page_title: Latin jazz
section_title: "Spanish tinge"—The Cuban influence in early jazz and proto-Latin jazz
hierarchical_section_title: Latin jazz / Afro-Cuban jazz / "Spanish tinge"—The Cuban influence in early jazz and proto-Latin jazz
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Jelly Roll Morton, cropped from group photo of musicians and entertainers in Los Angeles, California, at the Cadillac Club, c. 1917 or 1918.
context_page_description: Latin jazz is a genre of jazz with Latin American rhythms. The two main categories are Afro-Cuban jazz, rhythmically based on Cuban popular dance music, with a rhythm section employing ostinato patterns or a clave, and Afro-Brazilian jazz, which includes bossa nova and samba.
context_section_description: African American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban musical motifs in the 19th century, when the habanera (Cuban contradanza) gained international popularity. The habanera was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif. The habanera rhythm (also known as congo, tango-congo, or tango ) can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat. Wynton Marsalis considers tresillo to be the New Orleans "clave," although technically, the pattern is only half a clave.
  "St. Louis Blues" (1914) by W. C. Handy has a habanera-tresillo bass line.  Handy noted a reaction to the habanera rhythm included in Will H. Tyler's "Maori": "I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction to the rhythm...White dancers, as I had observed them, took the number in stride. I began to suspect that there was something Negroid in that beat." After noting a similar reaction to the same rhythm in "La Paloma", Handy included this rhythm in his "St. Louis Blues", the instrumental copy of "Memphis Blues", the chorus of "Beale Street Blues", and other compositions. Jelly Roll Morton considered the tresillo-habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be an essential ingredient of jazz.  The habanera rhythm can be heard in his left hand on songs like "The Crave" (1910, recorded 1938).www.pedo
  Now in one of my earliest tunes, “New Orleans Blues,” you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz—Morton (1938: Library of Congress Recording).
  Although the exact origins of jazz syncopation may never be known, there is evidence that the habanera-tresillo was there at its conception. Buddy Bolden, the first known jazz musician, is credited with creating the big four, a habanera-based pattern. The big four (below) was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.
  It is probably safe to say that by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions. Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed. It may also account for the fact that patterns such as [tresillo have] . . . remained one of the most useful and common syncopated patterns in jazz—Schuller (1968).
  The Cuban influence is evident in many pre-1940s jazz tunes, but rhythmically, they are all based on single-celled motifs such as tresillo, and not do not contain an overt two-celled, clave-based structure. "Caravan", written by Juan Tizol and first performed in 1936, is an early proto-Latin jazz composition. It is not clave-based.
caption: Jelly Roll Morton
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