
Latin Jazz: the Other Jazz, published by Oxford University Press (May 2020).
Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
"Chris Washburne has put together an amazingly well researched and engaging book. It not only serves as an illuminating guide through the longstanding and complex relationship between Latin America and Jazz music, but makes the case for Latin American Jazz musicians as major players in the development and evolution of this genre. Highly recommended." -- Miguel Zenon , (Saxophonist, Composer and Educator)
"Dr. Washburne has the receipts! Informed by the author's decades as a working musician and bandleader, this passionate work of high-level scholarship counterpoints historical inquiry with lived ecstatic experience. In laying out his case for the multicultural nature of music, Washburne goes straight to the thorny issue of how racialized and nationalized genre divides have repeatedly erased the fundamentally modern, world-shaking, Afro-Latin music from the overarching jazz narrative. Meanwhile, he's eager to introduce you to the rich world of musical geniuses who are living and creating in clave right now." -- Ned Sublette, author of Cuba and Its Music