Usage make words correct, but the term Latin Jazz remains a misunderstanding.
The late Cuban saxophonist and bandleader Mario Bauzá who, as music director of the classic Latin big band Machito and his Afro-Cubans in the 1940s was a key figure in the development of what came to be known as Latin jazz, used to rail against it.
“I don´t know what they´re talking about when people talk about Latin jazz. Nobody is playing Latin jazz, “ he would say, impatiently. “What they are playing is Afro-Cuban jazz.’’
The point made, he would then pause and allow for some exceptions. “ Paquito [D’Rivera] plays Latin jazz. Look at what he has done with Venezuelan waltzes, with tango, with Brazilian samba. [Jorge] Dalto played Latin jazz. Gato [Barbieri] plays Latin jazz. The rest are playing Afro-Cuban jazz.” 

He had, of course, a point.

In fact Afro-Cuban Jazz is a subset of Latin Jazz, only if an important one, just as Brazilian jazz which has a long and varied tradition including artists and groups such as Moacir Santos, Victor Assis-Brasil, Sergio Mendes, Airto Moreira, Oscar Castro-Neves, Hermeto Pascoal, Sivuca, Azymuth and Egberto Gismonti.
Now reality is catching up with the words.

What once was a sprinkling of exceptions and a decade ago became a promising trend, has become, as pianist Danilo Pérez recently put it, “a movement.”

It  includes established young veterans such as D’Rivera, Pérez, pianist Michel Camilo, pianist Chano Domínguez, saxophonist David Sánchez, trombonist William Cepeda, guitarist Gerardo Nuñez, and pianist Edward Simon, to name a few. But also an impressive list of  newcomers such as saxophonists Miguel Zenón, Perico Sambeat and Llibert Fortuny, vocalist Claudia Acuña,  pianist Guillermo Klein, bassist Pedro Giraudo, pianist Adrián Iaies, and trumpeter Diego Urcola.

Their music is not drawing board fusion but a form of bilingualism.

It might swing and include references to the blues, jazz harmonies and improvisation, but the source material, and even some of the instruments, can just as easily be drawn from flamenco, bomba y plena, huapango, cumbia, or tango. And while these musicians share a similar concept in applying the tools, practices, and sensibilities of jazz to the home-grown music styles of their native cultures, their individual sounds can be as diverse as their accents and as far from each other as Barcelona is from Buenos Aires.

Welcome to the “new,” Pan-Latin, Pan-Ibero-American jazz.
Or you may just call it Latin Jazz.

By whatever name, it´s one of the most stimulating developments in jazz in the 21st century.
“Music is always a product of the times and this is one positive aspects of globalization,” says Cuban reedman Paquito D’Rivera, 61. “But also jazz is a sort of Esperanto for musicians around the world. It has always been that, and it’s become more so as times passes.

“Anything that we could add to this marvel called jazz, as long as it maintains the spirit, it’s still jazz,” says D’Rivera, who has not only championed in his repertoire a Pan-Latin notion of Latin Jazz but also has nurtured in his bands many of the talents who are now shaping this music. “And remember: the Latin contribution has been important in jazz from the beginning.”

Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón, 32, has quickly become one of the leading young musicians in jazz. If a stamp of approval was needed, last year, Zenón won a MacArthur and a Guggenheim fellowships. It was the first time a jazz artist received both on the same year.
His new disc, “Esta Plena,” released on Branford Marsalis´s label Marsalis Music, features a collection of original compositions that suggest a jazz update of plena, a traditional Afro-Hispanic folk music from Puerto Rico. The new disc is a follow up to “Jibaro,” the 2005 album in which Zenón explored música jíbara, the hillbilly music of Puerto Rico.

Still, he calls himself “a traditionalist.”

“ I love people who play changes (the time-honored jazz practice of improvising over the harmonies of a song). I love bebop. That was my first school. But I also think what we are seeing is part of a natural process,” he says. “ With globalization you have musicians from all over the world [playing this music], you have bands in which every member is from a different place, you have access to music from all over the world,  and things develop naturally. I don’t think there is a Big Bang moment for this. I just think it’s the result of a natural progression.”

In fact, the roots and timing of the emergence of this “new” Latin Jazz might have to do as much with globalization and its most beneficial side effects as with the artistic and personal coming of age of a young generation of  Iberian and Latin American musicians.

“Playing with Paquito was like doing my graduate studies in Latin American music. And he was the door to Dizzy [Gillespie] who was the one who truly questioned me,” recalls Pérez, 43. Born in Panama, Pérez broke in the jazz scene in the United States with vocalist Jon Hendricks. He soon after joined D´Rivera´s band, which in time led to his joining Gillespie´s United Nation(cq) Orchestra. He has since developed a solo career while, at the same time, being a member of saxophonist Wayne Shorter´s quartet.

“ I remember after a show, guys like [veteran saxophonists] Jimmy Heath and James Moody were congratulating me and telling me how some of the things I had played  reminded them of Bud Powell and Bill Evans and what not,” recalls Pérez. “And Dizzy just looked at me and said ‘Yeah, that’s great. But when are you going to play your own [thing]?’ And because of that questioning, I started to look at my identity and the fact that I can’t escape the music I heard as a kid, the music my grandmother sang, the music I feel, the music I live. The fact is, the music in my DNA has a global component.”

For  Zenón, who before embarking on his solo career played with fellow Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sánchez, the Mingus Big Band,  Joshua Redman´s San Francisco Jazz Collective, and Charlie Haden among others,“ the idea of integrating Puerto Rican music into my music came after awhile, once I started to write.”

 “I left Puerto Rico to go the States (to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston) when I was 19, and then I immersed myself in jazz for a very long time,” explains Zenón. “ I wasn’t really dealing with anything that had to do with Puerto Rican music. But when I started trying to work on my own music [I realized] that if I wanted to explore [Puerto Rican] music and find out my roots, who I really was, and where I was coming from, I really had to study it from the bottom up.” His Puerto Rican projects, he says, “started from a need to learn.”

 “I’ve always had as reference the great creators in jazz: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. They not only revolutionized the music of their time, but they also incorporated music from other places of the world,” he continues. “I know that for many musicians they represent the tradition, but for me, they represent the revolution. They were my inspiration, especially with their approach, their compositions, and in being open-minded to incorporating music from other places.”

Argentine bassist and composer Pedro Giraudo, 32, who came to study to New York in 1996, including a masters at City College with bassist Ron Carter, says he got “fully involved with jazz.”
“And then, after four years at Manhattan School of Music, I started to realize what was that I could really do well, what it was me,” he says. “And I realized that as much as I admire jazz -- and had studied it a lot -- it was not my music, it’s something that comes from a different tradition”

 Giraudo’s music in “El Viaje,” his fourth and most recent release as a leader, suggests a lived-in mix of European classical music, jazz and Argentine tango and folk elements. His work for his 12 piece ensemble largely skirts the typical section writing of the big band tradition, favoring a classical orchestral approach instead. And while some critics hear in this echoes of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, Giraudo actually claims as influences young, idiosyncratic Latin Jazz bandleaders such as Guillermo Klein and William Cepeda.

In fact,  he readily concedes that his Latin Jazz sound “might have started as a fashion, after hearing other people doing it.”

“ But also, at some point, I realized that I’m never going to be a straight ahead jazz musician. It’s not my thing. Period,” he says. “No matter how much I’d study it, no matter how much I play it, no matter how many licks I’d learn, it’s never going to be my music. It will never have that power, that level of spirituality. I will never have the level of  conviction playing it that I may have playing tango, for example. It’s just not there. It’s a cultural thing.”

But while such moment of recognition is critical, there is no set formula for a personal mix of  jazz and music of  your own country. “It’s a process,” says Venezuelan pianist Edward Simon.
“I went through a period in which I was very diligently learning about jazz and trying to really understand the ins and outs of that language and its most essential elements, which to me are the blues and swing,” explains Simon, 40, who first broke in the American jazz scene with stints with D’Rivera, saxophonist Greg Osby, guitarist Kevin Eubanks and flutist Herbie Mann. “And then also, when you come from a different cultural upbringing, there are some cultural elements that you need to understand. Now, once you have a good understanding of all that, then you can begin to figure out the ways you can incorporate jazz into your music, your vision.”

Simon has since not only incorporated to his repertoire pieces from what may be called The Great Latin American Songbook, but also organized several ensembles, each with a different musical leaning, including a straight ahead jazz quartet, a classical music oriented trio, and Ensamble Venezuela, a group expressly created to play a fusion of Venezuelan music and jazz.
For Simon, the reasons for Latin jazz artists to draw from their culture and create their own sound are as much artistic as they are practical.

“I’d say it’d be kind of foolish to come all the way to the United States and try and make jazz better than the people who created it. The jazz greats come from here. That’s a selling-ice-to-the- Eskimos proposition,” he says. “I think what  we have to offer is something entirely different. We bring to jazz a rhythmic richness, and certain passion and poetry that Latin American music has by nature. And when you infuse that with jazz harmonies and the structures of classical music, the results can be fascinating.”

Pérez recalls fondly his time with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the undisputed non-Latin champion of Afro-Cuban Jazz and an artist who, even late in life, remained extraordinarily curious and open minded about the world. It was Gillespie, a one-time band mate and a lifelong friend of Mario Bauzá, who gave Afro Cuban jazz a bebop twist, opened his bandstand to Chano Pozo and his conga drums and created some of the enduring masterpieces in the genre.
“Dizzy always said that Latinos were learning to play jazz better  than American musicians were learning to play Latin music,” recalls Pérez. “And he used to say: ‘Watch it. When these guys get it, we’re going to be in trouble.’”