Groundbreaking Exhibition on Latin Jazz
Opens at Flushing Town Hall
In the words of New Orleans jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, jazz was born with a “Spanish tinge.” A new bilingual traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian, “Latin Jazz: La Combinación Perfecta,” will open at Flushing Town Hall on April 10, and remain on view until June 29, 2003.
“Listen to it, and you can’t help but move to the music. Read about it, and it opens doors to our diverse past. Latin jazz is American and world music. We’re delighted to bring this long overdue exhibition to the public,” said Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small.
“Latin Jazz: La Combinación Perfecta” tells the story of the evolution of Latin jazz in the United States. The exhibition offers a concise look at Latin jazz, its history, major personalities and icons. The exhibi-tion features maps, audio-visual stations, vintage film footage, oral history interviews, documents, photo-graphs, musical scores, programs and album covers. Several instruments (some owned by jazz greats) – tres, claves, maracas, congas, bongos, guïros, tamboras, panderetas, horns, timbales and a five-key flute – will enhance the exhibition’s impact on visitors.
An important educational component of the exhibition is the musical “hands-on” room where visitors, old and young, will be able to enjoy their musical creativity and learn while watching a video featuring Grammy-nominated drummer/percussionist and educator Bobby Sanabria. In the instrumental video, Sanabria navigates the visitor through the variety of percussion instruments used in Latin Jazz as well as the role of the clave and the drum set and demonstrates basic techniques and rhythms for each. Conga, bongos, shekeres, guïros and claves are all available for the visitor to use in the “hands-on” room. The impact of this interactive component of the exhibition is vital to the visitors’ comprehension of the Latin jazz genre.
In the late 19th century, musical traditions from the Caribbean and the United States migrated and mixed, resulting in the emergence of complex new sounds. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, musicians includ-ing Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Machito began to fuse jazz with Afro-Cuban music. The result was what “Latin Jazz” curator Raúl Fernández calls “a hybrid of hybrids.” Percussionists as-sumed a dramatic new importance, new instruments found their way into the jazz lexicon, and the African heritage of both Caribbean and American music became more pronounced.
In New York, social clubs, concert halls and dance venues brought together American, Puerto Rican, Cu-ban and Caribbean musicians. In other major U. S. cities jazz audiences and musicians also welcomed these new influences. On the West Coast, many local musicians, along with East Coast musicians who-had migrated west, adopted the new blend of music as their own. In San Francisco, the Beats wove the vocabulary and rhythms of Afro-Cubop into their own work. Meanwhile, the sounds of American jazz spread throughout the Caribbean.
An 18-member advisory committee, led by Fernández, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and drawn from the international jazz and Latin music community, has been an impor-tant part of the planning process of this project. Members include music scholars and historians, musi-cians, record executives, producers and radio broadcasters.
“Latin jazz is one of the most complex and exciting musics of the planet,” said Fernández. “It combines Afro-Cuban and Caribbean rhythms with the harmonic approaches and styles of jazz. It’s the perfect combination.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a CD, which may be purchased in Flushing Town Hall’s Gift Shop, produced by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings containing some of the most essential Latin jazz re-cordings. Go to
www.smithsonianlatinjazz.org for more information.
SPECIAL EVENTS BEING PRESENTED WITH “LATIN JAZZ: LA COMBINACIÓN PERFECTA”:
April 11 at 8 pm. Jazz Live! with Bobby Sanabria & Quarteto Aché. $29, $24 seniors/students, $22 Flushing Council members. Call ext. 222 for tickets.
April 16 at 10 and 11 am. The Joy of Latin Jazz for Student Groups, K-12 Only. $6 per student. Call ext. 241 to reserve.
May 9 at 8 pm. Jazz Live! with Jerry Gonzalez & the Fort Apache Band. $29, $24 seniors/students, $22 Flushing Council members. Call ext. 222 for tickets.
Flushing Town Hall is open to the public from Monday through Friday from 10 am-5 pm and on Saturday and Sunday, from 12 noon-5 pm. Admission is free. It is located at 137-35 Northern Boulevard, Flush-ing, New York at the corner of Linden Place. Flushing Town Hall is served by the #7 IRT subway, the Long Island Rail Road, the Q25, Q34, Q13, Q28, Q17, Q65, Q44 and the Q66 buses. It can also be reached on Sunday via Town Hall’s free Culture Loop trolley, which makes stops in downtown Flushing, Jamaica, Bayside and Fort Totten. There is a parking lot behind Flushing Town Hall.
This exhibition is presented in New York by the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts, located in landmark Flushing Town Hall, which receives major operating support from the NYC Department of Cul-tural Affairs, the NY City Council, Queens Delegation, Council Members Hon. John Liu and Hon. Leroy Comrie, the NYC Board of Education and the NYC Department for the Aging. Additional support is pro-vided by the NY State Council on the Arts, a state agency, Citigroup Foundation, J. P. Morgan Chase, The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, Newsday, Newsday Hoy, The Owen Cheatham Founda-tion, Richmond County Savings Foundation, Sam Ash Music Stores, Target and Verizon.
“Latin Jazz: La Combinación Perfecta” was organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibi-tion Service (SITES) and America’s Jazz Heritage, A Partnership of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the Smithsonian Institution. Additional support has been provided by BET Jazz. A collabora-tion of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and 19 other organizations, Jazz Appre-ciation Month (JAM) is a national celebration, held each April, to affirm jazz as both an historical and living treasure.
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