more commercial appeal.

Although the incorporation of Afro-Cuban drumming with Bebop did not bring immediate commercial success, after Gillespie’s historic concert in 1947 the idea of Latin Jazz became well established. Its practitioners were musicians mostly of the Latino community in New York, highly sophisticated musicians who were polyglots not just in speaking fluent Spanish and English, but that also were able to play Latin music and jazz with equal facility.

It is important to understand that Latin Jazz is a form of music that is mostly practiced by Latino musicians. Most American born musicians when playing Latin music have an “accent”, finding it difficult to produce the proper musical inflections demanded by a truly idiomatic performance of Latin music.

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