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The Latin Beat

The Rhythms And Roots Of Latin Music From Bossa Nova To Salsa And Beyond

Contributors

By Ed Morales

Formats and Prices

Price

$24.99

Price

$31.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $24.99 $31.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 23, 2003. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

The Latin explosion of Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, and the Buena Vista Social Club may look like it came out of nowhere, but the incredible variety of Latin music has been transforming the United States since the turn of the century, when Caribbean beats turned New Orleans music into jazz. In fact, we wouldn’t have any of our popular music without it: Imagine pop sans the mambos of Perez Prado and Tito Puente, the garage rock of Richie Valens, or even the glitzy croon of Julio Iglesias, not to mention the psychedelia of Santana and Los Lobos and the underground cult grooves of newcomers like Bebel Gilberto. The Latin Beat outlines the musical styles of each country, then traces each form as it migrates north. Morales travels from the Latin ballad to bossa nova to Latin jazz, chronicles the development of the samba in Brazil and salsa in New York, explores the connection between the mambo craze of the 1950’s with the Cuban craze of today, and uncovers the hidden history of Latinos in rock and hip hop. The Latin Beat is the only book that explores where the music has come from and celebrates all of the directions it is going.

On Sale
Oct 23, 2003
Page Count
400 pages
Publisher
Da Capo Press
ISBN-13
9780306810183

Ed Morales

About the Author

Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, and the Guardian. He was staff writer at the Village Voice and columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Latinx: The New Force in Politics and  Culture (Verso Books, 2018), Living in Spanglish (St. Martins, 2002), and The Latin Beat: From Rumba to Rock (Da Capo Press, 2003). He was a contributing editor to NACLA Report on the Americas and is a frequent contributor of op-ed columns for the Progressive Media Project.

Morales is also a poet whose work has appeared in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1993) and various small magazines, and his fiction has appeared in Iguana Dreams (HarperCollins, 1992), and Boricuas (Ballantine, 1994). He has participated in residencies as a member of Nuyorican Poets Café Live, touring as a spoken-word performer in several cities throughout the east coast, in California, Florida, Texas, and Denmark. Morales has appeared on CNN, Hispanics Today, Urban Latino, HBO Latino, CNN Español, WNBC-TV’s Visiones, WABC’s Tiempo, BBC television and radio, and The Laura Flanders Show, and hosted his own radio show, “Living in Spanglish,” on WBAI-FM in New York from 2015–2018.

Morales was the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship in 1992 to research Latino Theater and from 2006–2007 he was selected for the prestigious Revson Fellowship at Columbia University. While a Revson fellow, he codirected a fifty-five-minute documentary called Whose Barrio? The film was inspired by “Spanish Harlem on His Mind,” an essay published in 2003 in the New York Times and in the anthology New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (NYU Press, 2005). Whose Barrio? premiered in the 2009 New York Latino International Film Festival and won Best Documentary Short at the 2009 Long Island Latino Film Festival.

Morales is a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

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