Afro-Caribbean Jazz

Afro-Caribbean jazz is jazz built on the rhythms of the wider Caribbean beyond Cuba: the calypso and mento of Trinidad and Jamaica, Puerto Rican and Dominican dance patterns, reggae, soca and Afrobeat, folded into big-band and small-group improvisation. Where Afro-Cuban jazz codified the clave-based language of *Machito* and *Mario Bauzá*, the Caribbean variant draws on the whole archipelago and its diaspora, from Jamaican-born pioneers *Joe Harriott* and *Dizzy Reece* to the London scene of *Nubya Garcia* and *Sons of Kemet*, for whom Caribbean heritage is both rhythm source and cultural subject.