The Latin Tinge: Jazz and Latin American Music in New Orleans and Beyond

Over half a century before jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton argued the importance of “The Spanish Tinge” to jazz, Louis Moreau Gottschalk was incorporating the same Afro-Caribbean rhythmic cells (tresillo and habanera) within his Romantic-era piano pieces. A celebrated, virtuoso star performer in the mid-19th century, Gottschalk’s compositions serve as an early example of the rhythmic and harmonic combinations later so embedded in ragtime and jazz.

Gottschalk was born in New Orleans in 1829 to a German Jewish father and a French Catholic mother whose family had fled Haiti to Louisiana after the slave rebellion in the 1790s. As a child, he was brought to Paris for piano training, and at the age of 15, his acclaim began to spread after Chopin praised his successful recital. Not long after, Gottschalk debuted the composition Bamboula, which includes the habanera rhythm that he learned at home from his grandmother and her slave Sally, who were both from Haiti. This was the first of many compositions that prefigured ragtime by including elements of Haitian and Cuban contradanzas (also see Ojos Criollos, which sounds even closer to Jelly Roll Morton because the syncopated rhythms are in the bass in the left hand, rather than the higher pitched right hand figures).

Gottschalk was praised as a musical spokesman of the New World, and he spent of his life in Latin America and the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, Guadaloupe, Martinique, Cuba, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and, at the end of his life, Brazil. Many pieces that he wrote during his travels in the Antilles, such as Souvenir de Porto Rico, Danza, and Réponds-moi are now clearly recognizable as precursors to ragtime and jazz, in particular songs that feature what Jelly Roll Morton refers to as “The Spanish Tinge.”

In 1938, folklorist Alan Lomax interviewed Jelly Roll Morton for the Library of Congress. At one point, while introducing his composition “New Orleans Blues,” Morton explained “Of course you may notice the Spanish tinge in it. This has so much to do with the typical jazz idea. If one can’t manage a way to put these tinges of Spanish in these tunes, they’ll never be able to get the right season[ing], I may call it, for jazz music.”* He then demonstrated what he meant by playing a well known Spanish song “La Paloma,” which features an habanera rhythm played by the left hand in the lower register. After first playing La Paloma straight, he then shifted the part in his right hand into a style full of blue notes and syncopated twists and turns.

tresillo* x..x..x.
habanera x..xx.x.
cinquillo x.xx.xx.

What Jelly Roll Morton called the Spanish Tinge, and John Storm Roberts later amended as the Latin Tinge, came to be understood broadly as the Caribbean, Latin American and Spanish influence on music in the United States. Following Morton’s 1938 Library of Congress interview, this influence is often understood as the incorporation of Afro-Cuban rhythmic cells such as the tresillo, the habanera, and the cinquillo* [link here to a separate chapter about these rhythms], a technique also found in certain works by earlier American composers Louis Gottschalk and Scott Joplin. As this course unfolds, this particular model of the Spanish/Latin tinge will be shown to be just one of many ways to understand the subject. It is important to clarify here, however, how the Spanish tinge played out in Jelly Roll Morton’s music. Here are some examples, drawing upon musicologist Charles Hiroshi Garrett’s analysis of twenty of Morton’s compositions:

New Orleans Blues

One of Morton’s signature tunes, New Orleans Blues has been described as a “twelve-bar blues-tango”*. The tresillo rhythm propels the bassline throughout. The pianist’s two hands are often clashing rhythmically until the third note of the tresillo in each measure. Only at the end of the tune does the tresillo disappear and a swung 8ths take over.

Jelly Roll Blues

In contrast to the way that New Orleans Blues is tresillo-based throughout, only to end with jazz swing, Jelly Roll Blues has a simpler blues accompaniment until the end of the tune, when it ends strong with tresillo cross-rhythms.

The Crave

The Crave is perhaps better described as a Spanish-flavored tune with a blues tinge, rather than a blues tune with a Spanish tinge. The tresillo rhythm is constant in the bassline, and the second time through the first strain (0:33-0:55 on the 1938 recording) includes an almost caricatured flamenco-like flurry of notes. Most striking, however, is the start of the second strain (0:58-1:01) includes what Garrett aptly describes as “a pungent two-measure break, an unexpected interjection” of blues dissonance. The fact that this sudden shift to blues is jarring underscores the point that the rest of the song is more strongly allied with the tango than the blues.

Tia Juana (Tee Wanna)

This song is strong evidence that Morton wasn’t above riding the wave of popularity of exotic Mexican music in the U.S.. “Tia Juana” features the Charleston rhythm (the tresillo without the last strike: x..x….) and parallel thirds in an apparent attempt to evoke the sound of Mexican music. The sheet music was sold as a “Spanish Fox Trot.”

Musical circulations between Cuba, Mexico and New Orleans: danzón and jazz

In contrast to understandings of the Spanish Tinge that follow Jelly Roll Morton’s description of Afro-Caribbean rhythmic cells used in bass parts, new research argues that the Latin influence on early jazz is more than just spice added to an already-cooked musical mixture. Robin Moore, a scholar of Cuban music, and Alejandro Madrid, a scholar of Mexican music, recently collaborated on a project tracing the history of the danzón in Veracruz, Mexico, Habana, Cuba, and New Orleans. Moore and Madrid argue for a hemispheric, not a U.S.-centered frame for understanding the development of early jazz. Importantly, they focus not only on rhythm, but on the question of how “polyphonic weave” style improvisation, largely considered absent from its predecessor ragtime, became so fundamental to traditional jazz.

They see a possible answer in the Mexican and Cuban orquestas típicas that made such a splash when they performed again and again in late-19th century New Orleans. Specifically, the Mexican Eighth Cavalry Band under the direction of Captain Encarnación Payán performed several times in New Orleans, creating significant buzz surrounding “Mexican music,” including Mexican danza and Cuban danzón. After a successful run of performances at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884, sheet music sales of danzón skyrocketed, and the band returned to perform several times in the next 14 years.

Improvisation is a well-documented element of danzón. Terms such as floreos (embellishments) and especulaciones (flights of fancy) describe improvised moments where each instrument goes its own way. Some published scores of the repertoire even include, as early as 1862, open-ended two-measure vamp sections that served to support improvisation for as long as performers desired.

An early danzón recording from 1906, 11 years before the first known jazz recording, exhibits the “polyphonic weave”-style improvisation that it currently so identified with early jazz. The recording, “La Patti Negra” by Orquesta Valenzuela, begins with only minor variations from the melody in the repeated A segment. During the third and four repetitions of A, however, the low horns and the cornet re-enter with flashier collective improvisations that contrast significantly from the first iterations of the melody.

It is early danzón recordings like this that have led critics such as Cristobal Ayala to ask “Isn’t it possible that dixieland bands copied Cuban [danzón] orchestras? That their music was the initial point of departure, from which jazz soon developed into its many varied modalities and styles?” In other words, what if the Spanish in the gumbo of jazz isn’t just an added spice, but an essential ingredient in the roux.

Historian and archivist Bruce Raeburn digs deeply into the cultural origins of jazz, unearthing lots of details regarding how early jazz was being performed by musicians of Caribbean, Hispanic and/or Latino descent. In his research at Tulane’s Hogan jazz archive, he found that around one-quarter of the first generation of jazz performers were Hispanic and/or Latino. This finding makes plausible Robin Moore and Alejandro Madrid’s recent argument that the influence of late-19th century Cuban and Mexican musical practices permeate early jazz to an extent often unacknowledged. [link to Mexico/Cuba/New Orleans musical circulations page]

But the music of “Spanish” people that Jelly Roll Morton acknowledges when he describes “The Spanish Tinge” is not just identified with Cuba and Mexico. Iberian Spaniards and Portuguese, Spanish-speaking Canary Islanders, Filipinos, Hondurans, Panamanians and Puerto Ricans were also living in New Orleans in the “crazy quilt” neighborhoods such as Tremé, the 7th Ward, and the lower French Quarter. In this setting, reinvention and cross-fertilization came relatively easily. The rhythmic bag of tricks that included Afro-caribbean rhythmic cells such as the tresillo and the habanera spread through the city, responding to the demands of the dancing public.

But Raeburn’s research suggests that only acknowledging the clave-derived rhythmic elements as part of the Spanish tinge barely scratches the surface of how Hispanics and Latinos influenced the development of jazz. Here are just a few of the contributions of some of the most well-known players:

“Chink” Martin

Chink Martin, a Mexican-Spanish tuba and bass player, grew up in the lower French Quarter in an area that was populated, around 1907, mainly by Mexican and Spanish people. Chink contributed considerably to the transition of the rhythm backbone of ragtime to that of jazz, but without any of the asymmetrical clave-based habanera or tresillo rhythms. Instead, he is credited with moving from playing two bass notes a measure (the oom of an oom-pa bass rhythm) to playing four bass notes (four-on-the-floor). In his own words, his approach was considered “strange in those times; all other bass players played only two beats per measure, which was the proper way for a bass in a ragtime band to play; I decided the sound was too empty, so I began playing four beats, and filling out the chord…playing that style two or three years after he began playing the bass.” This opened the door to the subsequent development of the walking bass that has since become such a prominent element of modern jazz.

Luis Carl Russell

Russell was an Afro-Latino who was born in Colombia, near Bocas del Toro, right before it became part of the newly independent Panama. As a teenager, he performed music for American soldiers on the Caribbean coast of Panama. Just as jazz was beginning to be recorded, and coalescing as a genre, Russell miraculously won the lottery, allowing him to fulfill his dream of moving to New Orleans to become a jazz musician. After spending a few years in New Orleans and absorbing the emerging jazz idiom there, Russell moved up to Chicago and then New York City to play with King Oliver. In Harlem, he set out on his own and became a bandleader and arranger. From 1935-1943, Russell’s orchestra played as Louis Armstrong’s backing band.

Kid Ory

Trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory was one of the most important jazz band leaders in New Orleans after 1910. Although he is often described as black in accounts of jazz history, his father was white, the descendent of French-Alsatian immigrants, and his mother was Afro-Spanish and Native American. As Raeburn points out, Ory was as Hispanic as he was black, although he was a speaker of creolized French. Ory as an individual represented the same kind of ethnic and racial diversity that could be found in many of the bands described as “black” under segregation.

The tresillo, habanera and cinquillo rhythms contributed to the Spanish tinge in early jazz. Songs with these rhythms feature coexisting duple and triple pulses that create a productive rhythmic tension for dancers and instrumentalists alike.

This tension is also present in the Cuban son clave, a rhythmic organizing principle that is described either as 3 – 2 or 2 – 3, depending on whether the measure with three strokes, or the measure with two strokes is played first:

3 – 2 son clave

x..x..x…x.x…

2 – 3 son clave

..x.x…x..x..x.

Clave is a rhythmic ‘key’ or timeline that helps organize all of the other instruments, from percussion to horns and vocals. It serves as the backbone for music like mambo and salsa that features tight, interlocking polyrhythmic layers. Salsa trombonist and ethnomusicologist Chris Washburne summarizes how clave functions as more than just a beat. If a musical phrase is “in clave,” generally it follows these guidelines:

1. Accented notes correspond with one of all the clave strokes.

2. No strong accents are played on a non-clave stroke beat if they are not balanced by equally strong accents on clave stroke beats.

3. the measures of the music alternate between an “on the beat” and a “syncopated beat” phrase or vice versa, similar to the clave pattern.

4. A phrase may still be considered in clave if the rhythm starts out clashing but eventually resolves strongly on a clave beat, creating rhythmic tension and resolution.

In his article “The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation of an African-American Music,” Washburne gives several examples of how jazz tunes often have sections that are in clave. Within the jazz idiom, lots of tunes go into clave, and then out again into a swing rhythm. This contrasts Afro-latin genres such as mambo and salsa where playing in clave throughout the tune is standard, and dancers rely on that regularity.

He found that in jazz, rhythmic breaks and other transitional points in an arrangement are a frequent place where clave appears.

The drum break introduction to Louis Armstrong’s “Tiger Rag” is an example of this.

Also, certain “comping” patterns or accompaniment by the rhythm section feature clave.

The piano comping on Miles Davis’ “Two Bass Hit,” which follows the tresillo rhythm without the last beat, is an example of this.

In some compositions, the actual melody is in clave.

The first eight measures of Duke Ellington, Irving Mills, and Henry Nemo’s superlative “Skrontch” is an example of this.

Also, “Rhythm-a-ning” by Thelonious Monk is great for hearing the contrast between playing in clave and outside it in a jazz setting, because the melody begins in clave and then falls into a jazz swing rhythm for the second half of the A section and the entire B section.

The main melodic figure from “Salt Peanuts” by Dizzy Gillespie is also in clave.

Finally, there are examples of certain artists’ versions of standard tunes rhythmically “transpose” the composition into clave.

Louis Armstrong’s version of “All of Me” is an example of this.

In Tenerife, a city in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco, there is an ensemble named the Alabama Dixieland Jazz Band that gigs today. But the existence of this group named after a U.S. Gulf South state is not simply the consequence of early jazz winning over the world through mass media and touring performers. Instead, the Alabama Dixieland Jazz Band in Tenerife offers a footnote on the margins of jazz history. Their music tells us something about the complexity of jazz circulations.

Canary Islanders, or isleños, live a life ‘in-between’ in more than one way. Many residents are of the North African Amazigh (also known as Berbers), an ethnicity that confounds the simple equation of African-ness with blackness. In their history, they were pivotal to colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, yet located geographically neither in Europe, nor Africa, nor in the Americas.

Conquered in 1496, the Canaries were the first colonial territory of the Spanish Empire. Many colonial policies began and were tested there. Slavery and sugar cane cultivation were introduced to the Americas through the islands. Canary Islanders formed the vanguard of colonists throughout the Spanish Empire.

In the late-18th century, when Louisiana was still a Spanish colony, around 4,000 isleños were relocated by force to St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans. They were settled strategically around New Orleans to guard approaches to the city.

Alcide “Yellow” Nunez, a clarinetist of isleño descendant, was an early figure in jazz recording. Nunez played in the initial line-up of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the ensemble credited with making the first jazz recording in 1917. Nunez’s subsequent band, the Louisiana Five, had several hit recordings in 1918-1920.

The participation of isleños like Nunez in the emergence of jazz have inspired contemporary isleños in Tenerife to stake musical claim on the genre. As scholar Mark Lomanno convincingly argues, acknowledging their contribution highlights the question of what was left out and unwritten in conventional narratives of jazz history as the quintessential American art form—stories so often told in black and white.

The Latin Tinge in New Orleans is not only a turn-of-the-20th century phenomenon that helped shaped the history of jazz. It continues today, taking on new forms in the years since hurricane Katrina so profoundly disrupted the landscape. During the post-2005 rebuilding, Brazilians seeking construction work increased over tenfold in the city, and with this shift, the cultural imprint of Brazil on the city became more visible. Brazilians, with their world-famous carnaval traditions, have found that Mardi Gras is an event where they can assert their presence in New Orleans.

Casa Samba is a New Orleans-based Rio de Janeiro-style samba school that has been performing in the city for over two decades. Director Curtis Pierre has maintained long-term collaborations with Brazilian musicians such as percussionist Jorge Alabê. Mardi Gras has offered opportunities for Brazilian immigrants, or Brazucas, to be seen as a part of a kind of “universal carnival citizenship.”

It has also, however, tested the limits of how compatible the distinct celebrations of Brazilian Carnaval and New Orleanian Carnival can be. For example, Casa Samba tried to perform during the annual Endymion parade in the 1980s, but the six mile route ultimately proved impossible to endure while doing a dance as athletic as the samba. On the other hand, the group is often hired at the private balls of the carnival krewes, and during these jobs they are often billed as representative of New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition, rather than an exotic example of Brazilian Carnaval.

Brazucas also recognize the affinity between Brazilian Carnaval blocos and New Orleanian Carnival krewes. Both are groups of revelers, inspiring young Brazilians to print up T-shirts and form a bloco that joins the revelry by one of the main Uptown parade routes. As the mingle with the crowd, people often ask them what krewe they belong to.

In addition, bands like Chegadão made up of both Brazucas and New Orleanians are also forming, exploring the affinities between samba and funk, and between accordion-based forró and zydeco. As the city’s demographics change, new attempts to season the gumbo of New Orleans music emerge.

For more information on this subject, read Annie McNeill Gibson’s book “Post-Katrina Brazucas: Brazilian Immigrants in New Orleans.”