Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.

Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz uncovers Latin jazz's rich intercultural heritage, exploring its Caribbean and Latin American musical roots, its ability to transcend genre boundaries, and its inseparability from issues of ethnicity and nation.

The jazz world is both unified and fractioned. It presents itself as a tradition, and yet, the question of what is or is not jazz continues to be asked. In his book, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz, ethnomusicologist Christopher Washburne teases out the separation of Latin jazz from the rest of the jazz world by tracing the overlapping aspects of jazz and Latin jazz histories from the colonial to the contemporary era...To do so, he focuses on the processes of globalization, canonization, race relations, and genre construction and how they intersect with Latin jazz history and, more broadly, jazz history.