Preface

Jazz is the only art form originated in the United States. It was given iconic status by the 100th Congress of the United States, which declared it “a rare and valuable national treasure” in a resolution passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate in 1987 and reaffirmed by the 111th Congress in 2009.1 This remarkable music, which originated in the United States at the hands of the Afro-American community around the turn of the twentieth century, has been so dominated by American excellence that there has been an understandable lack of curiosity inside the United States about jazz outside American borders—the global jazz scene. This may have to do with what Milan Kundera has called “the parochialism of large nations,” meaning that they do not feel the need to go beyond their borders, since all their perceived needs can be met within them. As Downbeat magazine noted in 2006: “[In] many jazz circles here, Europeans with the gall to play America’s music are often given short shrift, especially if they’re breaking any blues-and-swing rules.”²

Nevertheless, despite the weight of American jazz history and the presumption of American exceptionalism, a gradual awakening to jazz from other nations has become apparent, not only among American audiences but also among global jazz audiences. It is well documented how jazz became a global phenomenon during the 1920s, but the success of the jazz education business in conquering global markets almost a half-century later is often overlooked. The effects of this have been profound. At the end of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, its results were beginning to be felt in local jazz scenes around the world. For example, a 2009 editorial in the German jazz handbook Wegweiser Jazz noted, “Jazz in Germany and elsewhere in Europe has established itself to such a degree that there is talk in the U.S.A. of a new European assertiveness in matters jazz. Promoters in Germany are increasingly recognising that concerts, even festivals, with national or European acts are drawing large audiences.”3 But it wasn’t that American jazz was suddenly somehow “doing badly.” Just as in the world of tennis, when 20 Americans made the draw in the 2007 U.S. Open compared with 128 in 1977, the reason was that other nations were catching up: in 2007, the final 16 players in the U.S. Open came from ten different countries.

Jazz has been America’s great gift to the world and, as the 100th Congress’s resolution presciently noted, it has been “adopted by musicians around the world as a music best able to express contemporary realities from a personal perspective.”⁴ This is not to say that jazz from global sources is somehow “better” than American jazz, but rather that today it both complements and contrasts it in a way that contributes to a more rich, diverse jazz scene that speaks of the music’s continuing good health as we look beyond jazz’s centennial. Over the past couple of decades I have become more and more convinced of the need for mobility in interpreting today’s fast-moving global jazz scene. Listening to jazz recordings from cultures other than our own reveals only a partial picture, since context can contribute to meaning as well as alter and transform it. Travel, as they say, broadens the mind, and there is no doubt that leaving the comfort blanket of your own sociocultural norms and experiencing those of others provides a direct route to reaching a deeper and more nuanced understanding of jazz in the global context. Since countless jazz fans around the world have traveled to the United States, or harbor a desire to travel there in the hope of deepening their understanding of American jazz by hearing, seeing, and experiencing it in its sociocultural context, it follows that the reverse may be true. To gain a deeper understanding of jazz outside the United States, it helps to experience it in person.

I am fortunate and privileged to have been invited to jazz events in more than twenty countries around the world over the last couple of decades. The extent of these peripatetic endeavors was brought home to me when I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at the Blackheath Jazz Festival in London in November 2011. One of the students asked me how much jazz I had seen in the last ten years. I did a quick calculation. Normally I attend two festivals a month in various countries, sometimes more, sometimes—but not often—less, so two festivals a month would be a fair average. Each festival typically lasts three (sometimes four) days, and between about three in the afternoon and midnight I would typically see about eight bands. Over a three-day festival that’s 24 bands, or around 48 concerts a month, which equates to 576 concerts a year, or 5,760 concerts over a ten-year period. That’s not as many as some of my colleagues, to be sure, but probably more than a lot of people, and certainly far more than I would have imagined. Over the years, these concerts have provided a valuable window through which to witness the changes in jazz in the global jazz scene at first hand, and to speak to local musicians, jazz writers, animators, educators, and fans to learn about the dynamics of their local jazz scene in its local context. Also, during this same period I have been the recipient of literally thousands of CDS, typically between thirty and fifty every week. This too has provided valuable background from which to piece together my thoughts. These chapters have grown out of these combined experiences.

In today’s complex and often discordant world, “culture” can be a loaded word. Yet the term surfaces and resurfaces throughout this book in a way that seems to suggest a distant but unifying theme in a way that was never intended at the outset. Maybe this is a reflection of the times we live in, since “culture” is a term that’s brandished daily in the media—a typical broadsheet in the Western world might cite the term between one and ten times each day. Similarly, magazines and radio and television programs make frequent use of the term, yet none feel the need to break off abruptly midflight to define their terms. This suggests that there is a “common usage” understanding of what the term means, which is perhaps hardly surprising, since the notion of what culture means was first put into words in Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC by Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who described what made the disparate communities of Ancient Greece band together in a common culture: common blood, common language, common shrines and rituals, and common customs. Today, this has been modified to incorporate a set of values, beliefs, and practices that distinguish one group of people from another, whether it’s the language we speak, the kind of clothes we wear, the kind of leisure we pursue, the social norms we abide by, or the traditions and values we embrace.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the whole notion of a distinctive culture came under particular scrutiny in the United States as intellectuals, artists, writers, and poets began to grapple with the notion of “American-ness” in their creations, trying to find ways in which they could reflect an “American culture” that would not subsequently be regarded as a footnote to European culture. The debate continued after World War I, with writers experimenting with notions of “American-ness” in modern American literature with the aim of creating an “imagined community” that built on the work of people like Walt Whitman, Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and William Faulkner. As events turned out, it would be Hollywood that would give greatest shape to this “imagined community,” or an imaginary America, with the global reach of the American film industry selling the idea of America, its values, and beliefs to the rest of the world. By 1996, American cultural products—primarily films and pop music—had become its biggest export, outstripping aerospace, defense, cars, and farming. Today American films dominate some 70 percent of the French market, 85 percent of the Italian market, 90 percent of the German market, and nearly all of the British market. These figures are not too dissimilar in most Latin American and Asian countries: even in India, where Bollywood dominates, American films nevertheless maintain a good share of the market. But what does this domination mean? Neal Gabler has suggested that Hollywood’s influence has created an imaginary America that constitutes “a landscape of the mind, a constellation of values, attitudes and images, a history and mythology that is part of our [American] culture and consciousness.”5

Hollywood has been an ideal vehicle for the global transmission of American cultural themes, codes, norms, and values from which most people beyond the borders of the United States have acquired the idea of America. For them, an Imaginary America is a cultural space that is more glamorous and adventurous than their own, bound up in discourses of youth, glamour, energy, and newness; an America less concerned with history than with a vision of the future that resonates with the here and now, a locus of pleasure and escapism that is “cool,” contemporary, and up-to-date. This idea of America abroad acts as a powerful Americanizing influence and along with the dominance of American popular culture fills the global cultural spaces with messages made in America. As John O’Sullivan wrote in the pages of National Review, “One of the curiosities of travelling abroad is to be continually reminded of America . . . the modern world has a sharply American look and a sometimes deafening American sound.”⁶

Today, the nature and extent of America’s global cultural presence passes almost unnoticed; it is the way of the world and few of us would want to do without the benefits of American-style consumerism and entertainment. But seeing the nature and extent of exported American culture duplicated in country after country after country during the course of my travels, I began to wonder how this might influence the consumption of jazz—is it possible we can consume it as a thing-in-itself, devoid of the cultural influence of an Imaginary America, or do we, as Duncan Webster asks in his book Looka Yonder! The Imaginary America of Popular Culture, consume “not just an American product, but ‘America’ itself”?7 No questions can be answered until they are asked, and this question provided the starting point for this book and is explored in chapter 3.

While jazz is indisputably a part of American culture, the Thelonious Monk Institute pointing out that it has “contributed to and has been a reflection of American culture,”⁸ jazz has also been shaped by American culture, and continues to be shaped by it. In her 1961 essay “The Crisis in Culture,” Hannah Arendt warned against “the displacement of culture by the dictates of entertainment,”⁹ and this is the underlying theme of the first chapter, that the very culture that enabled jazz to grow and thrive in its Golden Years is pushing the music aside through the dictates of entertainment, leaving the music increasingly isolated, rather like St. Patrick’s Church on Fifth Avenue. This in turn poses the question of how it maintains a viable audience share in the broader sweep of American life. In a world increasingly drowned out by popular culture, it is a problem not unique to America, and is something that I feel is worthy of exploration.

Chapter 2 arose during the course of my travels, when I became conscious that certain nuances of meaning in jazz performances in country A are not necessarily shared in country B—for example, Kind of Blue may be the best-selling jazz record of all time, but in Sweden, the best-selling jazz album of all time is Jazz pår Svenska, meaning Jazz from Sweden. Clearly different cultures attribute different meanings to music, but how does this play out in jazz?

Since my last book, Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address), was published, I have had countless requests from academics on both sides of the Atlantic to develop my ideas on globalization. This I have done in chapter 4, expanding and refining my original ideas and updating them to take account of contemporary developments including what Mary Kaldor has called “the current wave of nationalism [that] has to be understood as a response to globalization,”¹⁰ which in turn has resonated in jazz. Since the notion of globalization as a means of explaining the effects of the transmission of jazz across national borders has been contested by a small number of academics in favor of diaspora/transnationalism theory, I felt this chapter presented an opportunity to compare and contrast work in this field with globalization theory, since it provides an opportunity to rehearse certain arguments that provide further background detail surrounding jazz globalization that might not otherwise have been advanced and that I believe contribute to a broader understanding of the subject. Since the diaspora/transnationalism theory is argued within the context of relativism, which is gaining increasing traction within academe, it seemed appropriate to question whether we should welcome such postmodernist/poststructuralist techniques into jazz discourse as means of interpreting jazz history, given how more and more history is now being revised or reinvented by people who do not want the real past but instead a past that suits their purpose.

The final chapter deals with modernism in jazz and questions why jazz modernism in Europe began with the emergence of pre-jazz forms such as the Cakewalk and Ragtime, yet does not begin in the United States until the beginnings of bebop in the 1940s. Yet as early as 1919, it was clear that as jazz spilled out into the world beyond the United States, its early reception in Europe was different from that in its homeland. For example, the American journal Current Opinion reported in 1919, “Good or bad, fad or institution, Jazz was born in Chicago, developed in New Orleans and glorified in Paris,”11 where jazz was immediately embraced as an aspect of modernism, an art form in its own right that seemed to parallel several strands of modernism. This contrasts with the early reception of jazz in the United States, where, Jed Rasula has pointed out, “The greatest difference between the European and American responses to jazz . . . [was] that the avant-garde was a pervasive phenomenon across Europe when jazz appeared, whereas it had played almost no role in the United States.”¹² I would argue that with the passage of time, what we understand to be jazz has gradually become narrowed by the need to define it, and when these contemporary definitions of jazz are applied retrospectively they can act in an exclusionary way. If that is the case, then referring to some areas of early jazz as “jazz modernism” does not conflict with, or challenge, the existing status quo, but instead offers a broader context in which to understand pre-bop jazz, and how jazz modernism was influenced by and influenced “the real jazz.” I also go on to examine modernism’s legacy and argue that jazz’s cultural capital is enhanced when we consider all of it a modernist music.

Finally, my most grateful thanks to all who have helped me in this journey, for the encouragement and friendship I have enjoyed along the way and for those who have kindly looked at early drafts of these chapters and given me the benefit of their sage advice. Both inside and outside America, jazz continues to be a music that is energizing and inspiring, and when the best does find a way of being heard and you experience tomorrow’s classics today, you know the future of the music is in safe hands. If this book contributes in some small way to the interpretation of some of these developments, and maybe to encouraging thinking about them and hearing them in a slightly different way, then my goal in writing it will have been more than fulfilled.

Stuart Nicholson,
Woodlands St. Mary,
Berks, England
July 2013