Music of the World

Socarras started by playing the Cotton Club and in black revues, recording the first flute solos jazz with Clarence Williams, Sidney Bechet's and Louis Armstrong's producer. Once he had built up a reputation, he founded a big band that mixed classical music, Cuban rhythms and jazz. His music was a total novelty at the time, and one contemporary American critic wrote of the savage intensity" of the band's rhythm section. Although Socarras was black, he overcame racial barriers in many clubs that had previously been closed to coloured bands, taking his tropical drums as far afield as Illinois and Nebraska.

The Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol also embarked on an American jazz career, joining the Duke Ellington orchestra in the late 1920s. For Ellington he composed the first Latin jazz numbers, Caravan and Perdido. He also introduced his boss to the structure of Cuban music which, unlike jazz which allows its soloists complete freedom of invention, is based on a very precise superpos...