“Jazz is a global music and transcultural in its stylistic scope. It has been so since its inception” (3). So states Christopher Washburne in the introduction to Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz. This is not a new idea for ethnomusicologists. However, as Washburne points out, many jazz historians have resisted “foreign” influences that complicate conventional narratives of jazz as a uniquely American, or African American, creation. Hence the “othering” of Latin jazz, and the subtitle of his book. Washburne aims to deconstruct this “othering” with evidence that offers “a corrective to the lacuna in jazz scholarship, acknowledging and celebrating the significant Caribbean and Latin American contributions to jazz” (5).
Washburne is unusually situated to undertake such a task. He is a white, non-Latino musician from the rural Midwest who had little contact with Latin music or culture until moving to Boston where, in the late 1980s, he joined a...
