A Sound as International as the City Itself: A Review of Benjamin Lapidus' New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990

Reviewed by Matthew Pessar Joseph

New York and the International Sound of Latin Music boasts an ambitious title. Yet Benjamin Lapidus’s history of Spanish Caribbean music in Gotham does not disappoint. By exploring overlooked Cuban, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, and Jewish performers, dancers, music teachers, and instrument builders, the author shows how between 1940 and 1990 New York served as a transnational mecca for Latinx music. For Lapidus, the creation of an “international sound” was a two-way street. The mambo, rumba, and salsa traditions so popular among Black, white, and Latinx New Yorkers were not merely imported unchanged from the Caribbean. Rather, Lapidus argues, immigrant Latinx musicians, their US-born peers, and Jewish devotees developed new sounds by melding Caribbean folkloric and popular music with American jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock. Artists came to see Latinx music as “a unifying force” capable of “gradually break[ing] down social barriers.” Over the course of seven chapters, the author shows how Latinx music in the Big Apple was truly international.

In making this claim, Lapidus, a Grammy-nominated artist, marshals valuable musicological evidence gleaned from decades of performing in Latinx ensembles and teaching ethnomusicology at Gotham’s own John Jay College. He supplements these insights with material gleaned from historic newspaper articles and oral histories conducted with twelve musicians. While he does not extensively cite archival sources, his interviews with elderly, often understudied artists are priceless. Lapidus’s book is encyclopedic; it is a detailed compendium created by a scholar and musician with an obvious passion for the source material. As such, what follows is a breakdown of its many themes and subjects.

New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990
By Benjamin Lapidus
University Press of Mississippi, 2020
440 pages

The first two chapters notably shed light on Latinx music educators who helped mentor budding popular artists. While many scholars have ignored the classical and folkloric roots of Latinx music, Lapidus explains how older generations of musicians stressed the importance of such sonic foundations. Indeed, chapter one challenges racist assumptions that hold that Latinx artists had little formal musical training and instead learned their craft in the “university of the streets.” The author explores various education networks to show how formal classical training, listening sessions, informal mentorship, and the study of Afro-Latinx folkloric music informed Caribbean popular music in New York. Lapidus’s concept of multi-generational and ethnically diverse “learning communities” is useful to scholars like myself who study local, collaborative, cross-cultural musical scenes. Crucially, the author also spotlights understudied female music teachers like Maria Luisa Lecompte, Edveges Bocanegra, and Victoria Hernández, active between the 1920s and 1950s. By examining how these Puerto Rican women taught music theory and piano to future luminaries like Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, Lapidus successfully reconfigures the male-centric nature of most Latinx music scholarship.

Chapter two also deals with routinely overlooked figures. While most ethnomusicologists and music historians focus solely on the lives of Latinx musicians, Lapidus discusses the roles of luthiers and drum makers who constructed and repaired traditional Afro-Latinx instruments. Here, the author emphasizes one of the book’s central themes — the importance of “inter-ethnic collaboration” in shaping Latinx music in New York. Although readers might expect these craftsmen to be aged Latinx immigrants, Lapidus explains that many were born in New York. In fact, some of the most famous and sought-after instrument builders were not Latinx at all; rather, they were Jewish mambo fanatics. Lapidus documents developing inter-ethnic partnerships between luthiers and musicians who jointly modified Afro-Caribbean instruments to meet the needs of artists who performed a variety of Latinx and North American musical genres in the Big Apple. The author shows how inter-ethnic collaboration “was at the core of the New York sound.”

Chapter three features an in-depth study of Elio Osácar — better known as Sonny Bravo — a US-born, second-generation Cuban arranger and performer. Lapidus traces the rise, fall, and return of Bravo’s Típica 73, a pan-ethnic salsa group active between 1973 and 1980, to show how diverse bands were able to push the boundaries of sonic convention. Típica 73 featured musicians from Panama, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, as well as Gotham-bred Latinxs who incorporated jazz, rock, and rhythm and blues into their repertoire even as they strictly adhered to traditional Caribbean clave rhythms. Lapidus does an excellent job of documenting his subjects’ “musical biculturalism.” Members of the group were simultaneously steeped in Latinx and North American musical traditions and sonically connected the United States and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. In fact, by tracing musical and social changes through musical transcription and rigorous musicological examination, Lapidus accomplishes what few have attempted. It is certainly refreshing to see a scholar venture beyond lyrical analysis when making claims about the evolution of Latinx musical traditions.

The remainder of the book explores the contributions of Panamanians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Cubans to the development of Latinx music in New York. While each of the last four chapters deals with a specific ethnic group, Lapidus insists that Latinx musicians refused to culturally segregate themselves. From the moment Spanish-speaking immigrants began arriving in New York in the early 20th century, they actively sought out and embraced both Latinx and North American musical trends. Some Latinx musicians and US-born performers found it necessary to master a variety of genres. After all, the ability to sit in with jazz, rock, and Latinx groups meant steady income. The author argues that Latinx artists were uniquely able to “move back and forth across musical borders easily and reconcile seemingly disparate worlds.”

Chapter four discusses an ethnic group that has largely gone unexamined in the history of Latinx music. Lapidus insists that Panamanian musicians were central to the development of New York’s eclectic “international sound.” Given their unique backgrounds — they spoke English, were well acquainted with both Caribbean and North American sonic traditions, and could simultaneously identify as West Indian and Afro-Latinx — Panamanians arrived in New York armed with a diverse musical repertoire. “[M]usical multiculturalism” helped them successfully negotiate classical, jazz, Broadway, West Indian, and Latinx music scenes. While they faced discrimination from Latinxs and African Americans, Panamanians pushed their bands to perform innovative cross-cultural material. Lapidus’s focus on Panamanians is an important contribution. He contends that perhaps due to their English surnames, Panamanian artists have been misidentified and understudied.

Lapidus makes another important historiographical intervention in chapter five. By analyzing Puerto Rican and Nuyorican musicians who broadened the sound of Caribbean popular music, Lapidus takes issue with scholars like César Miguel Rondón who have argued that Cubans were solely responsible for the development Latinx music in New York. Lapidus maintains that Puerto Rican artists — steeped in both jazz and Latinx traditions — brought the “liquid sound” of the anticipated bass part to Gotham music, proving themselves to be innovators on par with their Cuban counterparts. Rather than “adopters, copiers, or appropriators of Cuban music,” Puerto Ricans who collaborated with artists across ethnic barriers transformed and “modernized” Afro-Latinx and Cuban melodies and rhythms.

Chapter six details Jewish New Yorkers’ decades-long involvement in Latinx music and builds upon Lapidus’s 2016 article “¡Toca maravilloso!: Larry Harlow and the Jewish Connection to Latin Music.” While scholars have seized upon mid-century mambonik dancers at the Palladium Ballroom and in Catskills Resorts, Lapidus presents a fuller history of 20th-century Jewish fandom. The author uses newspaper announcements from the 1930s to the 1960s to show how working- and middle-class Jews identified with and enjoyed Latinx music. Even as they danced to mambo and rumba at the Palladium and in the Catskills, Jews hired Latinx bands to perform at religious, philanthropic, humanitarian, Zionist, and secular venues across Manhattan and the outer boroughs. Crucially, the chapter also highlights the careers of Eydie Gormé and Abbe Lane, two female Jewish singers who have yet to receive scholarly attention.

Chapter seven details the musical impact of Afro-Cuban musicians and dancers who arrived in New York through the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. Once again, Lapidus foregrounds overlooked artists. While historians have examined the careers of mid-century Cuban pioneers like Mario Bauzá and Marco Rizo, they have devoted less attention to performers who came to New York after the Revolution. Lapidus differs from scholars who have argued that Cuba was culturally and politically closed off following the events of 1959. He maintains that since the majority of 125,000 Marielitos were Afro-Cuban, they “strengthened and reinvigorated Afro-Cuban ritual music and folkloric scenes” in New York and across the United States. Like early 20th-century Latinx immigrants, the Cuban refugees performed in jazz ensembles and served as teachers and mentors.

New York and the International Sound of Latin Music explores themes crucial to the study of urban popular music and documents the lives of musicians who, by dint of their gender or ethnicity, have gone largely unexamined. Those who are not as knowledgeable about Latinx music and New York cultural history will appreciate the glossary, which defines lesser-known terms like abakuá, bembé, and jíbaro. The same readers would have also benefited from a deeper engagement with the history of the Palladium Ballroom and Fania Records, arguably Latinx music’s most important postwar venue and record label. Both spurred inter-ethnic collaboration in the city and nation. In the conclusion, Lapidus urges future scholars to “address the immense contributions of African American and Dominican musicians to the New York sound of Latin music.” New York and the International Sound of Latin Music is an important foundation for such endeavors and should inspire historians to think about how Gotham’s diverse population helped shape 20th-century musical traditions that were simultaneously American and Latinx.

Matthew Pessar Joseph is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, specializing in in 20th-century American racial, cultural, and urban history. His dissertation, Syncopating Segregation: Musical Cross-Pollination in Post-World War II New York City, examines racially integrated musical scenes to show how artists sought to rethink and remap the spatial contours of an increasingly divided Gotham.