Grupo Afrocuba

Latin jazz is a fusion of jazz harmony and improvisation with Afro–Latin American rhythms, song forms, and percussion. It combines the swing, bebop, and big-band traditions with clave-based grooves such as son, rumba, danzón, and mambo, and later integrates Brazilian feels like samba and bossa nova. Typical features include the use of the clave (2–3 or 3–2), piano montunos (guajeos), bass tumbao patterns, timbales cáscara, conga marcha, and call-and-response horn "mambo" figures. While the rhythm section locks into cyclical patterns, soloists improvise using the vocabulary of jazz, creating music that is both danceable and harmonically rich.

Afro‑Cuban traditional refers to the folkloric, largely ceremonial and community‑based musics in Cuba that preserve West and Central African musical lineages brought by enslaved peoples and their descendants. It encompasses ritual repertoires such as the Lucumí/Yoruba batá “toques” for the orishas (Oru del Igbodú), Kongo‑derived Palo/yuka drumming, Abakuá (Éfik‑Ibibio) ceremonials, Arará/Fon‑Ewe song‑drum traditions, as well as secular yet Afro‑rooted forms like early rumba and coros de clave. Core traits include layered polyrhythms, a timeline pattern (clave) orientation, responsorial (call‑and‑response) vocals, tonal languages or liturgical lexicons (e.g., Lucumí), and hand‑drum/idiophone ensembles that drive dance and trance‑ritual contexts.