Re: The Palladium: Where Salsa Was King

Date: 18 May 2003 09:29:49 -0700
Newsgroups: rec.music.afro-latin
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How good was that documentary? Check this article from the NY Times:
After decades, Latin jazz develops its own academic canon
Sunday, October 27, 2002
By BEN RATLIFF, New York Times News Service
NEW YORK - By one measure, the invention of Latin jazz could be dated to
1940, when Machito Grillo started his band, the Afro-Cubans, here in New
York City. Before long he would be famous for his glorious combinations of
jazz harmony and phrasing with Cuban percussion. By another, it could go
back farther, to W.C. Handy's composing "St. Louis Blues" over a habanera
rhythm. Or to Louis Armstrong's recorded version of "El Manisero" ("The
Peanut Vendor"). Or to the early years of the century in New Orleans, when
Cuban and African and Creole cultures mixed so effectively.
Whatever the measure, until now there has never been any serious movement to
study it, canonize it, historicize it. As recently as five years ago jazz
bands were still playing a watery pseudo-clave rhythm and calling it Latin
jazz. And the enormous amount of jazz scholarship activity since the 1970s -
biographies, discographies, documentary films, CD reissue work - had no
equivalent on the Latin-jazz side. Now several long-flowing streams of
interest in Latin jazz are running together, and it seems that the form is
becoming recognized as official culture in America, ready for
heritage-building, specialized analysis and education.
Jazz at Lincoln Center has put its imprimatur on the music with its own
in-house Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, led by the pianist and composer Arturo
O'Farrill; it will play two concerts this weekend, Friday at Hostos Center
for the Arts and Culture in the Bronx and on Saturday at Brooklyn Center for
the Performing Arts. And the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has taken
note: A traveling multimedia exhibition, "Latin Jazz: La Combinacion
Perfecta," opened there last weekend and will go to 10 American cities by
2006. (In conjunction with the exhibition, Chronicle Books has published an
illustrated companion volume, and Smithsonian Folkways has released a CD
anthology of Latin Jazz.) Another show on the local roots of Latin music is
currently at the Museum of the City of New York.
The parallel rise of Latin jazz as an increasingly bigger part of
college-level jazz education also suggests that America is finally beginning
to come to grips with a music that has been around for longer than most have
noticed. "I think there's a practical reason for why this is happening,"
said O'Farrill, who is the son of the venerated Chico O'Farrill. (The elder
O'Farrill, who died last year, composed long-form works like "The Afro-Cuban
Jazz Suite" and "The Aztec Suite," both basic to the repertory of the
Lincoln Center group.) "As we see in popular culture with the acceptance of
Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin," he continued, "the Latino population is a
heavy demographic, and people in positions of money and power are realizing
that this is an economic force to be reckoned with."
But, O'Farrill said, the vision of Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of
Jazz at Lincoln Center, was central to the creation of the orchestra.
"Wynton asked me to come and rehearse the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at
its benefit concert last year," he said. "They were having trouble with some
of the phrasing in one of the Latin pieces, and Wynton's wheels started
turning. He understood then that you can't just put jazz players in a Latin
band. The guys that play this music the best, I'm telling you, are the guys
that really know how to phrase in clave." (Clave is the primary Afro-Cuban
rhythm.)
"It takes years just to stop being terrorized by the clave," he added. "And
then if you listen to the music of Machito, Chico O'Farrill, Mario Bauza,
this is music on a very high level. It's sophisticated rhythmically, but
also in terms of harmony, orchestration, arrangement. It's on a par with the
best of orchestral big-band jazz. Wynton understood that this is specialized
music that's equal and worthy of investment in terms of bringing the
highest-quality performance to it. In doing so, he's taken a very bold
step."
The Smithsonian's touring exhibition - small, colorful and introductory, in
the manner of exhibitions produced by Sites, the Smithsonian's
traveling-show extension - makes an effort to get the terms right and to
have the audience see Latin jazz in almost participatory terms. One section,
complete with pillows on the floor, is dedicated to a video of the drummer
and educator Bobby Sanabria demonstrating aspects of the clave rhythm; there
are bongos, shekeres, clave sticks and guiros available for anyone to play
along.
The exhibition is not collection based, because Sites has no collections;
aside from a 20-minute video on the evolution of Latin jazz and some display
cases holding items like Tito Puente's set of timbales, much of the space is
given over to tall, conga-shaped kiosks with texts printed on them. Some of
that material draws on the Smithsonian's jazz oral history project.
Raul Fernandez, curator of the exhibition, conducted some of those
interviews - traveling to Stockholm, Sweden, for instance, to speak with the
great Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes. Fernandez sees the exhibition as part of a
growing movement to preserve the history of Latin jazz. "When it comes to
jazz, I've read biographies dating back to the 1930s with big repositories
of photographs and documents," he said. "In Latin jazz there are few
collections of significance."
The practical challenges Fernandez encountered during four years of work on
the exhibition taught him, he said, that conservation shapes history. "We
met people who said, 'I used to have this instrument, but I didn't know it
was important, so I threw it away.'" Other sources had extensive collections
of film and photographs, but didn't know their provenance, and the film was
of dubious quality.
The short film in the exhibition - which includes brief but tantalizing
scenes of the bandleaders Perez Prado and Mongo Santamaria - features
Sanabria as one of its chief narrators; Sanabria also co-produced "The
Palladium: Where Mambo Was King," a documentary for the Bravo channel that
was first broadcast last June.
It's noteworthy that Latin jazz is breaking into America's big cultural
institutions, but it is perhaps even more meaningful that it is becoming a
greater part of college jazz education. Jazz programs in universities all
over the country are starting Latin-jazz ensembles.
Justin DiCioccio, assistant dean at the Manhattan School of Music in New
York, created a full-fledged Afro-Cuban jazz curriculum within the jazz
division when he started there four years ago. He began with an Afro-Cuban
jazz orchestra, led by Sanabria, who also teaches a class on history and
percussion in Latin music. (For the last decade Sanabria has filled a
similar role with the Latin jazz program at the New School University in New
York.) The Manhattan program now has two different smaller Latin combos and
provides private lessons.
Some well-recognized young players in New York from Latin-music
backgrounds - John Benitez, Miguel Zenon, and Luis Bonilla, for example -
have enrolled at Manhattan to start or finish degrees; their presence
enlivens and alters the school.
"Up until recently even professional jazz musicians were not playing Latin
jazz correctly," said DiCioccio, who is a drummer as well as an educator.
"They just didn't understand the importance of the clave. The Latin music
that most young people were coming up with was a fusion kind of thing - a
salsa approach, or a rock approach, as opposed to the deep tradition of the
son clave and the rumba clave."
Latin jazz is a history of border-crossings between white, black and Latin
cultures: Examples range from Handy's sojourn in Cuba to the Cuban conga
player Chano Pozo's entry into the New York jazz world in 1947, to the jazz
and mambo scenes in New York intermingling because the clubs for each kind
of music were set close together. O'Farrill sees the possibility, and the
need, for a new kind of border crossing, this time on the part of audiences.
"I think it's important that the Latino community not be scared of
institutional culture," he said. "It's been too long that we've allowed this
kind of high culture-low culture mentality to permeate us."
If the concern is about bringing in sufficient audiences to support Latin
jazz in a high-culture setting, however, there should be little to worry
about. All of Jazz at Lincoln Center's 21 Latin-jazz-themed concerts since
1991 have sold out. "It's like it was in the '50s again," said Chris
Washburne, a trombonist professor of music at Columbia. "The jazz record
companies start saying, 'All right, you're a jazz musician, jazz isn't
selling, do a Latin album.' And I've played in Latin-music concerts at both
Lincoln Center and Carnegie that have sold out. The thing is this: Latino
culture in general supports music. It's part of Latino society."