Jazz in the post-war years: In the early 1940s, bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music." The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach. Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form, thus lessening its potential popular and commercial appeal. Composer Gunther Schuller wrote, "In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted
Latin American music in the United States for a Latin orchestra, such as that of Vincent López, to alternate with a big band because dancers insisted on it. Latin American music was extremely popular with dancers, not only the samba, pasodoble, rhumba, and mambo, but even the conga (adapted for the ballroom). In the 1950s, Perez Prado made the mambo famous, and the Afro-Cuban jazz of Dizzy Gillespie opened many ears to the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic possibilities of Latin American music and is still influential in salsa. Latin American music imported from Cuba (chachachá, mambo, rhumba) and Mexico (ranchera and mariachi) had brief periods of popularity