Cuban music, characterized by its culture clash of African and Spanish heritages, has had a profound influence on music around the world for more than 75 years. Over the past century, Cuban music produced a seemingly endless variety of styles--Rumba, Mambo, Son, Salsa--at a dizzyingly fast rate. Since the 1940s a steady stream of Cuban musicians have made the migration to the US, sparking changes in North American musical forms: bandleader Machito set New York's jazz scene on fire, and Chano Pozo's entry into Dizzy Gillespie's group led to the birth of Latin jazz, to name just two.
After the Cuban Revolution, the new government closed the American-owned nightclubs and consolidated the island's recording industry under a state-run monopoly. Out of this new socialist agenda came the Nueva Trova movement of left-wing songwriters, popular from its inception in the 1960s into the 1970s. The 1980s saw more experimentation in modernist jazz, salsa and Afro-Cuban folk music.
Generously illustrated with hundreds of color images, Cuban Music in Revolution presents the history of Cuban record cover art, including many examples previously unseen outside the island itself. From pre-Revolution Cuba's vibrant imagery to the covers of 1980s salsa and jazz albums, via the socialist realist and geometric abstract designs of the 1960s and the folkloric Afro-Cuban roots styles of the 1970s, this volume of Cuban record cover art traces a musical form in an almost constant state of revolution.