La Délaissée et ses soupirs

Haitian students from a Cap-Haitien school of music performing a composition by Occide Jeanty, La Délaissée et ses soupirs. Due to Occide Jeanty's significance in the larger history of Haitian music, it's a shame more of his works are not available online, particularly the méringue.

Nan Fon Bwa

Perhaps the best recording of "Nan Fon Bwa" I have encountered so far. Coulanges uses a highly rhythmic approach that excels with this composition. Who needs drums if you can provide rhythm and melody on the guitar?

Krönungswalzer, op.133

I recently went through a jazz-waltz phase, and decided to go back to the 'roots' of the style. Of course, this entailed listening to more Strauss and other Vienna composers, in addition to the vast corpus of the classical genre's composers who used the waltz. Somehow, that led me eventually to Joseph Lanner, a key figure in the history of the waltz. There's something irredeemably uplifting and soulful about the waltz.

Waltz For Debby (Kronos)

When I was obsessively listening to Bill Evans a year ago, somehow I missed out on the collaboration of Kronos Quartet with Eddie Gomez and Jim Hall, two musical partners of Evans. They recorded some of my favorite songs by Evans, and although it's only Hall and Gomez who take solos, the results are spectacular. The style and compositions of Evans always lend themselves well to classical music, particularly French impressionists but even the quasi-baroque sounds of the Kronos Quartet here. With Gomez to establish a jazz foundation, Kronos Quartet's tribute to Evans is astonishingly quite successful. Although their Monk album was a tad underwhelming, I would love to hear them tackle compositions by various other jazz legends. Perhaps Ornette Coleman? Eric Dolphy?

La Valse

Listening obsessively to jazz waltz brought me, unsurprisingly, to classical music and the longer history of the waltz. Ravel's decadently delectable composition has been on repeat for the last week or so, and is far more interestingly than most of Strauss's waltz compositions.

Liebestraum

A beautiful piece stuck in my head for the entirety of the week.

Michelangeli plays Chopin Berceuse Op. 57 D Flat Major

Beauty is a rare thing. Bask in the pulchritude. 

The Spanish Tinge in American Music

So I've realized that my earlier post about Latin/Spanish-influenced American music is incomplete. Very incomplete. American music has always been influenced by Caribbean and Latin American music. New Orleans, a cosmopolitan city in the 19th century that was more Caribbean and Creole than Anglo-American, had always been exchanging people, language, religion, and music with Haiti, Cuba, Spain, and other Caribbean cities. That's why New Orleans music tends to sound very similar to Caribbean music: very melodic, polyrhythmic, syncopated, light-hearted, dance music. However, Caribbean music is obviously not monochromatic; Spanish, French, English, indigenous and African influences combined to form unique rhythms and musical styles that continue to separate various forms of Caribbean music in spite of a common African origin for most music of the region. Thus, Jamaican mento or reggae is clearly distinct from Cuban son or mambo, just as Haitian rara is different from Dominican merengue or Trinidadian calypso.

 However, their common African substratum and incessant cross-cultural exchanges between the Islands and New Orleans have led to a lot of commonalities that abound today in New Orleans jazz, ragtime, some blues, and even R&B and rock. Indeed, I was quite surprised after attending a Haitian rara concert by how similar the music is to New Orleans dixieland and jazz. Anywho, here is an interesting article about the similarities that exist between Caribbean and New Orleans jazz. It provides several examples of Caribbean influences in New Orleans jazz and explains how referring to the Caribbean connection as "Spanish" is quite far from the truth. While the habanero and other Afro-Cuban rhythms influenced a lot of early jazz, including W.C. Handy's St. Louis Blues, other Caribbean islands such as Haiti and the French Caribbean influenced Cuba's rhythmic diversity and New Orleans.
http://www.prjc.org/roots/nojazzandcarribe.html

Anywho, another oft-overlooked American classical composer of the 19th century, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, of Louisiana origin, also drew from African-American and Caribbean music and rhythms for his own compositions. His music, along with some early ragtime, laid the foundation for more Caribbean influences in American music beyond classical (of course other composers, including black composers of the 19th century, were aware of Caribbean music and wrote compositions based on it, along with the numerous dance bands that shifted between New Orleans and the Caribbean).

So here's what y'all have been waiting for, a list of several songs that exemplify what Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the Spanish Tinge, or influences from Afro-Caribbean music. Indeed, Morton once stated that the Spanish tinge was necessary to make jazz.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk has several compositions with Afro-Caribbean themes, including Bamboula, Souvenir de Cuba and Souvenir de Porto Rico. Le Banjo is another interesting composition that refers to the American banjo, which was historically associated with African-Americans because of the instrument's African provenance. I will post multiple youtube links to some of his Caribbean-themed compositons that sought to capture the sound and spirit of the Caribbean.

Now Scott Joplin, the master ragtime pianist best known for composing "The Entertainer," was also influenced by Latin/Caribbean music. One of his pieces, Solace, endeavors to sound "Latin."

Of course there are several examples of New Orleans jazz music which uses habanera rhythms as well as other forms of Caribbean music. Here are examples from the 1920s-1940s:

Of course future jazz songs took more from latin music. Dizzy Gillespie stands out in that regard...

Bill Evans' Nardis takes more from Spanish music than Latin or Caribbean.