James Brown Jazz: "Tengo Tango"

     It is only fitting that a James Brown "Jazz" album has a song entitled "Tengo Tango." The connection between African-American music, Jazz, blues, and Latin music reaches as far back as Louis Gottschalk's Souvenir de Porto Rico and Jelly Roll Morton's New Orleans Blues. In fact, Morton argued for the integral relationship between the blues and the "Spanish tinge." In its early years, Jazz's identity was nearly inseparable from tango and the habanera dance crazes of American popular culture in the early twentieth century. W.C. Handy's tango inspired refrain in  St. Louis Blues  is a prime example.         Brown's Tengo Tango is a F blues that begins in earnest with a stately latin intro consisting of three quarter notes followed by eighth notes on the fourth beat. The opening rhythm of the head sounds like a short-hand rendering of the syncopated rhythm of Morton's New Orleans Joys  which consists of two dotted quarter note rhyth