The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles

Published in conjunction with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the book shows how Latin American musicians and music have helped shape the city’s culture—from Hollywood film sets to recording studios, from vaudeville theaters to Sunset Strip nightclubs, and from Carmen Miranda to Pérez Prado and Juan García Esquivel.. In 1980, the celebrated new wave band Blondie headed to Los Angeles to record a new album and along with it, the cover song “The Tide Is High,” originally written by Jamaican legend John Holt. Featuring percussion by Peruvian drummer and veteran LA session musician “Alex” Acuña, and with horns and violins that were pure LA mariachi by way of Mexico, “The Tide Is High” demonstrates just one of the ways in which Los Angeles and the music of Latin America have been intertwined since the birth of

Positioning LA as a Latin American city, this collection of essays and original interviews reveals new geographic, visual, and sonic understandings of the link between Los Angeles and the world Latin@s have made."—Gaye Theresa Johnson, author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles  . From the Inside Flap"The Tide Was Always High will redefine the way people think and write about the music and history of Los Ang