Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie

The year was 1946, and Be-Bop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie quite simply had the best big band out on the road at that time. The band was spreading its exciting new style of orchestral modern Jazz, mixed with a healthy dose of blues and swing, all over the country and was beginning to spill over into Europe; and the critics…the critics were raving about this daring and innovative group that was translating the speedy Be-Bop language into a big band style that people could dance to, understand, and enjoy. Not to mention the fact that their leader, Dizzy himself, was quite simply playing some of the best Jazz trumpet that could be heard anywhere. It was indeed a good year for Dizzy, so good in fact, that you would think he would be on top of the world at that stage in his career, but he was not satisfied. Ever the innovator, Dizzy was looking for a new style, and a new sound to create and conquer, and the answer strangely enough, was bubbling away behind many of his own compositions. Right there lurking within the framework of tunes like P

When Dizzy met Chano, he was playing in a show, at a club called El Barrio.

His most famous composition undoubtedly, was Manteca. Manteca means skin or grease in Spanish, and back then, everybody was saying, ‘Gimme some skin. This was Chano’s idea of saying ‘Gimme some skin.’ (Gillespie 321) He went to Dizzy with the concept for the tune and asked him to notate it for him. The tune was based on riffs; first an intro by the bass, then a saxophone riff, a trombone riff, and lastly the trumpets. That was really all he wanted to hear the band play, along with improvisation and some featured drumming by him, because he was not to thrilled by American music and the way that it was constructed. He wanted the tune to be strictly Afro-Cuban, but Dizzy was determined for the tune to have a bridge and harmony, and so he wrote a bridge using some chord progressions that he had been playing around with for a while. He had planned on writing an eight bar bridge, but at the end of the eight bars, he had not resolved back to the original key of B-flat, so he kept writing and ended up with a very famous sixteen bar bridge, featuring a beautiful trumpet melody. This bridge is one of the highlights of this tune, because it is in such contrast to the shouting and upbeat feel of the riffs that make up the beginning of the number. Dizzy made sure that Chano got composer credits and royalties for Manteca and other tunes that he composed along with Dizzy, like Tin Tin Deo and Guarachi Guaro, due to his mysterious reputation for being very aggressive when it came to his money.

Obviously, the roots of this music can be traced to early African and Cuban, as well as Caribbean rhythms and folk songs, but it is not widely known that there were some isolated cases in the 1920’s and 30’s, that actually hinted at the fusion of Jazz and Afro-Cuban music before Dizzy and Chano came together. A prime example is the Jelly Roll Morton composition entitled The Crave. In spite of it’s listed copyright date of 1938, there are indications that early Jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton was playing this "Spanish tinge" piece as early as 1910. The primary rhythm used in this tune is the African or Cuban habanera, a three beat syncopated rhythm that is often confused with the four beat Latin Tango, but there are other patterns throughout this tune that are indicative of the fusion of Spanish and French influences found in the New Orleans of Morton's youth. Duke Ellington also delved into the concept of incorporating Latin influences into Jazz music, when he hired Juan Tizol, a valve trombone player from Puerto Rico to play in his band. He and Juan eventually would collaborate on the classic tune Caravan, which carries a strong Latin rhythmic feel, and was one of the first Jazz compositions to incorporate the clave as a rhythm and as a instrument. Even flamboyant bandleader Cab Calloway would ask his drummers to play the Tom-Tom drums on the introduction to certain tunes because he liked setting them up with the Latin feel. He felt that it gave tunes like Chant of the Jungle, The Jungle King, and Tarzan of Harlem, more a groove and got people locked into the concept of dancing early on. Interestingly enough, it was probably here that Dizzy’s initial interest in the Latin rhythms was fostered, and also gave Bauza such a clear concept of what it was that Dizzy was attempting to incorporate in his band. You see, Dizzy and Bauza played in Cab Calloway’s trumpet section together and took that time to exchange musical ideas with one another. Bauza always had a good sense of what it was Dizzy was trying to accomplish musically, even when others did not. It was Bauza who comforted Dizzy when he was dismissed from Cab Calloway’s band for incorporating his Be-Bop ideas into Calloway’s music every night on the bandstand, or as Calloway called it, “Playing that Chinese music.” So it is not surprising that Dizzy turned to Bauza when he needed help adding

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