Chucho Valdes and Joe Lovano. Courtesy: International Music Network

I have been around music and jazz for as long as I can remember—it was there on my mother’s turntable, between the lines of “West Side Story,” Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Wilson and on and on. In college, I became steeped in jazz classics, as my housemate, an upright bass player, and his cohorts would come to our place to jam after supper club gigs.

Later, a fellowship sent me to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to organize a symposium on contemporary issues in Latin American art, and subsequently to the King Arts Complex in Columbus, Ohio, where I organized a three-day jazz festival.

The King Arts Complex (named for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) had a large gallery, and so I curated a complementary exhibition on the history of jazz in Columbus, the home of jazz greats Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Harry “Sweets” Edison and Nancy Wilson.

Although I’ve worked primarily as a curator, educator, and visual arts writer, when the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency created the Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District, I began writing about performances at Yoshi’s, Rassella’s, the Sheba Piano

Lounge and players in and around that scene.

So why is that significant? Well, because context is important. That said, a somewhat cliché question that writers are often asked comes to mind: “Who is your audience?”

An advisor in graduate school once asked me that question, and my response was: “I see it like putting a note in a bottle and casting it out to sea. I’m never really sure where it will go, or who will find or see it. Thus, the audiences are largely unknown, and I find myself writing for myself, as a tactical practice that is trying to relate a thought point, or share an insight that might resonate with others.”

Rokia Traore. Courtesy: rokiatraore.net

These questions raise considerations related to the significance of ethnic identity, and what being a Chicano or Latino art writer means, and how that designation qualifies the writing.

Writing about art, music, or culture as a Chicano is always problematic and complex, because that identification, and those designations, come with inherited baggage, based for the most part on assumptions about what those terms mean, which can distort and condition interpretations of the writing and the subjects addressed.

Is a Latino art writer someone who writes solely about Latino art, artists, and music—that is, someone who writes about a “type” of art or music, or solely art created by Latinos?  Or is it someone who is Latino who writes about art and culture, regardless of artistic categories and areas?

In my mind, it’s never that simple. That is why I am attracted to the arts, because they challenge us to engage cultural phenomena as a complex amalgam of factors, constituted historically by cultural contact, conflict, and experience, and relate personal social existences as sources that inform our ideological world views and inspiration. It is because my Chicano experience is constituted from the world I live in, and therefore the world and everything in it is part of my Latino experience.

That is why I feel wholly comfortable with giving SF Jazz a shout-out, and speaking about diversity in terms of the variety of shows I have seen there. Shows like that of Mike “Maz” Maher, trumpeter and composer for the multi-Grammy award-winning group Snarky Puppy, whose solo work encompasses jazz, rock, and soul. Maher’s show included fellow Snarky Puppy members Bob Lanzetti on guitar and Justin Stanton on keyboards.

I want El Tecolote’s audience to learn of Rokia Traoré, who inflicts her native music of Mali with strains of rock, blues, jazz, and American roots music, since it is only natural that Traoré, who has travelled extensively, soaked up the cultural influences that informed her global approach to music.

And I want them to know Chucho Valdes and Joe Lovano, the Grammy-winning tenor saxophonist and the reigning Cuban virtuoso piano genius and key figure in the evolution of Afro-Cuban jazz, who have collaborated and bridged musical and cultural borders. A vanguard player/composer, who has qualitatively expanded the synthesis of Afro-Cuban folkloric rhythms and post-bop, Valdes is a seminal figure in the history of Cuban jazz and, together with Lovano and their air-tight band, has moved beyond categories of genre and style into an intergalactic realm of pure musical wizardry.

While some of these performers are Latino by heritage, and/or influenced by Latino musical sensibilities and traditions, they are essentially participants in the larger world—as are we—and thus the experience of their artistry, at least for me, is fundamentally integral to my Latino existence.