This expertly crafted study of seven twentieth-century Argentine musicians who made their careers by navigating the transnational music industry “rebuts accounts that reduce the globalization of popular music to a simple story of homogenization or cultural imperialism” (216). Recognizing the constraints placed on these artists—Oscar Alemán, Gato Barbieri, Lalo Schifrin, Astor Piazzolla, Sandro, Mercedes Sosa, and Gustavo Santaolalla—by the handful of US North American and European record labels that long dominated music sales in Latin America, Karush shows how they nevertheless fashioned their own success and propelled new musical styles that not only contributed to national and regional self-expression, but also forced their corporate benefactors to adapt to unforeseen directions in popular taste. Although his stated aim is to “demonstrate that the efforts of Argentine musicians to connect with foreign audiences profoundly influenced the construction of national identities at home” (9), the book as a whole charts the growth of a wider Latin American music market and culture that arose from these transnational engagements. As such, it deserves to be read by anyone interested in the development of Latin American identity in the twentieth century, including those interested in the US media conglomerates eager to fashion a “Latin” audience across national boundaries and their wittingly and unwittingly encouragement of that phenomenon.

Even though Musicians in Transit is structured chronologically as a series of biographical “career narratives” (11), Karush continually offers links that allow us to connect these stories to one another and situates each one in the broader musical, commercial, critical, and political developments that created new opportunities and challenges for Argentine musicians. His ability to move between different narrative realms and analytical registers is simply breathtaking and alone justifies the decision to anchor each chapter in the trajectory of a single artist (or, in one case, of two close collaborators). The approach also allows Karush to trace and explain the changing fortunes of each performer at different moments in his or her career and in different locations at home or abroad. The Afro-Argentine Alemán, for instance, rivaled Django Reinhart as a leading jazz guitarist in Parisian nightclubs during the 1930s, but when he returned home at the outbreak of World War II, he faced an audience anxious about the place of blackness and jazz itself in Argentine culture. Two decades later, Sosa almost scuppered her career before it began by releasing a debut album that sought to modernize folk music. In 1965, however, a chance intervention by a colleague at a festival allowed her to reinvent herself as the full-throated voice of Andean indigeneity that later made her a continental superstar.

As these examples suggest, the book does sometimes give the impression that success as a Latin American musician comes primarily from developing the right identity mix from the range of possibilities open to an artist born in the region—national, cosmopolitan, continental, latino, (white) European, indigenous, Afro-American, progressive, traditionalist, sophisticated, populist, etc. Though Karush does an admirable job describing the rhythms and tonalities of the many different song styles developed by his protagonists (some of which may be sampled through a supplementary website), the power of the music itself is difficult to capture in writing, much less measure as a contributor to the “authenticity” that modern fans and critics require of their favorite musicians. The documentary record naturally privileges the afterlife of popular music in print and so may exaggerate the importance of social and cultural discourses that were not originally put forth by the artist nor heard at first by the listener. That said, the book makes abundantly clear that such discourses do shape subsequent musical projects, as performers and their patrons wrestle with what has been written about their previous work.

Finally, as Karush points out, the unequal exchanges of the transnational music industry facilitate Argentine consumption of US North American music but rarely the reverse. Let us hope this fine book does not suffer a similar fate!