Epilogue

This chapter serves as the epilogue and offers a new conception of jazz and Latin jazz that embraces a rhizomic model accentuating the entanglement of the histories of the Caribbean and the Americas (North and South) and how all manifestations of jazz/Latin jazz are intercultural, transnational, and multivocal at their core. Conceived of in this way, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Tito Puente, Machito, Mario Bauzá, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and every other musician discussed in this book are unified and interconnected on the most fundamental and foundational level. The music is a product of the black, brown, tan, mulatto, beige, and white experience throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. By paying tribute to and celebrating the diversity of culture, experience, and perspectives that are foundational to jazz, the music’s legacy is shown to transcend far beyond stylistic distinction, national borders, and the imposition of the black/ white racial divide that has only served to maintain the status quo in the United States.