The Rise of Latin Jazz, From the Bronx to San Juan

How the Genre Has Shaped Generations

ByABC News
December 25, 2012, 11:47 AM

Dec. 25, 2012 — -- Back in 1967, Jerry Gonzalez was a student at New York's High School of Music and Art, splitting his time between studying the trumpet and playing the conga drum in parks and street corners all around the Bronx.

Like most visionary artists, he already had an idea of where this was all going."Latin jazz was my flag since back then, man," said 63-year-old Gonzalez over the phone. "I wrote graffiti on every desk in my high school that said, 'Latin jazz, played by me! The future is coming.'"

Gonzalez's future included stints with countless salsa bands (Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri) and straight-ahead jazz combos. But his crowning achievement was assembling the Fort Apache Band with his brother, bass player Andy Gonzalez. Today, it stands as one of the most influential Latin jazz groups in history.

Earlier this year, Fort Apache celebrated their 30th anniversary at the Blue Note Club in New York's Greenwich Village, playing its usual array of jazz standards and Latin boleros spiced with bebop and Afro-Cuban rumba and guaguancó.

"I wanted to play everything at first," said Gonzalez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. "I played at weddings, funk bands, soul bands, imitating Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaría, Tito Puente, Machito — those were my father's bands. But I was also affected by Miles Davis and Horace Silver and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Art Blakey — he was a monster influence."

In the 1970s, a series of jam sessions in Andy's home in the Soundview section of the Bronx produced historic linkages between conventional jazz and salsa musicians that yielded the groundbreaking Grupo Folklorico Instrumental, which fused traditional Cuban and Puerto Rican folkloric music with jazz influences.

Later, some spirited gigging at avant-garde outposts like the short-lived New Rican Village, located in the heart of the Lower East Side, and the Upper West Side's Soundscape produced early versions of the Fort Apache Band, whose signature tunes drew from Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. At first the band enjoyed some success, especially in Europe. But as Jerry tells it, he had to cut the 15-piece band down to six so he could assure band members a living wage.

The band produced ten albums, not always under the Fort Apache Band name, while Jerry pursued session work with legendary bassist Jaco Pastorious and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, among others, and Andy became a stalwart in roots salsa band Conjunto Libre.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Jerry Gonzalez decided to move to Spain, where he found a new group of musicians connected to one of his ancestral roots.