Cuban Influence On Latin American Music

Latin America contains almost thirty countries, each with a unique musical sound encompassing influence from three cultures. These main cultures are European, African and Amerindian, but within these three are different subcultures (Roberts 1). With such a wide array of different cultures, it was surprising to find that only a few had a noticeable impact on the music of the United States. The music of Cuba, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico is claimed to have the largest influence, so looking first at the distinct elements of each countries’ music and then at its manifestation in the United States music scene, I will examine how, where and when these countries came to be of influence.

Starting first with Cuba, it was evident that the influence

The most noticeable difference tends to be a large proportion of Hispanic influence with a bit of African in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, whereas Cuba is a more equal balance of the two (Roberts 10). One of the Dominican Republic’s music styles that successfully made it in the U.S. was the merengue (Roberts 10). This is a country style dance with instrumentation including a guiro (metal scrapper), a tambora, and a saxophone, and is sometimes fronted by a larger brass dance

Before this, Latin jazz in the U.S. was blurred together with other styles of jazz music, but with the help of Chano Pozzo, Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Bauza, Machito, Stan Kenton and various others, Latin jazz began to be differentiated (Washburne 411). Latin jazz was described by being compared to the rhythm of Latin songs such as the rumba, stomp or tango, but as jazz began to be less associated with dance, two categories were made: Cubop and Latin Jazz. Cubop is a word stemming from Cuba and bebop, with bebop being the term for popular jazz music wanting to be distinguished from jazz music before it (Washburne 412). Cubop drew from traditional bebop music and Cuban influences to create and new and distinct