Jazz Puertorriqueno

Puerto Rican musicians were present in U.S. jazz since the swing and bebop eras, and their perspective helped define Latin jazz as it emerged in New York. By the 1950s and 1960s, artists with Puerto Rican roots began fusing jazz language with Afro–Puerto Rican forms. On the island, the popularity of bomba and plena intersected with jazz arranging, while in New York, Nuyorican bandleaders introduced sophisticated harmony and improvisation into dance-band contexts.

From the late 1970s onward, Puerto Rico’s own jazz identity crystallized. Groups like Batacumbele explored progressive fusions of Afro-Caribbean rhythms with modern jazz, and a new generation of instrumentalists (e.g., conguero Giovanni Hidalgo, trumpeters Charlie Sepúlveda and Humberto Ramírez) raised the technical and stylistic bar. In the 1990s, William Cepeda’s “Afro-Rican Jazz” and Papo Vázquez’s trombone-driven projects formalized a vocabulary that placed bomba and plena at the core of jazz expression, not just as color but as primary rhythmic engines.

Saxophonists David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón brought Puerto Rican jazz aesthetics to international stages, weaving jíbaro song forms and the Puerto Rican songbook into contemporary jazz frameworks. Festivals and conservatory programs on the island helped cultivate a steady pipeline of players. Today, jazz puertorriqueño thrives as a flexible, modern idiom—equally at home in small-group improvisation, large-ensemble writing, and cross-genre collaborations—while remaining anchored by bomba/plena grooves and a deep sense of clave.