Joe Cuba's El Pito (I'll Never Go Back to Georgia)

Joe Cuba, el alcalde del barrio when it comes to boogaloo in 1960s New York, used the melody of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo's "Manteca" for his song, "El Pito (I"ll Never Go Back to Georgia)." Pito means whistle, and there is a lot of whistling in this track, as well as the repetition of "I'll never go back to Georgia," a chant used by Dizzy Gillespie in some of his recordings of "Manteca" decades before Cuba's "El Pito." "Manteca" is one of the "first" Latin jazz songs, fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms provided by Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie's swing/bop background, bringing both bebop and Latin jazz to America. Here is Joe Cuba's song, which is 5 minutes of Latin boogaloo and jamming. Since it's not meant to recreate the more improvisational bebop sounds of Gillespie's original, "El Pito" does not shift between Latin rhythms and more conventional swing like a lot of Dizzy Gillespie's early Latin jazz recordings, so it lacks the bridge where the Cuban percussion was abandoned during part of the song. The chant of never returning to Georgia referred to racial tensions and Jim Crow in the US South, which is why Dizzy Gillespie, an African-American, added that to the song. Perhaps he was inspired by Chano Pozo's Abakua chants he added when the band performed the song in the distant

Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo

Here is Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo in 1947. As you can hear, the song shifts away from the 3-2 son clave rhythm although Pozo does play the ostinato throughout the song, even as the horn section shifts to swing/bebop. Clearly, in 1947 Pozo and Gillespie did not understand each others music (Afro-Cuban and jazz) to create a truly seamless unity. However, the song is still a fine attempt and transcends those technical limits and contradictions as a beautiful song articulating a black Atlantic transnational consciousness and, perhaps to a limited degree, black nationalist outlook on African diasporic music and cultures. The incorporation of rhythms of African origin as well as Afro-Cuban music styles by Gillespie, an African-American from South Carolina, likely represents this transnational, black pride and cultural dialectics characteristic of the Afro-Atlantic world.

Dizzy Gillespie at Birdland

This version of the tune also shifts from the Latin rhythm to swing in the bridge, but is a little longer and features Mongo Santamaria on congas instead. Santamaria even gets a little solo and Gillespie's trumpet solo plays with Santamaria alone. Priceless moment of African-American and Afro-Cuban sonic harmony and unity. Check out this for a "Manteca Suite" that explores the song's structure in different ways as well as using different rhythms.