Based on unprecedented research in Cuba, the direct testimonial of scores of Cuban musicians, and the author's unique experience as a prominent jazz musician, Cubano Be Cubano Bop is destined to take its place among the path-breaking classics of jazz history. The work pays tribute not only to a distinguished lineage of Cuban jazz musicians and composers, but also to the rich musical exchanges between Cuban and American jazz throughout the twentieth century. Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie are just a few of the great North American musicians who figure prominently in Leonardo Acosta's account of the influence of Cuban music on jazz.

Beginning with the first encounters between Cuban music and jazz around the turn of the last century, and concluding with a chapter on the latest currents in the jazz scene in Cuba today, this book fills a huge gap in the history of one of the most popular musical forms of our time. Acosta writes about the presence of Cuban musicians in New Orleans and the "Spanish tinge" in early jazz from the city, the formation and spread of the first jazz ensembles in Cuba, the great jazz big bands of the thirties, and the inception of "Latin jazz". He explores the evolution of bebop, the feeling movement, and mambo in the forties, leading to the explosion of Cuban or Afro-Cuban jazz and the musical innovations of the legendary musicians and composers Machito, Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo. Acosta takes readers inside the cultural life of Havana in the fifties and shares with them the spectacular performances and jam sessions at the Tropicana and other nightclubs. He writes with firsthand knowledge of the period of musical transition after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new atmosphere of the sixties, and the beginning of soundtrack experimentation in Cuban cinema. The work concludes with a portrait of a new generation of internationally known Cuban jazz musicians, among them Grammy Award-winners Chucho Valdes and Paquito D'Riviera. Written by an internationally acclaimed Cuban musician, musicologist, and literary critic, Cubano Be Cubano Bop is an indispensable contribution to the history of jazz.

With a foresword by Paquito D'Rivera; translated by Daniel S. Whitesell.

CONTENTS:
Cuban Music and Jazz: First Encounters
The Twenties and the First Jazz Ensembles
The Big Bands and the Contradictory 1930s
The Forites: Bebop, Feeling and Mambo
The Explosion of Cubop or Afro-Cuban jazz
Havana in the 1950s
End of the Decade: The Club Cubano de Jazz
Musical Transition: 1959 and After
Irakere and the Takeoff of Cuban Jazz

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