City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research John Jay College of Criminal Justice 1998 Improvisation in Latin Dance Music: History and style Peter L. Manuel CUNY Graduate Center How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/jj_pubs/318 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] CHAPTER Srx Improvisation in Latin Dance Music: History and Style PETER MANUEL Latin dance music constitutes one of the most dynamic and sophisticated urban popular music traditions in the Americas. Improvisation plays an important role in this set of genres, and its styles are sufficiently distinctive, complex, and internally significant as to merit book-length treatment along the lines of Paul Berliner's volume Thinking in Jazz (1994 ). To date, however, the subject of Latin improvisation has received only marginal and cursory analytical treat ment, primarily in recent pedagogical guidebooks and videos. 1 While a single chijpter such as this can hardly do justice to the subject, an attempt will be made here to sketch some aspects of the historical development of Latin im provisational styles, to outline the sorts of improvisation occurring in main stream contemporary Latin music, and to take a more focused look at improvi sational styles of one representative instrument, the piano. An ultimate and only partially realized goal in this study is to hypothesize a unified, coherent aesthetic of Latin improvisation in general.