Bauza Gillespie Latin

Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the
Black Caribbean
Jairo Moreno
The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 103, Number 1, Winter 2004, pp. 81-99
(Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51565
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6848 THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY / 103:1 / sheet 87 of 283
Jairo Moreno
Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz: Difference,
Modernity, and the Black Caribbean
‘‘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 (–)
reckons that ‘‘very early, the tunes I wrote, like
‘Pickin’ the Cabbage’ [] sounded Latin ori-
ented 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’’
(). Immediately, Gillespie turns to figures
who shaped his affinity with Latin music, noting
that ‘‘this in part shows the influence of Mario
Bauzá [–] and Alberto Socarrás [–
].’’ ‘‘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
The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Winter .

Copyright ©  by Duke University Press.
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
82 Jairo Moreno
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, s 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 Cul-
ture,’’ argues for an increasingly organic coherence in African-American and
Afro-Cuban musical mixtures throughout the s and s.) 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 Ameri-
can musicians. The renewed force with which Latin musics emerge in jazz
beginning in the late s 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 musi-
cians are closely studied in Ruth Glasser, Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican
Musicians and Their New York Communities from Our Perspective, –.)
From the s on, the focus of Gillespie’s reckonings, Latin music can-
not 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 out-
lining 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 tem-
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 83
poral and spatial dislocations of a North American modernity. It should

be clear at the onset that, without detracting from its musical accomplish-
ment, I consider the emergence of Latin jazz not so much as a celebrated
contribution balanced between related expressive cultures (Gillespie), and
certainly not as a ‘‘marriage’’ of musical styles (Bauzá), but as a tense and
dynamic syncopation of sonic and social histories and temporalities. In my
account, ‘‘Latin,’’ ‘‘Cuban,’’ or ‘‘Afro-Cuban’’ are integrated in the jazz tradi-
tion, but only marginally, within a decidedly modernist cognitive and psy-
chic ambivalence that black North American musicians experienced as they
contemplated a black Other.
Bauzá’s Romance
‘‘Welcome home, welcome to New York,’’ said the Latina journalist greeting
Bauzá at the airport, on return from a tour in . ‘‘Mario,’’ she continued,
‘‘you are one of the pioneers of Latin American musicians coming to this
country.’’ ‘‘Fifty-three years,’’ he confirmed. ‘‘What is the difference between
now and fifty-three or thirty years ago and today and a Latin American artist
coming here?’’ she asked. Bauzá: ‘‘Transportation, for one thing. It took me
three and one-half days in a boat to come from Havana here, and I just come
from another country in inside of five hours.’’ Prompted to talk about the
attraction that New York exerts over musicians, Bauzá framed the matter
in a mixture of familial and religious metaphors: ‘‘Not only Latin American
musicians, but from all over the world come into New York, the Mecca of
the music. That’s all they have in their mind: New York. To me, the greatest
jazz artists that this country has developed through the years and years and
years [came to New York], and they want to be part of that family.’’ (My tran-
scriptions from Música, directed by John D. Wise, maintain Bauza’s origi-
nal grammar, with editorial additions in brackets added when considered
absolutely necessary.)
Every musical culture in the West has its sacred sites, and by the early
s New York, along with Chicago, had been consecrated as that place
for jazz, an obligatory destination of sorts for musical pilgrims and also
for those interested in incorporating themselves into a rapidly emerging
international market centered in and around U.S. mass culture. Bauzá first
came to New York from Havana in , as a member of Antonio Maria
Romeu’s charanga orchestra. He made the ‘‘three and one-half days’’ boat
trip to record for RCA, whose executives were trying to market an alterna-
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
84 Jairo Moreno
tive Latin fashion to the then raging tango fever. The New York City that
Bauzá encountered resonated loudly in his musical imagination. Mesmer-
ized by Gershwin’s use of jazz idioms in the context of a concert piece for
large orchestra, he heard four daily performances of ‘‘Rhapsody in Blue’’
with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Uptown, Bauzá witnessed firsthand the
vibrant black cultural life of the Harlem Renaissance, noting particularly
the privileges that audiences granted black bandleaders and musicians at
places such as the Lafayette and Lincoln theaters, the Smalls Paradise, and at
many other ‘‘shrunken spots’’ where people would ‘‘hang around all night,’’
as he would later reminisce.
It was to participate in this scene that he returned in , determined
to stay and become a ‘‘jazz musician.’’ With the misplaced romanticism of
someone having an affair in a foreign land, Bauzá did not expect, once the
affair turned into a permanent relationship, having to negotiate the vicis-
situdes of daily life, particularly in a society intensely defined by racial and
ethnic difference. It was one thing to drop in on a thriving Harlem as a visi-
tor, quite another to live and work while navigating the well-mapped terri-
tories of uptown New York City, and within those territories, ever narrower
circumscriptions for this or that ethnic group. Bauzá: ‘‘So I came back by
myself. It was very hard [to find] anyone to speak Spanish all day; you gotta
come all the way to th Street to the East Side, from Lenox into Fifth, but
no more than Lexington because Italians don’t let Latinos walk after hours
from Fifth Avenue to the East Side.That was kind of rough, but I keep myself
in Harlem, what I came here for.’’ Just how rough? The sign ‘‘No Dogs, No
Negroes, No Spanish’’ found in apartment buildings in Manhattan viciously
put dark-skinned Spanish speakers under a kind of double (racial and ethno-
cultural) jeopardy. This atmosphere of open and unbridled racism stood
in contrast to the cosmopolitan s in Havana, where, however heavily
influenced by U.S. economic policies and their attendant ‘‘whitening’’ of
the sociopolitical sphere and however marred by social and economical
inequalities largely drawn around racial difference, Bauzá had had a more
integrated socioeconomic space to navigate. He had, furthermore, enjoyed
the advantages of a privileged economic upbringing with his godparents,
wealthy Spaniards who, by his own accord, provided him with a first-rate
education and inculcated in him a spirit of cultural tolerance. And although
he had given up the opportunity to study music in Italy on a scholarship
while still in his early teens because of fears of racial discrimination against
him there, race had not impeded a spectacular musical career at home. At
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
age twelve, he had begun substituting for his clarinet teacher in the Havana
Symphonic Orchestra (Cuba’s most prestigious classical ensemble), and at
sixteen the clarinet chair was his. Soon, he also came in increasing demand
from the best dance orchestras. Back in Harlem, the bleak racial landscape
of a divided society accentuated the sense of cultural alienation he recalled:
‘‘Now and then, I wanna meet some people and there was no practical [way];
[there were] very, very few Puerto Ricans’’ (this in spite of the fact that by the
early s there were approximately , Puerto Ricans in New York).
It is against this personal backdrop that Bauzá’s otherwise unequivocal
success as a jazz musician in New York emerges. By any standards, Bauzá
accomplished his stated professional goals, entering the inner sanctum of
the elite swing bands on the strength of his musical skills and personal disci-
pline. Throughout the s, he performed (on saxophone and trumpet)
with the orchestras of Noble Sissle, Don Redman, Cab Calloway, and Chick
Webb, among others, and in the city’s most prestigious uptown club circuit
that included the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club. (Webb, for one, des-
ignated Bauzá as bandleader, in which capacity he delegated parts, selected
numbers, chose arrangers, and created set lists.) Clearly, Bauzá thrived in
the musical meritocracy that subtended the elite family of New York City–
based black North American swing orchestras. This professional ‘‘family’’
would have overlooked his ethnic background, as it did with other musi-
cians from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, many of whom were much
sought after because of their ability to read music—a skill gained either in
municipal bands or else, as was Bauzá’s case, through a classical music edu-
cation at conservatories in their country (Glasser reports that Latin musi-
cians were often called ‘‘stand musicians’’ because of their reading abili-
ties []).
In spite of the feelings of cultural isolation Bauzá expressed, the empathy
with black North American culture he experienced during his first trip to
Harlem did not wane. Nonetheless, it would be misguided to assume that
shared racial background erased all differences between him and his black
North American peers. Cab Calloway, for one, called Bauzá ‘‘Indian,’’ short
for West Indian, a marker which, although no doubt intended as a harmless
nickname among peers, introduced an immediately recognizable vector of
distance and difference between Bauzá and other musicians in the band.
That the nickname was given by the bandleader, likely sanctioning its use by
other band members, only accentuated the subtle asymmetry at play in the
relation of a black Cuban minority-within-a-minority to the larger ‘‘native’’
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
86 Jairo Moreno
black community. In fact, such naming was institutionalized through wide-

spread use; with the sole exception of Puerto Ricans, black North Americans
in New York identified all other immigrants from the Caribbean as ‘‘West
Indians.’’
This naming was one among other asymmetries that Bauzá encountered
in s New York. A far more marked asymmetry was determined by seg-
regation within the Latin musical community. Light-skinned Latin musi-
cians could and did ‘‘pass,’’ while dark-skinned musicians could not. Mem-
bers from both groups could of course make legitimate claims to a Latin
identity under various manners of subaltern identification (ethnicity, lan-
guage, race, or religion). These musicians were mostly recent immigrants
from Panamá, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, where ethnic
and racial integration formed the backbone of national identity discourses.
The multiplicity of subject positions that New York–based Latin musicians
could rightfully occupy was reduced to the binary terms of state racial poli-
tics in the United States: either black or white. The interpellative power of
this reduction can be seen in the fact that even light-skinned Latin musi-
cians would avoid speaking Spanish for fear of being outed. Having no
qualms about being an active member of the black North American jazz
family, Bauzá even refused to give in to pressures from other Latin musi-
cians to speak on their behalf (Glasser ). As he saw it, Latin musicians
were implicated in their own subordination. Latin bands were relegated
to the role of ‘‘relief bands,’’ filling in between breaks in the white bands’
sets. Bauzá considered their music to be watered-down versions of Latin
music, performed exclusively to satisfy white patrons. Moreover, he felt that
in their spineless music-making these bands risked leaving behind material
traces of their subalternity, and that they had positioned themselves in a
weak musical platform—musicianship standards among Latin bands, he
thought, would remain low as long as they continued to play light, filler
music. But nothing ignited his ire more than their internal complacency
before segregation laws; Latin relief bands would not employ dark-skinned
Latin musicians. His decision to take charge of the situation, however, was
not fueled by a sentiment of solidarity with the predicament of Latin musi-
cians. ‘‘In Harlem I was a big shot. I was one of the best dressed musicians
in Harlem. They [Latin musicians] were making thirty, forty dollars a week
and I was making four, five hundred recording. All the black musicians,
they look for me for jobs’’ (quoted in Glasser ). The obvious question is,
what then would make a tremendously successful Bauzá leave behind such
hard-earned musical and economical privileges, which he did in ?
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
The internal divisions and tensions within the Latin music scene that
Bauzá diagnosed bear directly on the emergence of a musical style where
Cuban dance music encounters the sound of the black North American
swing orchestra. Besides relief bands, other far more commercially success-
ful Latin bandleaders held fast to racial segregation—and no one more than
Xavier Cugat, the Catalan-born Cuban musician whose orchestra became
the mainstream representative of Cuban and Latin music in New York in the
wake of the rumba craze that began in the early s (Cugat, like Bauzá a
child prodigy in Cuba, held forth at the Waldorf-Astoria from  to ).
Bauzá again observed the lack of representation of black Latin musicians in
music he considered unthinkable without their contribution. ‘‘Every time I
seen it,’’ he observed in Música, ‘‘the Latin bands was lily-white or something
similar to that. Musicians of my color, they had no opportunity in those
bands.’’ The urgent desire for representation and the struggle for musico-
expressive recognition and self-regulated economic options began with an
analysis that no longer viewed the existing asymmetries in the binary terms
of U.S. racism: ‘‘I said, ‘but these people . . . they ain’t with black and they
ain’t with the other one, where are they? Nowhere.’ So I said, ‘I gotta organize
a band.’ That’s how I organized the Machito band.’’
For Bauzá, Machito and his Afro-Cubans gave form to musico-cultural
self identifications that are no doubt forged by the exclusionary politics and
economics of racism in late s New York. These factors alone, however,
do not fully explain why Bauzá organized an orchestra to present a new kind
of music mixing Afro-Cuban and jazz elements. His response to the imper-
sonal market networks in New York takes on a more complex and personal
form, cast in deeply affective terms. ‘‘When I got the boat on my own,’’ he
has also—and I believe crucially—said, ‘‘my homeland missed, and that’s
how I organize the Machito and his Afro-Cubans.’’ Bauzá’s observation is
fundamental to begin to understand how the conditions dictated by a situa-
tion of subalternity cannot alone account for questions of personal order
and meaning. Evaluation of Bauzá’s agency in the articulation of Latin/Jazz
needs to consider his negotiation between material conditions (sociomusi-
cal and economic factors) and ideal processes (subjective poetics of self-
construction).
As a paradigm of an ideal process, take the notion of ‘‘my homeland.’’
In Cuba, throughout late s and s the notion of afrocubanismo
helped to reevaluate and advocate the centrality of black Cuban arts and
culture, spurred in part by Fernando Ortiz’s writings (Ortiz first used the
expression Afro-Cuban, deploying it descriptively and prescriptively; also
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
88 Jairo Moreno
see Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revo-

lution in Havana, –). Afrocubanismo represented, however, one
among a series of episodes within the larger process of nationalization of
black culture in Cuba, and it constituted part of a response to the encroach-
ing ‘‘whitening’’ politics that emerged in the vacuum left by the deaths of
José Martí (–), the white-skinned creole ‘‘founder’’ of Cuba, and
Antonio Maceo (–), the black general and military strategist who
led the campaign against the Spaniards. Martí, in particular, had promul-
gated the ideology of Cubanidad (literally, Cuban-ness) on a platform of
national integration that prominently featured the culture of black Cubans
as an essential component of Cuban national identity. As a result, and dif-
ferent from the situation in the United States, the question of whether or
not black Cubans held full rights as citizens was, for example, nonexis-
tent. But by the time of the U.S. occupation (–) the mythology of
racial integration was already being compromised by an all-creole leader-
ship that sought to ally itself with the United States, a phenomenon that
would continue unabated up to the revolution. Indeed, as Lisa Brock points
out in her introduction to Between Race and Empire, ‘‘from the s onward,
Cubans grew increasingly outraged at U.S. domination and their cubani-
dad deepened’’ (). And while afrocubanismo entered mainstream Cuban
consciousness, it never translated into a political strategy to pursue a sepa-
rate black cultural movement. Another concept, transculturation, gained
widespread acceptance as the key trope for framing Cuba’s presumably
integrated multicultural national identity. Transculturation recognized the
selective and often subversive adoption of aspects of the dominant culture
by a subaltern group and proposed that such asymmetric cultural encoun-
ters did not entail reductive processes of assimilation or acculturation by the
subordinate group. (Ortiz first proposed this theory in his Cuban Counter-
point: Tobacco and Sugar. Full examination of this phenomenon will have
to take into account the place of integration ideologies in the definition not
only of individual nation-states, but also of its place within the construction
of a broader Latin Americanist project—of which Martí was a leading advo-
cate—and, in turn, of this project in relation to the United States. As Alberto
Moreiras has noted, the success of transculturation ‘‘[had] everything to do
with the fact that the national-popular state was the dominant state forma-
tion in Latin America’’; see his ‘‘Hybridity and Double Consciousness,’’ .)
This Cuba of intense cultural and racial self-reflection (but that none-
theless held fast to a collective ideology of racial integration) had roots on
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
a soil ontologically different from Bauzá’s ‘‘homeland.’’ First, Bauzá recog-

nized the discrepancy between discourse and practice. His Cuba was negoti-
ated epistemologically, through a lived experience of racial tension and tacit
discrimination there. Indeed, the belief in a covertly racist Cuban society
ran like a motif in his declarations on the matter. Second, he distinguished
between Cuban nationalist ideology and his idea of self, being aware of
the paradox of a ‘‘benevolent’’ oppression of black Cubans, a phenomenon
explainable only within an ideology of no use to him. Third, Bauzá negoti-
ated the irreversible gap between his past in Cuba and his present in New
York. With whatever sociopolitical developments were taking place in Cuba
during the s (which he could have easily followed in New York) Bauzá
would have been unconcerned—and necessarily so, because the ‘‘home-
land’’ he invokes at the genesis of Latin/Jazz is an emotional figure largely
outlined against the background of cultural, economic, and also musical
alienation in the United States. His response to representational asymme-
tries witnessed and lived in New York appeals therefore to an emotional
whole sought in and through the memory of an always already vanishing
territory. For this reason, it would be misguided to think of Bauzá’s Cuba
and his homeland in traditional terms of representation as recipients of sets
of namable attributes that more or less correspond to a particular place at a
given time. As the genealogist knows well, there is no better place to posi-
tion—and indeed construct—the subject of (self-)knowledge than in the set
of relations that constitute the object of feeling. With the homeland, Bauzá
gains purchase on an aesthetic, cultural, expressive, and racial terrain by
recourse to a mythology of origin.
Bauzá’s rhetoric of homeland puts into circulation two intertwined no-
tions. First, it carries the aura of lexical singularity characteristic to the
proper name: singular, monadic, and atemporal. Second, unlike the proper
name, which is characteristically untranslatable, homeland is tactically
pressed into service as a sign, making it susceptible to tropical transactions.
The semiotics of Bauzá’s homeland are then constituted through a double
gesture. First, a feeling of musical alienation is transposed to the long-
ing for place. This is a spatial re-placement, understood here as a kind
of socioexpressive space. Second, place stands for a time no longer avail-
able. This is a temporal substitution, understood here as a kind of personal
history. Combined, Bauzá’s spatial and temporal replacements function
chronotopically as a way to inscribe socioexpressive context, history, indi-
vidual agency, and ultimately aesthetic responsibility. Put into action, this
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
90 Jairo Moreno
chronotope transforms the moment of his departure into the ‘‘forever after’’
time at his destination, and the homeland comes to designate the economic,
musico-cultural, and social space he would establish in New York once his
aesthetic responsibilities were fulfilled with the creation of Machito and
his Afro-Cubans. In its interpellative melancholy, the homeland grafted the
past into the continuity of the present, and what originated as an ideal,
extradiscursive, extraterritorial, and affective entity became instrumental
to the material processes by which Bauzá inserted ‘‘his’’ Cuba in the fissured
island (or cultural archipelago) of Manhattan. His is an island within an
island, an insular echo fully inscribed in his musical imagination and in the
spaces where he, for instance, would alter the social order by leading the
first black Latin orchestra to play downtown, at the Beachcomber, or later
on, at the Palladium, which soon was to achieve monumental status among
New York City dancers. In the end, the trope of the homeland allowed Bauzá
to release himself from the ontological bearings of national territory and
to exercise a dual temporal operation out of affective memory. That duality
means, furthermore, that the homeland and the past are rejected or are sub-
stituted by Bauzá’s present; but it means that the homeland and the past
are retained in the present, as its double.
As sign, homeland forms part of the repertoire of semantic codes through
which Bauzá administers his individual agency in the articulation of Afro-
Cuban jazz. This self-constitution is why I would suggest reading his nego-
tiation of the present as a romance, and his position within the story as that
of a romantic hero who, in Frye’s words, is ‘‘superior in degree to other men
and to his environment . . . whose actions are marvelous but who himself
is identified as a human being,’’ and for whom ‘‘prodigies of courage and
endurance, unnatural to us, are natural’’ (Anatomy of Criticism ). Bauzá’s
romance begins as a response to the real material conditions of an unrelent-
ing and inequitable present encountered as part of his designs to become
a New York jazz musician. It ends as an interested fiction in which the
idealized homeland imbues the adopted homeland with meaning and pro-
vides to the self an affective and temporal continuity in the face of a (poten-
tially devastating) fragmented subjectivity. Stamped with the authority of
origins, the new and the now receive the imprimatur of authenticity and
co-opts the sustained coherence of geocultural and temporal continuity.
These values stabilized the present and allowed the historical subject, Mario
Bauzá, to inscribe himself simultaneously into an identitarian network of
the past and his music into the present’s modernist impetus for aesthetic
self-determination and musical development.
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
Indeed, musical innovation and development were central topoi in

Bauzá’s aesthetics. To his mind, Afro-Cuban music needed to overcome
the presuppositions weighing down on it in New York, where Latin music
continued to be framed in viral terms, as a succession of bisyllabic fevers:
tango, rumba. For him, musical innovation was founded on aesthetic prem-
ises (that is, claims to immanent and authentic musico-expressive values)
and rational claims (the idea that the present affords a sophistication inac-
cessible to the past). It is my contention that the tense dialectic relation
between these aesthetic and rational values, in combination with the histori-
cal particularity given in the encounter of a black Cuban with black North
American culture, marks the modern condition of Latin music in the U.S.
diaspora. If there is anything heroic about Bauzá’s romance it is his juxta-
posing two distinct narratives of the ‘‘black Atlantic.’’ Bauzá’s tropical home-
land constitutes a Black Caribbean, a cultural territory and a way to think
the exchanges and flows in the relation between Black Cuba and black North
America. And to return to Frye, if the hero of romance is one whose actions,
‘‘unnatural to us, are natural [to him],’’ then we must question the natural-
izing process by which he seeks to restitute to Afro-Cuban music what had
been erased in the racialized stages of New York. This process adopts the
form of a familial affair, a marriage.
Marriage and Syncopation

While Gillespie, the black North American, speaks of combining unlikely
ingredients in a dish, Bauzá, the black Cuban immigrant, speaks of some-
thing more intimate, personal, and familial: marriage—a marriage, further-
more, in which his agency is complexly articulated as being a party and
the matchmaker. Bauzá for one had precise plans for the musical direction
the Machito and his Afro-Cubans ought to take. Determined to provide an
alternative to the watered-down versions of Latin dance music of Cugat’s
big band, to give an extreme case, he accentuated the percussive elements,
rhythmic sensibilities, and metric orientations of Cuban dance music and
foregrounded its proclivities toward vocal and instrumental improvisation,
as well as other Afro-Cuban musico-cultural markers such as call-and-
response. Equally important, he put to good use his vast knowledge and
accent-free command of jazz idioms, gained in the elite swing circles.
Again, from Bauzá’s interview in Música: ‘‘I got hold of two of the top
arrangers that used to write for Calloway and Chick Webb, [one] a fellow by
name of John Bartee, and we had a talk. I said, ‘I want an arrangement for
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
92 Jairo Moreno
this particular band. I want that sound [his emphasis] of the big American
band translated into my music.’ So he said, ‘Mario, but I don’t know nothin’
about your music.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, let me worry about it; all
I want [is for] you to orchestrate, to get that sound. The rhythms, syncopa-
tion, and the clave, that I write down for you.’ ’’ The next step, he said, was
‘‘to get the marriage of the two musics, the jazz and the Afro-Cuban music.’’
Bauzá defined for himself a distinctive agency in the marriage, decid-
ing who gets married, when, and most importantly, under what conditions.
His was the transculturist’s approach, strategically using selected features
of the (relatively) dominant musical culture (for example, orchestration and
harmony, which he calls ‘‘sound’’), incorporating them alongside defining
features of the subaltern group’s musical culture (such as rhythm). This
approach redefined the overall sonic imprint of the subaltern group’s music.
Marked elements of the subaltern group held, in this new sound, a place
of prominence in the musical surface: Spanish was the language of choice
for the lyrics and dense percussion layers dominated and helped structure
the compositional texture. Instrumental numbers could exhibit some of
the harmonic intricacies characteristic of bebop, or could equally feature
unchanging single chord vamps or montunos, as they are called by Cuban
musicians.
The marriage was not without ‘‘congenital’’ problems. Bauzá’s directives
to Bartee conjured a common dualism in accounts of musical fusions in
North America according to which rhythm, along with timbre, constituted
either a retention or a transformation of African musical practices, while
most other elements (such as harmony and orchestration) were an assimi-
lation of Western European practices. In Bauzá’s marriage, the terms of the
dualism were transposed so that rhythm was associated with Afro-Cuban
music, while orchestration and harmony were associated with black North
American swing. A parallel ideological transposition placed rhythm at the
end of a cultural axis in a realm denoted ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘instinctive,‘‘ ‘‘primi-
tive,’’ and ‘‘primordial,’’ and placed restrictive cognitive conditions on it
such as untranslatability (for example, that rhythm was felt and could not
be learned, that rhythm was both prediscursive and extradiscursive). Cog-
nitively and representationally inaccessible even to Bartee’s expert musi-
cal hearing, Afro-Cuban rhythmic designs suggested that the original link
between Afro-Cuba and black North America had become an undeniable
index of difference.
The admission of difference between two black musical cultures intro-
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
duced two distinct issues into the discourse tying rhythm to blackness.
(For more on the topic, see Ronald Radano’s ‘‘Hot Fantasies: American
Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm.’’) First, it signaled the exis-
tence of a rhythmic practice perhaps more fundamentally ‘‘black’’ than that
of black North Americans. Second, it imposed on black musicians a two-
tiered classification of musical competency, for the readily acknowledged
rhythmic complexity of the Afro-Cuban musical tradition put black North
American swing and bebop musicians at a disadvantage (the difficulties
experienced by acknowledged jazz giants like Max Roach when first playing
with Cuban musicians are legendary). These issues elicited intense feelings
of loss among key black North American musicians involved with Afro-
Cuban music and raised for them what Gilroy (after LeRoi Jones) calls the
‘‘challenge of a changing same,’’ that is, the question of ‘‘variation between
black cultures’’ (‘‘Sounds Authentic’’ ). Black North American musicians
responded to this challenge with their own interpretive scheme to give the-
matic form to the two shades of black that were party to Bauzá’s marriage.
In it, Bauzá’s homeland is recast (and effectively neutralized) as a screen on
which the image of the true bride has been projected. Enter Dizzy Gillespie
to resolemnize the marriage between jazz and ‘‘Mother Africa.’’
Echoing late-nineteenth-century accounts of drumming bans imposed
on slaves in the United States, Gillespie would note that ‘‘after the drums
had been outlawed and taken away, our ancestors had to devise other means
of expressing themselves, their emotions . . . the rhythm was in them, but
they just didn’t have any means, instrumentally, to put it together so that
the sound could travel very far . . . our ancestors had the impulse to make
polyrhythms, but basically they developed a monorhythm from that time
on. . . . We became monorhythmic, but the Afro-Cubans, the South Ameri-
cans, and the West Indians remained polyrhythmic . . . our rhythm became
so basic, though, that other blacks in the hemisphere could easily hear it’’ (to
BE ). Cast in a plot of tragedy, the melancholy air of this account reflects
Gillespie’s feelings of irreparable loss on seeing that this most treasured
token of musico-cultural identity, rhythm, has been taken from him. It
too posits the existence of a condition always already within (an ‘‘impulse’’)
which however dormant would, once reawakened, reclaim for black North
Americans their ancestral and therefore rightful and natural polyrhythmia;
all that was needed was someone who could alter the course of history
and change its tragic denouement into the triumph of romance. Gillespie’s
idealized ancestral past here appeals to an affective and psychological fra-
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
94 Jairo Moreno
gility similar to Bauzá’s interested fiction of ‘‘my homeland.’’ Gillespie’s

account, too, is subtended by ideal processes that give identitarian value to
vestigial retentions. But the processes he invokes are of a historical nature,
namely, the undeniable African diasporic origin of the two groups. This uni-
fying dynamic of origins and cultural inherence was taken as an opportunity
to redirect history, but the recuperative move that carried this out had to be
etched into the modernist poetics of bebop. The immanence of the ancestral
past and the drive to the future are contradictory tendencies that Gillespie
negotiated with skill, but in a way that was ultimately unthinkable without
structural advantages given by his status as a North American musician.
The kernel of Gillespie’s gesture of reclamation is his statement that he
had ‘‘always felt polyrhythmic from a long way back,’’ which encapsulates
his living sense of a kinship with a particular way of experiencing rhythm
(‘‘I always had that Latin feeling’’). Whether or not this was a psychological
projection, and whether or not it constituted a crude presentism, is both
unknowable and beside the point. Still, it is possible to speculate about how
Gillespie addressed the issue musically and how he went about the business
of reclaiming polyrhythms for his brand of black North American music in
the mid- to late s. By the early s, Machito and his Afro-Cubans had
established itself as the preeminent Latin ensemble in New York City, and
by the mid-s were holding forth at the Palladium, on th Street, with
jazz musicians from the neighboring nd Street coming over to see them
all the time. A veritable who’s who of the jazz world played and/or recorded
with the Machito orchestra under the musical direction of Bauzá: Charlie
Parker, Dexter Gordon, and Doc Cheatham, among others. Bauzá’s gambit
had paid off. Meanwhile, Gillespie had assembled a big band for which he
sought, in , a conga player (an idea he remembers mentioning to Bauzá
as early as ).
Just as he did with the marriage of Afro-Cuban music and jazz, Bauzá took
the role of matchmaker. ‘‘Well, I was the cause of it, that marriage, that
integration,’’ explained Bauzá for having introduced Luciano ‘‘Chano’’ Pozo
(–) to Gillespie. The scene of their first encounter is particularly
telling of Gillespie’s and Pozo’s respective ideas of blackness. ‘‘When I first
heard him down there [th Street], we talked; I mean, we didn’t talk, we
just looked at one another and laughed. . . . Since he couldn’t speak any
English, people always asked, ‘Well, how do you communicate?’ ‘Deehee no
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
peek pani, me no peek Angli, bo peek African,’ Chano would answer’’ (to
BE –). However obvious, these power dynamics warrant mention. The
linguistic barrier between the two made Pozo a subject of Gillespie’s ven-
triloquism. That he supplied the words in grotesquely broken and accented
English speaks patently of Gillespie’s structural control of their relation-
ship and of Pozo’s subordination. The dynamics surrounding their distinct
fields of musical expertise were more subtle, as can be seen in the manner
in which Gillespie characterized Pozo’s abilities. With a distinctive mixture
of paternalism and unbridled admiration, Gillespie would note that ‘‘Chano
was the first conga player to play with a jazz band, and he was very unusual
about playing with an understanding. There were certain things about our
music that he didn’t understand’’ (to BE ). In the last sentence, Gillespie
was referring to the radical difference between the Afro-Cuban conception
of rhythmic organization around the clave (a two-bar pattern of three and
two unequal-length beats) and the jazz practice that favored single bars sub-
divided into three or four beats. Pozo, who could not read music, soon was
taught the proper rhythmic subdivision of a jazz feel by his new boss, who
would sing in Pozo’s ear whenever the Cuban ‘‘got on that wrong beat.’’ ‘‘He’d
change immediately, it was fantastic,’’ said Gillespie admiringly. In the give
and take of his musical relationship to Pozo, Gillespie’s recognition of differ-
ence remained firmly in place, and was, further, framed within specific cul-
tural terms. ‘‘Chano had such limited knowledge of our music. He was really
African, you know. He probably played when he was two and a half years old
or something like that. All the Nañigo, the Santo, the Arrara, all these dif-
ferent sects, the African things in Cuba, he knew, and he was well versed’’
(to BE ). Deployed as an all-purpose trope, Africa, more than Cuba, was
indeed the source for Gillespie’s profound respect for Pozo’s musicianship
and expressive power, complete with a fascination with and desire for the
deeply buried and authentic kind of knowledge of rhythm he felt Pozo pos-
sessed. Here, for example, the motif of a supplementarity or the dialectic
tradeoff between having and not-having reappears, slightly transformed:
‘‘Chano wasn’t a writer, but stone African. He knew rhythm—rhythm from
Africa’’ (to BE ).
We will never know how Pozo saw his relationship to Gillespie. From
Gillespie’s perspective there was no doubt profound respect for Pozo and
a desire to access the archive of knowledge he felt had been lost to black
North Americans. The respect was, however, countered by the need to disci-
pline Pozo’s musical instincts and aesthetic predilections. Describing the
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
96 Jairo Moreno
assemblage of ‘‘Manteca,’’ their best-known and most celebrated collabora-

tion, Gillespie noted,
Chano wasn’t too hip about American music. If I’d let it go like
he wanted, it would’ve been strictly Afro-Cuban, all the way. There
wouldn’t have been a bridge. I wrote the bridge. I said, ‘‘Now, wait a
minute. Hold it, hold it. After that part [the polyrhythmic, riff-based
main section composed by Pozo], we need a bridge.’’ . . . That’s how it
happened. Anytime you hear something that Chano and I wrote, that
we were collaborators on, I just didn’t gorilla myself in it, I contrib-
uted. You see, when I use these guys from different cultures, I always
try to understand their music, and then I try to put what I think should
go in it. (to BE )
Walter Fuller, credited as co-composer in ‘‘Manteca,’’ was also the arranger,
and related the composing dynamics in no uncertain terms:
Chano would sing you from thing to thing. And what broke the night
was, we asked him, ‘‘Whaddayou want the bass to do? Whaddayou think
this should be? . . . ‘Pee-de-do! Pee-da-do! Pee-da-do!’ ’’ Chano was
doing that shit. Finally, I told him, ‘‘Hey, O.K., I got enough. Go ahead,
I’ll fix it.’’ Because we stayed there for about two hours with that kinda
shit . . . Chano had some figures that he wanted out and out. We sat at
the piano then, trying to structure the thing . . . So you take the har-
monies from Dizzy and say, ‘‘We’ll fix the rest of it, don’t worry!’’ When
Dizzy and Chano started out with the saxophones, he didn’t have that
shit. He didn’t have none of that. He had that line; he had that melody
line. And then he would say, ‘‘Pee-do-do! Pee-de-de! Pee-de-do!’’ That’s
exactly what he said. (to BE )
They had little tolerance for the montuno aesthetics of repetition that Pozo
favored when he composed tunes on his own. Fuller: ‘‘And if you listen to
‘Guachiri Guaro,’ it will drive you nuts because it does the same thing all
over again because it just keeps going and repeats itself ad infinitum. And it
never got off the ground like it should have because it wasn’t structured . . .
The form was lacking’’ (to BE –).
Fuller’s impatience with Pozo’s limitations is perhaps understandable
in the context of a busy New York arranger. His portrayal, however, goes
well beyond practicalities in representing a highly determined manner of
negotiating differential values of musical cognition and meaning. The effect
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
of the motif of repeated vocables, presented not as a symptom of Pozo’s

lack of English but as a symptom of his lack of language, is to infantilize
Pozo. It is hard to avoid the impression that Gillespie and Fuller are, in this
way, asserting their authority over the gift of rhythm that they desired. The
exchange between the musically literate black North Americans and the
illiterate black Cuban stands as a powerful record of an asymmetric but ulti-
mately dynamic relationship of combination and contradiction. But it is Gil-
lespie’s and Fuller’s intolerance for the aesthetics of Afro-Cuban music that
stand in high relief from all other aspects of this exchange. Heard as repe-
titious to the point of madness and irrationality, the montuno aesthetics are
perceived to be without form or structure. Incompatible with the vanguard-
ist aesthetics of bebop, which prized, in addition to harmonic complexity,
formal contrast and thematic variation and development, Pozo’s aesthet-
ics are judiciously disciplined, as when Gillespie notes that ‘‘if I’d let it go
like he wanted, it would’ve been strictly Afro-Cuban’’ (my emphasis). Thus,
the ‘‘form-giving’’ bridge to ‘‘Manteca,’’ originally planned by Gillespie to be
eight bars long, turned out twice that length, because the harmonic progres-
sion he worked out did not make it ‘‘back to B-flat,’’ as he put it. In this nod
toward formalism, and in spite of his allegations to the effect that he did
not ‘‘gorilla [himself ] in,’’ Gillespie here bracketed his enthusiasm for Afro-
Cubanisms in order to impose aesthetics that were black North American
through and through. For all his claims to a common ancestry, Gillespie’s
aesthetic priorities were firmly rooted in a black North American modernist
vanguard, not in an imaginary ‘‘Africa.’’
In this last comment, I find a symptom of the tension at play in the rec-
lamation of Africanness that Gillespie vaunts. ‘‘Chano’’ Pozo was simulta-
neously Same and Other. He was, on the one hand, regarded as a repository
of directly transmitted knowledge and as a living musical archive holding
ancestral memories lost to black North Americans. He was, on the other
hand, stripped of the cultural and historical complexity that had formed
him: a black Cuban fully invested in the synchretic musico-religious culture
of black Cuba and clearly cognizant of Cuban musical styles in all their rich
admixture. In circumventing the complexity of Pozo’s history, Gillespie was
transferring ‘‘into the object the principles of his relation to the object,’’ as
Bourdieu put it (Outline of a Theory of Practice ). That relation was gene-
alogical, and its principles were guided by the ideology of descent (the rule
of hypodescent) that governed the official politics of racial identity in the
United States. It was not the African ancestry of Gillespie which causally
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
98 Jairo Moreno
determined the common bond he felt to Pozo, or for that matter his ‘‘feeling
polyrhythmic,’’ it was rather his being fully immersed in a North America
with a particular view of and ideological investment in black sameness and
otherness. In that view, Africa becomes a simultaneously naturalized and
dehistoricized idea, a spectral intimation of ‘‘simultaneity in homogeneous
empty time,’’ to adopt Benjamin’s notion in Illuminations (ff ). (I have in
mind also Benedict Anderson’s use of the notion to describe the totalizing
simultaneity of time he considers essential to a modern conception of imag-
ined communities; see his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism.) In what may be rightfully termed an act of sub-
lation, Gillespie appeals to ‘‘Africa’’ in order to ground his modernism and
progressive aesthetics in an original anteriority. This original anteriority is
at the same time an alienating one, being both a sonorous index of a men-
acing counterrationality lodged in formless and unstructured music and the
musical signifier for a signified of absence at the point of origin. Gillespie
negotiated this alienation in his post- music. That bebop ultimately
accommodated that counterrationality in the form of CuBop (no matter
how much disciplining efforts went into that accommodation) is a mark of
Gillespie’s modern condition. Articulated by its author as a contribution of
two cultures, as an inclusive transcultural phenomenon, Gillespie’s Afro-
Cuban music sounds off the problematic encounter, not so much of cul-
tures but of histories, and most fundamentally of the incompatible senses
of temporality that constitute those histories and through which they are
represented. His marriage, such as it was, lived in the syncopation of tem-
poralities that could not be resolved in the downbeat of a simplified history
or an idealized origin.
Latin/Jazz must be thought always already within a modernity con-
ceived as a heterogeneity of temporalities. This heterogeneity, my analyses
of Bauzá’s and Gillespie’s self-representations indicate, comes into sharp
focus in the aural field of late-s to mid-s New York City. I write
‘‘sharp focus’’ deliberately, in full awareness of the fact that each term in
the equation Latin/Jazz exists in a differential relation to the other and as
an implied ideological critique of the other. That differential relation, the
heterogeneity of temporalities, and the fragmented cultural space where
Latin/Jazz dwells must be understood as constitutive of and constituted in
the modes of subjectivity that would ground Bauzá and Gillespie in their
aesthetic and expressive experimentations. It becomes imperative for histo-
rians to recognize this critical polyphony and to understand in it the Black
Tseng 2003.11.28 06:43
Caribbean of Latin/Jazz as an expressive praxis and cultural locus character-

ized by dialectic tension, and precisely because of it as a cause for musical
celebration.
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso, .
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken
Books, .
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, .
Brock, Lisa. ‘‘Introduction: Between Race and Empire.’’ In Between Race and Empire: African-
Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution, ed. Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda
Fuertes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, , –.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, .
Gillespie, John Birks (Dizzy), with Al Fraser. to BE, or not . . . to BOP. Garden City, NY: Double-
day, .
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, .
. ‘‘Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a Changing Same.’’
Black Music Research Journal . (): –.
Glasser, Ruth. Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities from
Our Perspective, –. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Jacques, Geoffrey. ‘‘CuBop! Afro-Cuban Music and Mid-Twentieth Century American Cul-
ture.’’ In Brock and Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, –.
Moore, Robin. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, –
. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, .
Moreiras, Alberto. ‘‘Hybridity and Double Consciousness.’’ Cultural Studies . (): –
.
Música. Dir. John D. Wise. New York: Third World Newsreel, .
Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís. Durham:
Duke University Press, [] .
Radano, Ronald. ‘‘Hot Fantasies: American Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm.’’ In
Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, with a foreword
by Houston A. Baker, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , –.
Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States.
New York: Oxford University Press, .
. Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, s to Today. New York: Schirmer Books, .
Washburne, Chris. ‘‘The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation
of an African-American Music.’’ Black Music Research Journal . (): –.
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Bauza Gillespie Latin

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Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

‘‘Deehee no peek pani, me no peek Angli, bo peek

In his autobiography, to BE, or not . . . to

The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Winter .

poral and spatial dislocations of a North American modernity. It should

black community. In fact, such naming was institutionalized through wide-

see Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revo-

a soil ontologically diﬀerent from Bauzá’s ‘‘homeland.’’ First, Bauzá recog-

Indeed, musical innovation and development were central topoi in

Marriage and Syncopation

gility similar to Bauzá’s interested ﬁction of ‘‘my homeland.’’ Gillespie’s

assemblage of ‘‘Manteca,’’ their best-known and most celebrated collabora-

of the motif of repeated vocables, presented not as a symptom of Pozo’s

Caribbean of Latin/Jazz as an expressive praxis and cultural locus character-

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