Latin Jazz Piano

Latin jazz piano grew out of the meeting between Cuban dance rhythm and North American jazz harmony. The groundwork was laid in New York in the 1940s, where Mario Bauza and the singer Frank Grillo, known as Machito, led the band Machito and his Afro-Cubans. In 1947 the bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie brought the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo (1915-1948) into his orchestra, and their "Manteca" became the first jazz standard built on the clave, the two-bar rhythmic cell that underpins the whole tradition. Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco" of 1951 carried the same current into the piano trio.

At the keyboard the defining device is the montuno: a short, syncopated figure repeated in step with the clave, worked mostly in the left hand while the right improvises above it. Eddie Palmieri (1936-2025) did more than anyone to place that pattern at the heart of the music, hammering out montunos with a percussive, almost orchestral attack. In Havana, Chucho Valdes (born 1941) took the language further with the band Irakere, which he founded in 1973, folding in classical technique and older Afro-Cuban ritual drumming.

The result asks a great deal of both hands: a steady, driving bass and montuno underneath, fast and harmonically rich lines on top, all held to the discipline of the clave. It rewards slow study. Drop a recording to half speed, or open a transcription in practice mode with the hands split across separate channels, and the interlocking parts come apart cleanly enough to learn one at a time.