"Millie danced to jazz in her Italian neighborhood. Pedro danced to Latin songs in his Puerto Rican neighborhood. It was the 1940s in New York City, and they were forbidden to dance together ... until first a band and then a ballroom broke the rules. Machito and His Afro-Cubans hit the scene with a brand-new sound, blending jazz trumpets and saxophones with Latin maracas and congas creating Latin jazz, music for the head, the heart, and the hips....

Introduced to Latin jazz in the 1980s, when he was beginning his career as a director, Fernando Trueba has since become a devoted fan of the music. Noted jazz artists have scored for some of his films and he took his love of the music one step further in which he gathered together a number of his favorite Latin jazz artists for a series of interviews and performances.

Spanish Harlem's musical development thrived between the 1930s and 1980s in New York City. This area was called El Barrio by its inhabitants and Spanish Harlem by all others. It was a neighborhood where musicians from the Caribbean or their descendants organized musical groups, thereby adding to the diaspora that began in Africa and Spain. The music now called salsa had its roots in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, and it continued developing...