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Fernández, Raúl A. From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz, Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2006. 199 pp.
Much of the research behind Raul A. Fernández's From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz comes from the author's participation as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution's Jazz Oral History Program from 1994 to 2000. While working in this capacity, Fernández interviewed Afro-Cuban musicians in the United States and throughout the world. His access to these musicians-Celia Cruz, Mongo Santamaria, and Israel "Cachao" López, to name just a few-is both the greatest asset to his short book and, unfortunately, underscores its most significant weakness. While the study tries to assess the influence of Afro-Cuban music over the course of the twentieth century, and Cuban son in particular, the result is an unevenly divided introduction to Cuban dance music: one third historical and theoretical analysis, two thirds biographical sketches with rich anecdotal testimony.
As Fernández organizes the book, chapters one, two, and three are devoted to the roots of Cuban son, undeniably, and unquestionably, the foundation of Cuban popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Fernández seems to feel it necessary to prove this point, along with others like the importance of dancing in Cuban music, as if there were ever a debate over the subject. Nonetheless, the historical information provided is accurate, if not new, and does offer a concise overview of the genealogy of Cuban dance music from African drumming traditions through the rumba, culminating in the son of the early 1900s. What is presented, however, has already been explored in greater detail in works by Cristobal Díaz Ayala, Helio Orovio, Natalio Galán, Leonardo Acosta, Peter Manuel and John Storm Roberts. This shortfall could be mitigated significantly if the book were clearly geared toward a popular, that is, non-academic, audience. Unfortunately, Fernández embraces terminology such as "transculturation," and "imagined communities" without explanation or...