Juan Tizol was born in Puerto Rico at the turn of the 20th century and moved to New York City in 1917 where his career as a musician in collaboration with Duke Ellington. This new opportunity would be built upon the years of previous experience he had playing in puerto Rico with his uncle, Manuel “Manolo” Tizol, whom Juan recognized as one of the greatest musicians in Puerto Rico.

By the time Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol began working together, Tizol had mastered many instruments of which the trombone one of his signatures . He has been noted as having “a unique and profoundly important place in the history of American music as the first prominent composer to meld Latin American music and Jazz”. Despite his grand influence on American music with his unique stylings and contributions to variability within Jazz, he did live in the shadows of Ellington as a trombonist, composer, and transcriptionist (Serrano, Chapter 1).

Both Tizol and Ellington play crucial roles in the uprising of new musical palettes during the Harlem Renaissance, which ranged from the 1910s – the mid 1930s. This catalogued a new wave of Black American creation in the arts. Ellington was actually one of the more frequent performers in The Cotton Club, which was a night club that launched Jazz into the larger society as it provided a venue and platform for the genre to skyrocket during this era of innovation (History.com Editors). Given that this was such a pivotal point in the history of entertainment in the United States, artists such as Ellington and Tizol would prove to be great contributors to an era of  artistic explosion that would not only be crucial for the arts, but also for the onward progression of forms of Black art.

Juan Tizol playing the trombone.