An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 16 | JAZZ IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 405

CD 3.10 Listening Guide 16.4 “El cayuco” TITO PUENTE AND HIS ORCHESTRA

Listen & Refl ect

1. How does the sound of Puente’s band differ from the sound of jazz ensembles studied
   so far?


2. On the basis of what you can hear, how important would you say improvisation is in this
   music?


3. What is the balance of vocal sections to instrumental sections in “El cayuco,” and what
   does that imply about the role of singers in Latin dance music?

essentially vamps, built of repeating two-bar riffs or ostinatos such as the piano

montuno heard near the beginning of “El cayuco.” At a time when other forms of

modern jazz were moving away from the dancers that had fueled the Swing Era,

Latin jazz bands such as Puente’s were maintaining strong ties to their audience’s

desire to move to the music.

JAZZ LPs AND ARTISTIC PRESTIGE

In the early 1950s jazz recordings began appearing in the 33 1 ⁄3-rpm long-playing

(LP) format developed for classical music. The fl exibility that LP recording

offered jazz musicians infl uenced the content of their music as well as boost-

ing its prestige. An LP offered the possibility of longer pieces. The relatively

high price encouraged repeated listening, which helped fans absorb unfamiliar

styles. LPs also came with liner notes by writers—often jazz critics—who might

suggest a context for listening. Thanks in part to LP recordings, modern jazz

began to develop a fan base that included concertgoers and readers of the maga-

zines, from the New Yorker to the trade journal Down Beat, that carried jazz criti-

cism and news. Growing numbers of white college-age listeners embraced jazz

as their own; a particular favorite of collegiate listeners was the Dave Brubeck

Quartet’s 1959 LP Time Out, which featured tunes with unusual meters, such as

Ta ke Fi v e, in quintuple meter. And in the summer of 1954 the Newport Jazz Fes-

tival, modeled on classical festivals, was founded in Newport, Rhode Island. Jazz

was fi nding a new place on the American scene.

Writers on jazz such as Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams treated the new LPs

as an artistic legacy. Indeed, they shaped that legacy into a body of work that,

with its great fi gures, canonic recordings, and style periods, paralleled the tra-

dition of the Western classical sphere. And they did so long before most classical

musicians and music lovers showed interest in jazz as an art form. In a day when

such labels as “new music” and “contemporary music” pointed to the Eurocen-

tric classical sphere, jazz musicians lacked the institutional support and cultural

prestige to convey their own artistic ideas beyond the circle of jazz fans.

Dave Brubeck

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