Some years ago, I came across something rather unusual: a 1920s Argentinian pressing of a U.S. jazz phonograph record. I had never seen such a thing before (and have seen very few since), so it made me wonder what would make a U.S. record company go to the trouble and expense of having copies of a record pressed in South America as well as in the United States. In turn, this made me wonder, just what was that relationship between Latin American and U.S. music in the 1920s or so? There seems to be relatively little information related to the topic readily available, except as it relates to Latin American influences on the development of jazz; however, records and phonograph trade publications from the era exist, and provide some useful clues: the records themselves contain actual examples of music from a given time and place, and therefore can potentially give some suggestions as to the motives behind their creation; trade publications, meanwhile, can give insights into the thought processes of non-musicians who were nonetheless associated with the recording industry, such as record company executives. Using these sources, I will attempt to demonstrate that the musical relationship, in terms of recorded music at least, was not strictly that of one country forcing its music on others and taking what it wanted from them; rather, both the United States and various Latin American countries adopted the other’s styles willingly, and at the same time actively tried to promote their own musical traditions abroad.
The United States’ expanding economy of the early twentieth century created an increasing demand for new markets and products; among the former was South America, and among the latter, the production of recorded music, the result of which was an effort by the major phonograph and record companies to tap into the South American market[1]: By 1905, both the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Victor Talking Machine Company had recording studios in Mexico, and by the 1920s, Victor had built pressing plants there and in Argentina.[2] In order to make the records produced at these facilities appealing to the broadest audience possible, recording companies chose to focus on a handful of generally-defined “Latin American” styles that would be popular across national borders; due to strong economies in Cuba, Uruguay, and Argentina, music from these regions came to dominate the recorded output.[3]
The body of Latin American music recorded in the early decades of the century was not, however, necessarily truly representative of the broader musical scene of the region. When choosing material and performers, the U.S.-based Victor and Columbia tended towards a “concert hall sound” based on European classical traditions and intended to appeal at once to the higher classes and to a lower class that the recording industry believed shared their musical preferences.[4] In addition, their idea of “national” music, and therefore the music that they recorded to represent it, was based on the United States’ own variety of national music—i.e., marches and the like played by official military bands.[5]
Musical communication between Latin America and the United States also played an important role in the early history of jazz and early-twentieth-century dance music in general. The New Orleans-born Jelly Roll Morton, for example, who played an important role in the transition from ragtime to jazz as composer and performer, believed in the importance of what he called the “Latin tinge” in jazz.[6] As jazz transitioned from its early New Orleans-based form to swing in the 1920s onward, U.S. jazz bands also frequently looked towards Latin America for musicians, especially those from Puerto Rico, given their U.S. citizenship, musical training, and “Afro-American swing”.[7] On the South American end of the matter, the Brazilian band Os Oito Batutas began to adopt certain elements (such as the instrumentation) of U.S. jazz and dance orchestras after encountering jazz on tour in Paris in 1922—an interesting case of a Latin American performer being influenced by U.S. music indirectly, through a third party that had itself adopted the American style.[8] While it did not necessarily represent the major musical force in Latin America in the Jazz Age, jazz, as often used at the time to refer to essentially any ragtime- or jazz-influenced popular music, did have a significant presence in the region as a whole; for example, by 1929, the Asociación Argentina de Autores y Compositores de Música (AAACM), an Argentinian association of composers created to enforce payment for use of its members’ copyrighted works, had registered 933 songs, or about thirteen percent of its total output, that could be classified as “jazz-related danceable music (fox-trots, shimmies, one-step, two-step, etc.)”.[9]
Latin American musicians also formed their own Latin-style bands in the U.S.; Xavier Cugat, for instance, was born in Barcelona in 1900, moved to Cuba at the age of four, and then moved to the U.S. when he was twenty-one, where he first formed a tango orchestra during the ’20s, then in 1935 formed the Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra, which initially played “international light concert music.”[10] As the decade progressed, the band incorporated more Latin elements and material, adopting a flamboyant, visually-striking style at the same time.[11]
By the 1940s, the interchange between the respective music of North and South America was growing steadily, for a number of reasons. In the late ’30s, concerned about the possibility that Nazism and Fascism might spread to Latin America, the United States government created the Office of Inter-American Affairs to encourage good international relations between the U.S. and its neighbors to the south; the Office’s Music Committee was given the task of “uniting North and South America through music.”[12] A major responsibility of the Committee was the building and maintaining of the United States’ image in Latin America, which was accomplished largely through the promotion of South American tours of U.S. musical groups that were deemed to represent the highest quality of American music (which usually meant European-influenced classical or folk styles);[13] at the same time, an attempt was made to facilitate Latin American musicians’ travels and music in the Unites States, although various factors rendered this aspect less successful in the end.[14] Following World War II, U.S. Cold War-era cultural diplomacy and propaganda on the one hand,[15] and on the other mass emigration from Puerto Rico to the United States,[16] resulted in still greater levels of cultural exchange between Latin American and the U.S.
Based on the above, it seems that the musical interchange between the United States and Latin America generally increased throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but that their precise musical relationship (if such a thing can be said to exist), aside from the latter’s influence on the birth of jazz, is not as clearly understood as it could be. It is important to note, however, that only sources written in English have been considered, and that this could result in a bias towards information relating more to U.S. styles than Latin American. Still, this project aims shed at least a ray of light on a relatively little-known topic—if only to stimulate further interest and research.
[1] Ángel G. Quintero Rivera. “Migration, Ethnicity, and Interactions between the United States and Hispanic Caribbean Popular Culture,” translated by Mariana Ortega Breña. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No.1, “The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony in the Twenty-First Century” (2007): 85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27647997
[2] William Howland Kenny. “The Phonograph and the Evolution of ‘Foreign’ and ‘Ethnic’ Records,” in Recorded Music in American Life : The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1999: 69. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.wooster.idm.oclc.org/lib/wooster/detail.action?docID=272563
[3] Ángel G. Quintero Rivera. “Migration, Ethnicity, and Interactions between the United States and Hispanic Caribbean Popular Culture,” translated by Mariana Ortega Breña. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No.1, “The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony in the Twenty-First Century” (2007): 85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27647997
[4] William Howland Kenny. “The Phonograph and the Evolution of ‘Foreign’ and ‘Ethnic’ Records,” in Recorded Music in American Life : The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1999: 69-70. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.wooster.idm.oclc.org/lib/wooster/detail.action?docID=272563
[5] William Howland Kenny. “The Phonograph and the Evolution of ‘Foreign’ and ‘Ethnic’ Records,” in Recorded Music in American Life : The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1999: 70. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.wooster.idm.oclc.org/lib/wooster/detail.action?docID=272563
[6] Ángel G. Quintero Rivera. “Migration, Ethnicity, and Interactions between the United States and Hispanic Caribbean Popular Culture,” translated by Mariana Ortega Breña. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No.1, “The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony in the Twenty-First Century” (2007): 84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27647997
[7] Ángel G. Quintero Rivera. “Migration, Ethnicity, and Interactions between the United States and Hispanic Caribbean Popular Culture,” translated by Mariana Ortega Breña. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No.1, “The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony in the Twenty-First Century” (2007): 84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27647997
[8] Gerard Béhague. “Bridging South America and the United States in Black Music Research.” Black Music Research Journal, Vol 22, No. 1 (2002): 6-7. https://doi.org/10.2307/1519962
[9] Pablo Palomino. “Transnational Networks,” The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History, Currents in Latin and Iberian Music (New York, 2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Apr. 2020): 68. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190687403.003.0003
[10] Phil Hardy. “Xavier Cugat.” In The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music. 3rd ed. Faber and Faber Ltd, 2001. https://wooster.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/ffcpop/xavier_cugat/0?institutionId=4607
[11] Phil Hardy. “Xavier Cugat.” In The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music. 3rd ed. Faber and Faber Ltd, 2001. https://wooster.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/ffcpop/xavier_cugat/0?institutionId=4607
[12] Jennifer L. Campbell. “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, Issue 1 (2012): 30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01006.x
[13] Jennifer L. Campbell. “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, Issue 1 (2012): 33-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01006.x
[14] Jennifer L. Campbell. “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, Issue 1 (2012): 35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01006.x
[15] Jennifer L. Campbell. “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, Issue 1 (2012): 29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01006.x
[16] Ángel G. Quintero Rivera. “Migration, Ethnicity, and Interactions between the United States and Hispanic Caribbean Popular Culture,” translated by Mariana Ortega Breña. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No.1, “The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony in the Twenty-First Century” (2007): 86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27647997