Jazz and Culture in a Global Age Rbl

308 Pages·2014·2.04 MB·English

by  Nicholson

ALSO BY STUART NICHOLSON
Jazz: The Modern Resurgence (reprinted in 1995 as Jazz: The 1980s
Resurgence) Ella Fitzgerald
Billie Holiday
Jazz-Rock: A History
Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It
Moved to a New Address) With Max Harrison and Eric Thacker The
Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 2
With Will Friedwald, Ted Gioia, Peter Watrous, Ben Ratliff, and others The
Future of Jazz, Yuval Taylor (ed.)

Northeastern University Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com
© 2014 Stuart Nicholson All rights reserved
For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New
England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholson, Stuart, 1948–, author.
Jazz and culture in a global age / Stuart Nicholson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-55553-727-2 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-55553-844-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-
55553-839-2 (ebook) 1. Jazz—History and criticism. 2. Music and globalization.
I. Title.
ML3506.N515 2014
781.65—dc23 2013044223
In Memory of
Beatrice Margaret
Nicholson
Contents
Preface
1
Jazz and the Perfect Storm
2
Jazz May Be Universal, but Does It Have a Universal Meaning?
3
Jazz and American Cultural Power
4
The Globalization of Jazz
5
Jazz and Modernism
Notes
Index
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