The jazz world is both unified and fractioned. It presents itself as a tradition, and yet, the question of what is or is not jazz continues to be asked. In his book, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz, ethnomusicologist Christopher Washburne teases out the separation of Latin jazz from the rest of the jazz world by tracing the overlapping aspects of jazz and Latin jazz histories from the colonial to the contemporary era...To do so, he focuses on the processes of globalization, canonization, race relations, and genre construction and how they intersect with Latin jazz history and, more broadly, jazz history.
Christopher Washburne is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University and the Founder and Director of Columbia's Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program. As a trombonist, he has performed on over 150 recordings and leads his own SYOTOS Latin jazz band and the Rags and Roots jazz band.