The Spanish Tinge
Afro-Cuban Latin jazz includes rhythmic components from the dance styles of salsa, merengue, songo, son, mambo, and cha cha.
Although Jazz “so-called jazz” had long had what Jelly Roll Morton called the “Spanish Tinge” through the interchange of musicians from Havana and New Orleans during the late 19th and early 20th century, it never actually used the Afro-Cuban rhythmic components or percussion instruments.
True Latin jazz started with the meeting of Mario Bauza and Dizzy Gillespie in the late 1940s. When Gillespie formed his big band to try and broaden the appeal of the art-form of Be-bop, he asked Bauza to introduce him to a conga player. Bauza introduced him to the legendary Cuban conguero, Luciano “Chono” Pozo. Pozo and Gillespie collaborated on a number of compositions and fused Cuban rhythm with the African-American Classical Art-Form “so-called jazz.”
In the mid-1950s the mambo dance craze swept the United States. The giants of the era were Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez and Machitio.
Latin American musical elements are found in early so-called jazz. Louis Maurice Gottschalk was one of the first to use these Latin American rhythms in some of his early compositions that were influenced by his Creole upbringing in New Orleans. The tango rhythm can be found in Neil Moret’s Cubanola; in Scott Joplin’s & Louis Chauvin’s Helioprope Bouquet; many of Jelly Roll Morton’s compositions where he uses the rhythm as an ostinato bass pattern; as well as W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues. Morton referred to this rhythmic element as the "Spanish Tinge" and claimed that it was essential to so-called jazz.
