Jazz du Quartier Latin

rhythm and soul

8/15/2025

Jazz du Latin Quartier


By Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw

I have always found rhythm to be the first language of the world. Long before ink touched paper, before empires mapped the world, we spoke in drums. The earth itself pulsed beneath our feet, and our hearts kept time with it. My journey with Jazz Y África is a return to that primordial conversation—a dialogue between continents, histories, and souls.

Africa, to me, is not an abstraction. It is home It is the warmth in the sun and the resolve in the night sky. My work in music, activism, and cultural bridging has always been about reconnecting that maternal thread, even when the modern world has tried to fray it. Jazz, for its part, is the diaspora’s heartbeat born from displacement, shaped by resistance, and carried by hope.

When I step onto a sphere, whether Cape Town, Havana, or Barcelona—I am never simply just a listener. I am engaging in a ritual. I hear the horns echoing the call of distant ancestors; I feel the bass walking the dusty roads of migration; I sense the drums summoning a time when music was not a commodity but a necessity for survival.

In Jazz Y África, every note is a meeting point across centuries. When the rhythm takes hold, I hear the congas of Havana leaning into the kora strings of Bamako, like old friends catching up after a long separation. South African township jazz sidesteps joyfully into the smoky blue notes of Harlem, their conversation carried on the wind like whispers between kindred spirits. This is not a fusion—fusion suggests two strangers politely mingling at a reception. What I live and breathe is a reunion: the moment when blood relatives recognize each other after generations apart, when the eyes widen with memory, and the arms open without hesitation.

Too often, history has been written as if Africa’s story was shattered like glass and its shards scattered irretrievably across oceans. The slave ships, the partitions, the colonial redrawings of maps—all these have been framed as the final severing of ties. But I know, deep in my bones, that nothing was ever truly lost. The rhythms hid themselves in the work songs, the call-and-response chants, the gospel moans, the blues bends, the syncopated steps of a dancer’s foot. They lay dormant but never died, waiting for the right moment to speak again.

It is in the jam sessions, the raw improvisation where no one asks for permission, that the proof of our wholeness emerges. I have felt it in a late-night rehearsal in Dakar where the trumpet player from New Orleans suddenly fell into a groove that the djembe master recognized from childhood. I have seen it when a Cuban bassist hears a Ghanaian drummer’s pulse and smiles in that way that says, I know this—I have always known this. Music remembers what the textbooks forget, and it remembers in color, in sweat, in laughter, and in defiance.

I carry this work into my activism as well. Just as jazz has always been a form of resistance, Jazz Y África is my way of insisting that cultural memory is power. The colonial project tried to silence it, but music refuses to forget. And I refuse to let the next generation inherit a silence where there should be song.

Every performance, every project, every collaboration is an act of reclamation. I am not here merely to preserve tradition; I am here to make it live, breathe, and demand its place in the present. Jazz and Africa are not separate chapters—they are the same book, still being written.And if you listen closely, you’ll hear it: the heartbeat is still strong.

Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw

Saint Germain Des Pres 15 August 2025