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 The
Latin Tinge : The Impact of Latin American Music on the United
States by John Storm Roberts
When it comes
to 20th-century American pop music, "virtually all of the
major popular forms--Tin Pan Alley, stage, and film music, jazz,
rhythm and blues, country music, and rock--have been affected
throughout their development by the idioms of Brazil, Cuba, or
Mexico."
So writes
eminent musicologist John Storm Roberts of the often-overlooked
role that Latin American rhythms, musical forms, and musicians
have played in shaping American culture. The Latin Tinge
shows how musical trends from Spain and Africa evolved into the
Cuban son, bomba y plena in Puerto Rico, Argentinean
tango, and the samba in Brazil. Roberts highlights pioneering
Latin American performers who popularized Afro-Hispanic music
in the United States: Cuba's Pérez Prado and Mario Bauzá, for
example, swung New York dancers to the beat of the rumba, mambo,
and Latin jazz in the '30s and '40s. Brazilian composer Antonio
Carlos Jobim combined his native country's samba percussion with
jazz structures and European harmonies and launched the bossa
nova craze of the mid '60s; Mexican American superstars Carlos
Santana and the late songstress Selena blended Afro-Cuban, rock,
blues, Tejano, and Tex-Mex folk styles into an upbeat American
hybrid.
Roberts also
details the Puerto Rican contribution to the making of salsa,
the pivotal role of Puerto Rican Americans in creating rap, and
the fast-growing popularity of merengue from the Dominican Republic.
Even an American standard like the theme to I Love Lucy,
Roberts reminds us, was shaped by the Latin influence. -- Eugene
Holley (Amazon.com)
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