Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bauza Black Caribbean
Bauza Black Caribbean
Jairo Moreno
Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz: Difference,
Modernity, and the Black Caribbean
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-
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Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 83
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-
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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
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Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 85
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’’
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Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 87
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
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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.
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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-
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Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 93
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-
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94 Jairo Moreno
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
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Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 95
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
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Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz 97
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
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. ‘‘Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a Changing Same.’’
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ture.’’ In Brock and Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, –.
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