Why Call It Latin Jazz? Afro-Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Cubop, Caribbean Jazz, Jazz Latin, or Just . . . Jazz

Abstract

This chapter explores how Latin jazz is positioned and named and the primary discursive contestations associated with the genre. What is focused on in particular is how musicians exert agency by manipulating generic boundaries as a negotiative tool. With a focus on two prominent bandleaders as case studies, Arturo O’Farrill and Ray Barretto, discursive strategies embodying a complex of subjectivities are explored and serve as a lens into the fundamental political undergirding of intercultural production. What becomes apparent is that self-conceived notions held by musicians concerning how to label and perform this music prove to be neither static nor terminal in nature but rather must be imagined as mobile, fluid, and changeable, always strategic, and at times even seeming fickle. What is revealed is the pendular, self-positioning discourse that makers of this music engage in, in order to navigate through and strategically position themselves within this at times adversarial milieu. The politics of place, nation, class, economics, and race as well as the complex historical relationships inform their fluid dance of genre imaginings.