Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between the island, the United States, and other locations. It is also a powerful critique of efforts to define "Cuban music" for ethnographic examination or market consumption. Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it. "Listening in detail" is a method invested in opening up, rather than pinning down, experiences of Cuban music. Critiques of imperialism, nationalism, race, and gender emerge in fragments and moments, and in gestures and sounds through Vazquez's engagement with Alfredo Rodríguez's album Cuba Linda (1996), the seventy-year career of the vocalist Graciela Pérez, the signature grunt of the "Mambo King" Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban music documentaries of the 1960s, and late-twentieth-century concert ephemera.

"“Listening in Detail stands alone in its discussion of the important music of greater Cuba. . . . Thoroughly researched and featuring fine literary references, this is a rich resource for advanced students and scholars of music and Cuban studies."" - Choice

"“With its imaginative, beautiful prose and broad themes of post-colonialism, race, feminism, and the production of knowledge, Listening in Detail would be an edifying read for most, although Cuba and Cuban music specialists stand the most to gain.”" - Ethnomusicology Review

"“It is Vazquez’s emphasis on the importance of details that draws out seemingly peripheral contacts and relationships, and draws out stories from them that position them at the centre of global transactions of racialised, imperial identities.”" - Latin American Review of Books

"“Vazquez’s work is required reading not only for Cuban music scholars, but in particular those working in fields traversing African American and American studies. Students and scholars of many disciplines whose topical and methodological interests take them to Cuban music performance or music in general will draw much inspiration from Listening in Detail.”" - American Studies

"“Reading Listening in Detail is a very enjoyable experience. … All in in all it is a unique and valuable addition to the growing volume of literature on Cuban music, written with passion and love, and should be read not only with open ears as the title suggests, but with an open mind and heart as well.”" - EIAL

"[A]n outstanding book that invites us, through its own example, to linger with the sounds, images, andprinted words that make up (and are made up by) the many remarkable performers appearing and resonating in its pages. Vazquez offers critical and personal responses to what Cuba and music, in their articulation, signify, and the experience (a keyword in her method) becomes, for us, that fine arrangement of pleasure in, and of, critique, where reading a book turns into us cheering it on, often aloud.” - Journal of Popular Music Studies

"“Vazquez’s explorations of listening as a critical act are intimately tied to the rich heterogeneity of texts that she embraces in the book. Having grappled in my own scholarship with the complexities, limitations, and potentialities of ‘listening’ as a metaphor for engaging in the study of Latino popular music, I have found Professor Vazquez’s incursions into ‘listening’ to be both invigorating and expanding.”" - The Americas

"“Vazquez’s methodology is inspirational for scholars interested in music-making and consumption in Cuba today during this period of change in economic and cultural policy. Moreover, Vazquez’s determination to acknowledge an object of study as unpredictable and unstable, as well as her commitment to seeing beyond domestic-diaspora and black-white binaries, make the book important for performance studies." " - TDR: The Drama Review

"“Listening in Detail is a necessary book for those who work within the disciplines of performance studies, musicology, sound studies, postcolonial studies and critical race studies. Because of its methodological framework and its unique exploration of inscription and fugitivity, the book will also be of particular use to those who research at the nexus of cultural studies and media theory.”" - Theatre Research International

"I listen now with refreshed ears and hope, for hope is what I find myself left with after I finish the book—hope for the capacity of human beings to create beauty." - Small Axe

"For Vazquez, listening in detail is a transformative experience, enabling an interweaving of writing and music. She wrote the book while listening to music, and reading her work in detail is unquestionably a sonic experience as well; her colorful writing encourages the reader to listen not only to the poetic style of her prose, but to the music that accompanies it." - New West Indian Guide