Inter Metro Jazz Big Band

Jazz puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican jazz) blends modern jazz harmony and improvisation with Afro–Puerto Rican rhythms—especially bomba and plena—alongside salsa phrasing, bolero lyricism, and occasional jíbaro (highland folk) colors. Emerging through both the island’s scene and the Nuyorican diaspora, it keeps the jazz language (swing feel, bebop/hard bop vocabulary, extended chords) while grounding the groove in clave-informed Afro-Caribbean percussion. Characteristic textures include the sound of barriles de bomba and panderos de plena alongside a jazz rhythm section, horn mambos, and montuno vamps.

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.

Big band is a large-ensemble style of jazz and popular dance music built around brass, reed, and rhythm sections playing arranged parts. Typical instrumentation includes five saxophones (often doubling clarinet/flute), four trombones, four trumpets, and a rhythm section of piano, guitar, upright bass, and drum set. The music emphasizes swing rhythms, call-and-response between sections, riff-based writing, and dramatic shout choruses, while leaving space for improvised solos. Born in American ballrooms and theaters, big band became the sound of the Swing Era, providing both music for dancing and a platform for sophisticated arranging and orchestration that shaped much of 20th‑century jazz and popular music.