[castleofargh]

that's all good and well but you didn't even mention who was a nazi.(is it still and inside joke if it's on the web?)

 

[bigshot]

Can you give me some specific pre-1940 tracks that are Latin Jazz? I probably have them and am just not thinking of them then. Machito is the first I can think of.

 

[Steve999]

Can you give me some specific pre-1940 tracks that are Latin Jazz? I probably have them and am just not thinking of them then. Machito is the first I can think of.

Latin jazz as we think of it as a genre today probably began in 1943.

Latin influence on jazz was a heavy element in jazz at the time of its inception, i.e., in the very early 1900s. It was part of what made jazz jazz, it was essential, as you can see in the Jelly Roll Morton quote or the Wikipedia article.

 

[bigshot]

Jelly Roll Morton doesn't sound Latin to me at all. I'm curious where that influence is supposed to be heard. When I listen to Muskrat Ramble or St Louis Blues, I can hear the blues, tin pan alley from New York, military band music like Souza, and ragtime rhythms, but I don't hear Latin at all. I wonder what he was referring to specifically. Could he be talking about work songs' influence on the Blues? That seems more African than Latin.

 

[Steve999]

Jelly Roll Morton doesn't sound Latin to me at all. I'm curious where that influence is supposed to be heard. When I listen to Muskrat Ramble or St Louis Blues, I can hear the blues, tin pan alley from New York, military band music like Souza, and ragtime rhythms, but I don't hear Latin at all. I wonder what he was referring to specifically. Could he be talking about work songs' influence on the Blues? That seems more African than Latin.

It’s in the syncopation. It’s part Cuban, part African. This was New Orleans. Mixed race musicians getting forced out of classical orchestra. Cuba not too far away. Brass and woodwinds. Classes mixing. Folks from Africa and Cuba and Europe. A perfect storm. It’s taking the emphasis off of the first and third beats and propelling it with a back beat and adding the feeling of triplets over one or two or four beats. Now me, I was not around in 1905, and in the Wikipedia article is says that exactly how jazz syncopation came about is somewhat speculative, but Wynton Marsalis and many others seem to feel it grew out of the Latin Habanera rhythm. In classical and march music it’s often a very straight beat with emphasis on the first and third beats. That’s what Latin influence gets you away from. All I can really do is refer you to the Wikipedia article and it’s many sources and you can try to play around in your mind with Latin rhythms and where they emphasize the beat and divide up measures and that is apparently where the emphasis in jazz and the propelling nature of it come from (unlike what we might think of as work song which has a strong and forceful rhythm but not complex or propelling). Any time you here a back beat (emphasis on two and four) or two lively beats juxtaposed against three lively beats there’s likely some Latin origin to that. It’s in rock, it’s in R&B, it’s ubiquitous now, so maybe you don’t hear any Latin in it. Now this is me talking based on how I hear things including early jazz. Again for the original sources you can read what the very first jazz musicians did and said. Buddy Bolden based his beat on the Habanera (a Latin Cuban beat), Jelly Roll Morton said you can’t play jazz without the Spanish tinge. That was the incipiency of actual jazz. Maybe Wynton Marsalis understands it better than anyone else alive. It’s not pure Latin but it’s unlike anything that came before it and Latin rhythm was an essential ingredient. Total brain dump here with lots of personal impressions and opinions so you can take it for what it’s worth. That’s how I’d try to explain it to you and illustrate it to you in person. It’s hard because I can’t express or juxtapose rhythms I’m writing. I hope you did read the Wikipedia article and it has just a wealth of references and you can dive as deep as you want. I’ve learned a lot with this conversation myself.

 

[bigshot]

Then is Ragtime Latin influenced too? It had the torn up rhythms before New Orleans Jazz did. Ragtime was a semi-classical purely American movement that was appropriated by popular music and fused with military band arrangements and the Blues to create Jazz. I can hear all of that in early Jazz. But I don't hear the Latin rhythms or song forms in Jazz at all. In fact, aside from native Mexican ranchero music in the Southwest I don't see much influence of Latin music on American music until it was picked up as a novelty by sweet dance bands in the 20s. And even then, it sounded more Spanish than Latin American. Real Latin American stuff shows up in the late 30s/early 40s with Cugat (for sweet bands) and Machito (for hot bands). That's when you see the Latin forms like cha cha, bolero and mambo show up. Strangely enough, Latin dance band music was primarily a British thing. In the 30s, there were tons of cha cha records recorded in the UK. Thinking about it a little more, I think that Latin Jazz evolved out of Latin Sweet Dance bands. Machito took the romantic sweetness out of it and crossed it with Cab Calloway.

I look for the sound in the music that I can hear, I don't just follow experts' opinions about origins. The origins of Jazz has undergone a huge revisionist revolution in the past decade. I think most of that revisionism is bullcrap. American music was all sorts of ethnicities existing tooth and jowel alongside each other, influencing each other. I love the crossovers the best.

I've listened to a lot of traditional Latin music (pre-Jazz) and I hear European and indigenous influences. But none of that exists in early Jazz. Once Jazz merged with Latin music, Latin music was never the same again. Just like when Jazz merged with American pop music, it changed everything. It might be that we find it hard to think of Latin music without thinking of Latin Jazz.

 

[bigshot]

It also may be that the influence is technical, not stylistic. As a non-musician, I can discern style, but I'm not as good at detecting technical aspects of musical construction.

I listened to the short clip of the tessero on the Wikipedia page. It sounds to me like march time... sort of like the rhythm of Stars and Stripes Forever.

 

[Steve999]

It also may be that the influence is technical, not stylistic. As a non-musician, I can discern style, but I'm not as good at detecting technical aspects of musical construction.

I listened to the short clip of the tessero on the Wikipedia page. It sounds to me like march time... sort of like the rhythm of Stars and Stripes Forever.

Well jazz (at least in its early form) does not sound like latin music, it does not sound like European music, it does not sound like African music. But it's an amalgam of all 3. How do we know? Not by experts, but by the people who invented it! Buddy Bolden used the Habanera beat. That has 1) a backbeat and 2) superimposed complex triplet-like rhythms.

About Ragtime--Jelly Roll Morton played perhaps the first jazz and played ragtime. You can read what he wrote about the Spanish tinge in the liner notes to your Smithsonian album. They didn't put that there for nothing. Buddy Bolden is said to have been important in the development of ragtime. Habanera.

We'll leave Wynton Marsalis out since you could construe him as an "expert," but he is from New Orleans and had access to his dad (a jazz pianist) and who knows what else by word of mouth or at least second-hand eyewitness accounts, and it's fair to say he's an extremely accomplished musician. But if you want to throw him out as an "expert" okay. I personally think he's done some things that fossilized jazz somewhat and that he has become a bit pedantic and somewhat closed-minded, but we'll leave that to the side. He probably has access in more than one way to how jazz started. But okay, let's throw him out as an expert. Bottom line is he seems to be really nice guy and that rates pretty high in my book, but whatever, let's just chuck him.

So here is an intuition I had, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. It just came to my mind all at once.

Let's go back to ragtime. Because I'm sure you're familiar with it, and even though it's time worn and cliche, play Scott Joplin's The Entertainer (not you personally on a piano, of course, but play the music) and keep the beat. (Not even close to the top of his artistry, BTW.) Keep time with one hand, keep the beat. Or if you are super-cool snap your fingers and move your head to the opposite side on the second and forth beats. That's how geeky people act super-cool because jazz musicians said that's how to be cool. No kidding. No, actually, just keep the beat, one two three four etc Do you hear the emphasis in the melody just popping up all over the place, off the beat?

Now another cliche--What's his name--Glen Miller?--In the mood. Time worn cliche. But you know the tune. There the beat as conveyed by the melody pops up in different places but in a more simplistic and patterned kind of way. Again keep the beat with one hand.

Now let's go to Dizzy Gillespie playing Manteca, after jazz got a full new infusion of latin.



Two drummers?!?!?! Anyway. . .

By this time it is way way cooler to snap your fingers on the second and fourth beats but if you want to just keep the beat all four beats to the measure.

Keep the beat with your hand again. (In the very beginning you can hear Dizzy Gillespie snapping his fingers to the second and fourth beats.) (At about 2:50--Dizzy Gillespie snapping his fingers on the second and fourth beat, in case you want to see it done by a master!)

Now! (You could stop keeping the beat with your hand. It may too much at once.)

Sing the melody to The Entertainer while you are listening to Manteca!

Sing the melody to In the Mood while you are listening to Manteca!

Sing it! Switch back and forth! Whatever! Go! Get into it! (As long as no one's looking.)

Whoa! What's that feeling! You don't have to hit the notes, just keep the melody in the right time.

Just an intuition.

 

[bigshot]

I get what you're talking about now. The Latin influence goes back before Jazz into Ragtime. I'm not sure how Joplin got influenced by Latin music. Perhaps at the Chicago Worlds' Fair. Maybe it goes back to the work songs sung in the fields. I clearly hear ragtime, the blues, tin pan alley and military band music in the earliest jazz music. Some other stuff is in the mix too, just folded into one of those four and already processed into it.

By the way, there is a whole history of tin pan alley rags and jazz records that hasn't been considered since the early 1940s. I only discovered it when I started to explore 78s. It was hugely popular and it clearly influenced the jazz musicians we remember, but it was forgotten because it didn't fit the narrative. Alan Lowe has written a lot about the other side of jazz that current scholars ignore. He has a new book on the history of American music coming out, and it comes with 40 CDs with illustrations of what he is talking about.

 

[Steve999]

I get what you're talking about now. The Latin influence goes back before Jazz into Ragtime. I'm not sure how Joplin got influenced by Latin music. Perhaps at the Chicago Worlds' Fair. Maybe it goes back to the work songs sung in the fields. I clearly hear ragtime, the blues, tin pan alley and military band music in the earliest jazz music. Some other stuff is in the mix too, just folded into one of those four and already processed into it.

By the way, there is a whole history of tin pan alley rags and jazz records that hasn't been considered since the early 1940s. I only discovered it when I started to explore 78s. It was hugely popular and it clearly influenced the jazz musicians we remember, but it was forgotten because it didn't fit the narrative. Alan Lowe has written a lot about the other side of jazz that current scholars ignore. He has a new book on the history of American music coming out, and it comes with 40 CDs with illustrations of what he is talking about.

Well thanks for humoring me anyway.

I think with the development of ragtime into jazz we are talking about a 15 year period maybe, from 1895-1910? So there has to be some speculation involved. After I read your comments above I started to wonder about things in different ways and read this and that. It looks like Scott Joplin was a departure from previous ragtime and he described a “weird” characteristic he was getting in the music he called “swing.” The birth a swing? Who knows.

It looks like during that time frame African rhythms were getting filtered through Cuba so as to result in the Habanera and then moving into the U.S. from there. Although it looks like there were Latin and African influences prior to that time in the U.S. it looks like the habanera thing was a big deal. So how to untangle all of that I have no idea.

I definitely get what you are saying about the narrative and things getting ignored from the past if it doesn’t fit some academic preconception. The writing I am seeing about that period is so conceptually dense it’s comical. I don’t like the narrative in my own way, I think it is an impediment to change in the present. If it doesn’t flow from the narrative it’s not jazz and thou shalt not play it that way. And universities are getting incredibly adept in churning out technically proficient musicians, but within boundaries and at a time in life that is displacing the most creative years for many people.

If you want to get a concrete idea of all of what all this Habanera stuff is about try keeping a 4/4 beat with one hand (simple 4 beats to the measure) and every two of those beats try to get three even beats with the other hand. It’s a two against three pattern as they call it. That’s kind of a building block. It’s not easy when you first learn to do it. I remember in college that was one of the first things the kids at the music university on the same campus as us had to learn to do. So you would see all these freshmen trying to do two beats with one hand and at the same time an even three beats with the other hand. So of course I had to play around with it too. I’m sure it came up in other music as well for brief parts of the music but to keep it as a steady pulse of the music is another thing. Today a rock musician or jazz musician will just throw out those even three beats in the melody against two beats in 4/4 meter time at times because it’s just part of how you play the music, it’s something in their toolkit, it sounds cool. But apparently perhaps maybe the root of that as being a pulse of the music was African music getting filtered up through Cuba to the U.S from about 1895-1910. Maybe. Now that’s something I’ve only learned in the last day or two reading what the eggheads have had to say.

 

[bigshot]

It's not all speculation. There are lots of recordings between 1895 and 1910, and sheet music to see how the semi-classical ragtime movement got co-opted by tin pan alley and arranged by military bands. New York based popular music was a huge influence on early Jazz.

Prince's Band: Porkupine Rag (1910) http://www.vintageip.com/xfers/princesband_porkupinerag.mp3

Here is a ragtime tune played by a military band consisting of the same basic instruments as a New Orleans Jazz band would have a few years later. Before this, ragtime was strictly piano music and it was created to be a separate academic style. In Porkupine Rag they have a true ragtime verse and chorus, they they graft a European bridge on, and end with a cakewalk, bringing in Southern style music. A little bit of everything there. There are even early examples for brass band ragtime going back to the first few years of the 20th century.

 

[Steve999]

It's not all speculation. There are lots of recordings between 1895 and 1910, and sheet music to see how the semi-classical ragtime movement got co-opted by tin pan alley and arranged by military bands. New York based popular music was a huge influence on early Jazz.

Prince's Band: Porkupine Rag (1910) http://www.vintageip.com/xfers/princesband_porkupinerag.mp3

Here is a ragtime tune played by a military band consisting of the same basic instruments as a New Orleans Jazz band would have a few years later. Before this, ragtime was strictly piano music and it was created to be a separate academic style. In Porkupine Rag they have a true ragtime verse and chorus, they they graft a European bridge on, and end with a cakewalk, bringing in Southern style music. A little bit of everything there. There are even early examples for brass band ragtime going back to the first few years of the 20th century.

That’s great. I have absolutely never heard anything like that before. It makes me smile and almost laugh.

 

[Steve999]

I get what you're talking about now. The Latin influence goes back before Jazz into Ragtime. I'm not sure how Joplin got influenced by Latin music. Perhaps at the Chicago Worlds' Fair. Maybe it goes back to the work songs sung in the fields. I clearly hear ragtime, the blues, tin pan alley and military band music in the earliest jazz music. Some other stuff is in the mix too, just folded into one of those four and already processed into it.

Here’s something from the Wikipedia page on jazz about Scott Joplin being influenced by the tresillo and habanera:

African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants, the habanera rhythm and cinquillo, are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin and Turpin. Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is generally considered to be in the habanera genre:[62][63] both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion, completely abandoning any sense of a march rhythm. Ned Sublette postulates that the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk,"[64] whilst Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass."[65]

Honestly, it’s all news to me, I was just giving you some stuff that snapped together as puzzle pieces in my mind to try to illustrate the Latin influence in early jazz.

The fact that Joplin's "Solace" is alternatively titled "A Mexican Serenade" seems to speak to the Latin influence also. And I guess it was also in the movie "The Sting" and is part of some video game called Bioshock Infinite.

So, I decided to search out the tune, which is not hard to do. Written in 1909. Quite beautiful really.



https://www.allmusic.com/composition/solace-a-mexican-serenade-for-piano-mc0002364690

 

[Steve999]

Latin(ish) Louis Armstrong! Cuban Pete--July 7, 1937.

Recording details: http://dippermouth.blogspot.com/2010/11/cuban-pete.html

 

[Steve999]

Latin Duke Ellington! Caravan--1937