Why Does “Let’s Play a Latin Tune” Usually Mean Bossa Nova?

There is something that has bothered me for years at jazz gigs and jam sessions. Somebody will say, “Let’s play a Latin tune,” and almost immediately we are choosing from the same small group of songs: “Wave,” “Corcovado,” “Triste,” “The Girl from Ipanema,” maybe “Black Orpheus,” “Blue Bossa,” or “Recorda-Me.” You probably know the scene I’m talking about if you have spent much time playing jazz.

What makes this stranger is that the first four tunes I just mentioned are all by the same composer, Antônio Carlos Jobim. “Wave,” “Triste,” “Corcovado,” and “The Girl from Ipanema” all came from Jobim, although João Gilberto was enormously important in developing and popularizing the bossa nova style in which many of those songs became famous. The archives of the Antônio Carlos Jobim Institute document Jobim’s authorship of those compositions.

Think about how strange that is for a minute. “Latin music” refers to an enormous musical world involving many countries, cultures, instruments, dances and rhythmic traditions, yet in a typical jazz setting we can somehow travel from that gigantic category to Brazil, from Brazil to bossa nova, and from bossa nova to Antônio Carlos Jobim within about ten seconds. If someone asked us to play “European music,” we would immediately realize how hopelessly broad the request was, but somehow “Latin” has become a usable musical instruction.

I like Jobim, so that is certainly not the problem. I like bossa nova too, and I would not want to live in a world without “Wave,” “Corcovado,” or “The Girl from Ipanema.” What bothers me is that this tiny slice of an enormous musical landscape has somehow become the default Latin vocabulary for so many jazz musicians.

The more Latin music I have actually played, the stranger this has seemed to me. Salsa does not feel like bachata, bachata does not feel like merengue, merengue does not feel like bossa nova, and none of those styles feels like cumbia or reggaeton. Once you spend some time inside these grooves, the idea that “Latin” itself is a rhythm starts to seem almost absurd.

And those examples barely begin to describe the possibilities. We could be talking about son, mambo, cha-cha-cha, rumba, guaguancó, guajira, songo, timba, Afro-Cuban 6/8, bomba, plena, salsa, merengue, bachata, cumbia, vallenato, samba, partido alto, baião, choro, frevo, maracatu, bossa nova, tango, reggaeton and many other styles and regional traditions. Even within one country such as Brazil, an instructional book like Duduka Da Fonseca and Bob Weiner’s Brazilian Rhythms for Drumset deals not only with bossa nova, but samba, partido alto, baião, maracatu, marcha, frevo and other Brazilian rhythms.

So why did jazz musicians end up here? I have a theory, and I think there are several reasons that reinforce one another. Some are musical, some historical, and some are simply practical.

Bossa Nova Fits Comfortably Into the Jazz Musician’s World

One reason is harmony. Jazz musicians spend enormous amounts of time thinking about harmony, and Jobim’s music gives us plenty to think about. There are major sevenths, minor sevenths, altered dominants, secondary dominants, diminished chords, chromatic movement, ii-V progressions, substitutions and modulations.

In other words, even when the rhythm is coming from another tradition, the chords look familiar. Put a lead sheet for “Wave” in front of a jazz musician and there is a good chance he immediately sees things he knows how to deal with. He starts seeing chord-scale relationships, voice-leading possibilities, substitutions and places to improvise.

Compare that with a salsa tune that might sit on the same two or three chords for a long time. Harmonically, a jazz musician might look at it and think there is not much happening, but that is because a huge amount of what is happening is somewhere else. It is in the clave, the bass tumbao, the montuno, the percussion, the anticipations, the horn figures and the relationship between all those individual parts.

If your musical training has taught you to look primarily at chord symbols for information, you can miss most of the actual information. Several relatively simple individual parts can combine to create something rhythmically sophisticated, and understanding that sophistication requires a different kind of listening. The complexity is not necessarily going to announce itself with an altered dominant chord.

This may be one reason bossa nova was such a natural meeting place between Brazilian musicians and American jazz musicians in the first place. Bossa nova developed out of Brazilian musical traditions while also absorbing influences from American popular music and jazz, and João Gilberto famously brought the complex rhythmic character of samba onto a quietly played nylon-string guitar. Smithsonian describes his guitar conception as putting the rhythmic complexity associated with samba percussion into that intimate guitar setting.

That is incredibly sophisticated, and I do not want anything in this article to suggest otherwise. But it could also be translated into a format that a small American jazz group could work with fairly easily. The harmony, instrumentation, volume and overall aesthetic all made the meeting between the two musical worlds relatively comfortable.

It Is Relatively Easy to Fake

This is probably the more controversial part of my theory, so I want to be careful about what I mean. I am not saying bossa nova is easy, because authentic bossa nova is not easy at all. Listen closely to João Gilberto and try to reproduce exactly what he is doing with the guitar, his voice and the placement of the beat, and you will discover an extraordinary amount of subtlety.

What I am saying is that it is relatively easy for jazz musicians to produce something that everyone in the room will accept as “a bossa.” The drummer can play cross-stick and a simple bass drum pattern, the bass player can stop walking and play a repetitive root-and-fifth-oriented figure, the pianist or guitarist can play a stock syncopated comping pattern, and everybody switches from swing eighth notes to straight eighth notes. Within a few seconds the band has something recognizable enough that nobody stops the tune and says, “Wait a minute, that isn’t bossa nova.”

Try doing that with salsa and the limitations become more obvious. A drummer who has never studied Afro-Cuban music cannot simply play “some Latin stuff” underneath the band and create convincing salsa, and a bass player who does not understand tumbao cannot simply stop walking and invent a vaguely syncopated bass line. A pianist who has never studied montunos can certainly make something up, but musicians and dancers who know the music are going to hear the difference immediately.

Clave alone changes the entire situation. Smithsonian has described clave as a rhythmic structure that provides integrity and forward momentum to Afro-Cuban music, rather than simply being one more percussion pattern that somebody happens to play. Once you understand that, “play something Latin” becomes about as useful an instruction as “play something European.”

Bachata presents a different problem. You can learn the chord changes quickly, but the guitar language, bass movement, percussion and feel give bachata its identity. Cumbia has its own rhythmic vocabulary, merengue has another one, and reggaeton has the unmistakable dembow-based rhythmic language and production aesthetic that help identify it.

If you remove those defining characteristics and simply play the chord progression with generic jazz-Latin comping, you have not necessarily turned it into that style. You have created a jazz approximation of something vaguely Latin, which may be perfectly fine if everyone understands that is what is happening. My point is simply that we often mistake the approximation for knowledge of the style itself.

Bossa Nova Is Also Perfectly Suited to the Typical Jazz Gig

There is another very practical reason for all of this. Bossa nova works beautifully with the instrumentation jazz musicians already have, and you do not have to completely reorganize a normal jazz quartet to play one. Piano or guitar, bass, drums and a horn can play “Corcovado” immediately.

You do not need to add congas, bongos, timbales, güiro or cowbell. You do not need a large horn section playing arranged figures, and you do not need several musicians who specialize in a percussion tradition. You can even play many of these tunes convincingly as a duo or trio.

It also works at a low volume, which makes it ideal for restaurants, cocktail hours, hotel lounges and other places where jazz musicians frequently work. Bossa nova can be sophisticated, understated, harmonically rich and intimate, all qualities that fit naturally into the environments where jazz musicians often make their living. There is simply very little practical resistance to calling one.

There is also an aesthetic compatibility between bossa nova and the cooler side of jazz. That compatibility was important when bossa nova first reached American jazz musicians, and it is easy to hear why the two styles found each other. The Library of Congress describes the understated quality of the American jazz that influenced Jobim and how naturally Stan Getz’s lyrical style subsequently fit the Brazilian music.

All of this means the path of least resistance keeps leading us back to the same place. If everybody knows “Wave,” everybody can play it quietly, everybody understands the harmony, and nobody has to bring another instrument, why wouldn’t we play “Wave”? The problem comes when the path of least resistance becomes the only road we ever travel.

The Stan Getz Influence

There is also a huge historical reason that we cannot ignore. Bossa nova did not quietly enter American jazz and become one of twenty equally familiar Latin styles. It exploded into popular culture.

Guitarist Charlie Byrd encountered Brazilian music on a State Department-sponsored tour and subsequently collaborated with Stan Getz on Jazz Samba. Getz then recorded with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim on Getz/Gilberto, and “The Girl from Ipanema” became a major crossover hit. The Library of Congress credits that recording with helping popularize the melodic, samba-based bossa nova sound in the United States.

Imagine the effect that had on generations of American jazz musicians. You had one of the great jazz saxophonists playing with some of the creators of bossa nova, beautiful tunes with sophisticated harmony, a rhythmic style that could be adapted to the standard jazz combo, and a recording that crossed far outside the normal jazz audience. It would almost be surprising if the repertoire had not become deeply embedded in American jazz culture.

A connection was formed in the American musical mind: Latin leads to Brazilian, Brazilian leads to bossa nova, and bossa nova frequently leads to Jobim. That is obviously an oversimplification of an enormous amount of music, but I think some version of that chain still lives inside jazz culture today. We inherited it without necessarily stopping to ask why those particular associations became so strong.

Then We Taught It to the Next Generation

Once certain songs enter the jazz standard repertoire, they have an amazing ability to stay there. Musicians learn them because other musicians know them, teachers teach them because students will encounter them at jam sessions, and students learn them because they are in the books everybody else is using. Jam-session musicians then call them because there is a reasonable chance everybody knows them.

The circle starts over again with every generation. “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Wave,” “Corcovado,” “Black Orpheus,” “Blue Bossa” and similar tunes continue to represent the Latin category, not necessarily because anybody consciously decided they should represent Latin music forever, but because repertoire develops inertia. Jazz itself does this with standards all the time.

There are thousands of jazz compositions, yet go to enough jam sessions and you will hear many of the same fifty or hundred tunes over and over again. There is nothing inherently wrong with that because common repertoire allows musicians who have never met to make music together immediately. The difference here is that we are using a small amount of repertoire not just to represent jazz standards, but to represent an enormous variety of musical cultures.

That is where I think we could do better. The answer does not have to be eliminating the shared repertoire that works so well. It could simply mean expanding it.

Jazz Itself Has Actually Done Better Than the Average Jam Session

To be fair, none of this means jazz musicians have ignored Afro-Cuban and other Latin traditions. Quite the opposite, and the relationship goes back much further than the bossa nova explosion of the 1960s. Cuban musicians and jazz musicians were creating important musical exchanges decades earlier.

Dizzy Gillespie’s work with Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo in the 1940s was historically important in bringing Afro-Cuban rhythmic concepts deeply into modern jazz. The Smithsonian credits Gillespie with playing a major role in making Latin rhythms an important part of American jazz, and “Manteca,” associated with Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Gil Fuller, became one of the landmark pieces to come from that interaction.

Machito, Mario Bauzá, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri and many other musicians created sophisticated relationships between jazz and Afro-Caribbean music. Generations of musicians have gone far beyond putting a generic Latin beat underneath jazz standards. There is an enormous tradition here for anyone willing to investigate it.

So I would not argue that jazz itself failed to evolve. Plenty of jazz musicians went very deep, and plenty still do. What I am questioning is the vocabulary that survives among the average jazz musician who does not specialize in this music.

Somehow all of that rhythmic richness can still get compressed into a button marked LATIN. Press the button, play the cross-stick pattern, and call “Wave.” That is the habit I think is worth challenging.

Harmony May Be Part of the Trap

I think jazz musicians’ love of harmonic sophistication may actually work against us here. If I show a jazz musician a harmonically static salsa groove and then show him a Jobim tune with beautiful chromatic voice leading and a series of extended chords, the Jobim tune may appear more musically sophisticated to him. From the standpoint of harmony alone, perhaps it is.

But why should harmony alone be the measuring stick? One of the things I have learned from playing more Latin music is that complexity can live in entirely different places. A piece can remain on one chord while creating a remarkably sophisticated rhythmic environment.

Several relatively simple individual parts can lock together in a way that creates something much more complicated than any one part. Jazz musicians already understand this when we talk about the interaction between great jazz rhythm sections, polyrhythm, displacement and rhythmic conversation. There is no reason we should stop applying that level of curiosity merely because the chord changes become simpler.

In fact, that may be precisely when we need to listen harder. If the harmony is not doing all the work, something else probably is. That “something else” may be the part of the music we have not yet learned to hear.

Maybe the Word “Latin” Is Part of the Problem

The more I think about this, the stranger the phrase “play it Latin” sounds. What does that actually mean, and why do musicians think it provides enough information? If somebody told me to play “African,” “Asian,” or “European,” my first response would probably be to ask what they were talking about.

Yet musicians routinely say “Latin” as though everyone understands exactly what to do. Usually everybody does understand what to do, and that might actually be the problem. They play the familiar jazz-bossa vocabulary that generations of musicians have agreed can stand in for the entire category.

I have done it too. This is not me standing outside jazz culture and pointing a finger at everybody else, because I came up through much of the same musical vocabulary, played many of the same standards and learned many of the same shortcuts. The more time I spend investigating rhythmic traditions outside mainstream jazz, however, the less satisfied I become with those shortcuts.

Even Brazil itself makes the problem obvious. Nelson Faria’s The Brazilian Guitar Book covers samba, bossa nova, baião, frevo and other Brazilian styles, while Brazilian Rhythms for Drumset by Duduka Da Fonseca and Bob Weiner covers samba, partido alto, bossa nova, baião, maracatu, marcha, frevo and more. If one country contains that much rhythmic diversity, reducing the entire Latin world to one Brazilian style starts looking even stranger.

Digging Deeper Takes More Work, but the Information Is Out There

I am not an authority on Afro-Cuban music, and I certainly am not an authority on every style I have mentioned in this article. I do know, however, that when I wanted to understand some of this music better, I had to do more than listen to a jazz drummer play a stock Latin pattern. I had to start investigating how the music was actually put together.

Some of the books that helped me do that were Ed Uribe’s The Essence of Afro-Cuban Percussion & Drum Set and Frank Malabe and Bob Weiner’s Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drumset. Uribe’s book is much broader than the title might initially suggest, because in addition to percussion and drumset it examines rhythm-section parts for bass, piano, guitar, horns, strings and tres. Malabe and Weiner approach Afro-Cuban rhythms through the drumset while explaining the traditional instruments and rhythmic foundations behind them.

Another important book for me was Funkifying the Clave by bassist Lincoln Goines and drummer Robby Ameen. The whole idea behind that book is useful for a jazz musician because it shows how Afro-Cuban rhythmic concepts can interact with funk, rock and jazz rather than treating “Latin” as a mysterious category off to the side. The accompanying material deals with concepts such as clave, tumbao, songo, guaguancó, Afro-Cuban 6/8, cha-cha-cha and mozambique.

Rebeca Mauleón’s work was also extremely helpful to me. Her Salsa Guidebook for Piano & Ensemble gets into how the entire ensemble works, including piano, bass, percussion and drumset, and explains the relationship between clave, montunos, tumbaos and the larger musical structure. Her 101 Montunos goes even further into the history and vocabulary of Afro-Caribbean piano grooves, including material related to Cuban danzón and songo, Puerto Rican bomba and Dominican merengue.

I also spent time playing along with Muy Caliente!, the Afro-Cuban play-along associated with Mauleón and bassist Oscar Stagnaro. That kind of experience was especially useful because reading a pattern on paper is one thing, while trying to place your part inside an already functioning rhythm section is something else entirely. Stagnaro’s own The Latin Bass Book similarly deals with Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Caribbean, Latin-jazz and South American styles from the bassist’s perspective.

What I like about these resources is that they do not just hand you one generic “Latin groove.” They begin revealing how many different musical systems are sitting underneath that one word. Once you start seeing the individual bass parts, piano parts, percussion parts and rhythmic relationships on the page and hearing them on recordings, it becomes much harder to believe that switching the drummer to cross-stick has somehow solved the problem.

And there are many resources I have not personally worked through. For guitarists, Nelson Faria’s Brazilian Guitar Book gets into samba, bossa nova, baião, frevo and other Brazilian approaches, while Neff Irizarry’s Contemporary Latin Jazz Guitar adapts ideas from tres, cuatro, requinto and piano to the guitar and deals specifically with guajeos, montunos and other Afro-Cuban concepts. Chris Mello’s The Latin Guitar Handbook and Doug Munro’s The Total Latin Guitarist take broader approaches, surveying guitar vocabulary associated with numerous Cuban, Brazilian and other Latin styles.

I am sure there are many excellent resources I do not know about, particularly for styles such as cumbia, bachata, merengue and reggaeton. I have never sat down and worked through a comprehensive reggaeton or cumbia method book, so I am not going to pretend I know the definitive resources for those styles. My point is that if one of those sounds interests us, we can go looking instead of assuming the generic jazz version of “Latin” is good enough.

That probably does take more work than learning the average jazz-bossa pattern. You may have to listen to individual percussion instruments, understand which part belongs to which instrument, learn how the bass interacts with the clave, or spend time trying to make a guitar part sit correctly against everything else. But perhaps the fact that it takes more work is part of the answer to why we so often do not do it.

There Is Nothing Wrong With Playing “Wave”

After everything I have just said, if somebody calls “Wave” tomorrow night, I will happily play it. It is a great tune, and so are “Corcovado,” “Triste,” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” Jobim was a brilliant composer, and João Gilberto’s rhythmic conception was revolutionary.

The fact that these musicians became enormously influential in jazz is not some unfortunate historical mistake. The recording of “The Girl from Ipanema” was important enough to enter the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, and there is a reason musicians are still attracted to this music decades later. The problem is not that we play it.

The problem is what we do not play.

Imagine if calling something from the broad Latin world at a jazz gig could lead almost anywhere. Maybe tonight it means bossa nova, tomorrow it means cha-cha-cha, and the next night somebody brings in a songo, cumbia, salsa, samba, merengue or bachata groove. Nobody has to master all of them, but simply learning that they are different would already be progress.

Think about what that could do to us as rhythm-section players. The bassist would have to learn more than one stock Latin bass pattern, the drummer would have to understand how different rhythmic traditions work instead of reaching automatically for the same cross-stick groove, and guitarists and pianists would have to develop rhythmic vocabulary instead of merely reading the correct chord extensions. All of us would probably become better musicians in the process.

The Bigger Opportunity

What excites me about all of this is not the opportunity to criticize jazz musicians. It is the opportunity to grow, because jazz musicians are already trained to adapt. Improvisation demands it, and we spend our musical lives learning tunes, transposing melodies, responding to other musicians, altering rhythms and harmonies in real time and trying to hear more deeply.

So why shouldn’t that curiosity extend to groove? Instead of learning one generic “Latin” pattern, we can learn what actually makes a salsa bass line work, where the bachata guitar sits, how samba differs from bossa nova, how a montuno relates to the clave, or why one cumbia rhythm does not simply become another style because we change the chords. We do not have to become experts before we are allowed to investigate.

I am certainly not claiming to be an expert. I am still learning this material myself, and one of the things playing more Latin music has done for me is show me how much I do not know. That realization is much more interesting to me than pretending all of this music can fit underneath one convenient label.

The funny thing is that digging deeper may ultimately bring us closer to the spirit of jazz itself. Jazz grew through musicians listening to other musicians, absorbing new sounds, learning from different traditions and finding new ways to combine what they heard. Dizzy Gillespie did not encounter Afro-Cuban music and decide that the rhythmic language was somebody else’s problem.

Musicians listened to one another. João Gilberto listened, Antônio Carlos Jobim listened, Stan Getz listened, Dizzy Gillespie listened, and the musical exchanges that came from that curiosity gave us music that people are still studying decades later. The best response to that history may not be to freeze one tiny piece of it into a permanent “Latin” preset.

Maybe the best way to honor the tradition is to keep digging.

And maybe the next time somebody says, “Let’s play a Latin tune,” we could ask one more question:

“What kind?”