Dominican jazz –both within and beyond the island, in a transboundary point of view– results from the rhythmic and technical parallels between Afro-Dominican and African American musical cultures. At the same time, is the result of a diffusion process proper to jazz as part of a “cultural invasion”, which generated resistance and appropriation in the Dominican nation. On one hand, the introduction of jazz in the Dominican local space was an immediate cultural result of the military occupation of the U.S. around 1915-1916 and its context of an aggressive imperial expansionism. On the other hand, and in a more profound sense, it also resulted from the musical traces shared by both cultures, as it relates with their common African ancestry and belonging in the black Atlantic. The emergence of jazz in Dominican society joined with Afro-descendent musical traditions that carried the form and rhythmic elements that preceded by centuries the introduction of African American music, and that were present in jazz before its diffusion in the Caribbean. From these connections emerged genres such as meren-jazz and Afro-Domincan jazz, which themselves have endured into the present and which continue to nourish the multifaceted and polyphonic spectrum of Caribbean and Latin jazz.
Keywords:
Jazz, República Dominicana, jazz caribeño, jazz latino, latin jazz
Tejeda, D. (2018). The founding process of Dominican jazz. Revista Musical Chilena, 72(229), pp. 57–78. Retrieved from https://nuevosfoliosbioetica.uchile.cl/index.php/RMCH/article/view/50765
