Popular Cuban Music 80 Revised And Corrected Compositions

Arsenio Rodrguez, composer and musical innovator, made an indelible impact on a broad range of musical styles from the Caribbean and Latin America to West and Central Africa. The son montuno style that he created and his innovative conjunto ensemble inspired other Cuban musicians and played a key role in the development of salsa, yet Arsenio achieved only intermittent commercial success. Drawing on the testimony of family, musicians, dancers, and other contemporaries, David Garcia traces Arsenio's early career in Cuba, his influence on Cuban and Latin popular music in the 1940s, his struggle for recognition at the height of mambo-mania in the 1950s, and his importance to Puerto Rican and Cuban communities in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Garcia shows how matters of race, class, and identity as well as the transnational Latin music industry shaped Arsenio's music and career.

This study of the Latin American art song and its development in the context of musical nationalism shows how the song is a mirror in which the processes of conformation to Latin American national identity are reflected.

Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.

Examines the full range of humanities and social science scholarship on people of African descent in Latin America.