Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz uncovers Latin jazz's rich intercultural heritage, exploring its Caribbean and Latin American musical roots, its ability to transcend genre boundaries, and its inseparability from issues of ethnicity and nation.
The jazz world is both unified and fractioned. It presents itself as a tradition, and yet, the question of what is or is not jazz continues to be asked. In his book, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz, ethnomusicologist Christopher Washburne teases out the separation of Latin jazz from the rest of the jazz world by tracing the overlapping aspects of jazz and Latin jazz histories from the colonial to the contemporary era...To do so, he focuses on the processes of globalization, canonization, race relations, and genre construction and how they intersect with Latin jazz history and, more broadly, jazz history.