Full Description
In Tropical Riffs Jason Borge traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals-who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own-the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and DÁmaso PÉrez Prado popularity challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, Borge elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Kindred Sounds and Latin Cats 1
1. La Civilizada Selva: Latin America and the Jazz Age 13
2. Dark Pursuits: Argentina, Race, and Jazz 51
3. The Anxiety of Americanization: Jazz, Samba, and Bossa Nova 89
4. The Hazards of Hybridity: Afro-Cuban Jazz, Mambo, and Revolution 131
5. Liberation, Disenchantment, and the Afterlives of Jazz 163
Conclusion. The Cruelty of Jazz 195
Notes 201
Bibliography 237
Index 261
