06/03/2026
Featured Q&A with Guitarist and Composer José Guzmán (The Afro-Caribbean Jazz Collective)
For guitarist and composer José Guzmán, the distance between the academic rigours of a Doctoral degree and the street-level pulse of a Puerto Rican bomba circle is non-existent. Born and raised in Ponce, Guzmán has spent his career translating the "hard 90-degree pivot" from rock-and-roll to jazz into a sophisticated, percussion-driven language. His latest project with The Afro-Caribbean Jazz Collective, Cortadito, serves as a vibrant proof of concept for his "drum-first" philosophy—an approach that demands the composer master the hand drums before ever picking up the pen.
In Cortadito, Guzmán departs from the traditional jazz quintet by daringly removing the drumset entirely. By centring the barril and congas, he creates a sonic space that smells of the Caribbean sea and feels like the cobblestones of Old San Juan. It is an intimate, unfiltered snapshot of heritage that balances the intensity of son montuno and songo with the tender, lived-in emotions of the bolero.
In this candid conversation, Guzmán opens up about the "flying without a net" energy of the Collective, his responsibility to the legacy of masters like Rafael Cortijo and William Cepeda and why he believes that to truly play Latin Jazz, you must first learn to speak through the skin of the drum.
Read the full Q&A on latinjazznet.com
