Western Bias, Canonicity, and Cultural Globalization: Introduction to “Jazz Diasporas”

Abstract

Although Popular Music and Society published a special issue on jazz in 2006 (volume 29, issue 3, July), only a decade ago it was still unusual for an academic journal specializing in popular music to deem it appropriate to devote a special issue to jazz, and this was even more so with respect to jazz outside the United States. In the history of popular music studies, jazz has been something of an outlier. Partly because of its postwar aspirations to high-art status, jazz has not fitted neatly into the narrative arc largely defined by a field of study dominated by the rock-pop tradition with which the growth of such studies has broadly coincided. And until the late twentieth century, the dominant jazz narrative was built on the foundation of a canon wholly constructed within the United States and then exported internationally. From the late twentieth century, both of those categorical boundaries – between jazz and popular music, and U.S. jazz and its negligible “Others” – have increasingly been challenged. While jazz has begun to infiltrate the discourse of popular music, the study of jazz itself has embraced the global picture as something more than a footnote or an aside. We can trace that process back almost to the mid-twentieth century, with David Boulton’s Jazz in Britain of 1959, and over subsequent decades publications on jazz in such geographically and politically disparate regions as Australia (Bisset; Johnson, Oxford Companion; Whiteoak) and different totalitarian regimes including the Third Reich (Kater) and the USSR (Starr). It has been in the twenty-first century, however, that we witness a sea change, the development of a “critical mass” in studies of the global jazz diaspora. The term “New Jazz Studies” (NJS) has given focus to a growing international community of scholars for whom the U.S.-centric canon-based model has proven to be too constricting in the study of a music whose larger significance in cultural history lies in its globalization. In neglecting the stories of jazz beyond the borders of the United States, the established canonical account seriously limits our understanding of the cultural work that jazz has performed as a global force that expressed the multiple ambiguities of Westcentered globalization. The U.S. canon is an essential point of reference but has produced a jazz narrative that tends to turn back on itself, retelling the same tales; “ . . . the problem with writing about a world of twentieth-century jazz is that the history of jazz (one located almost exclusively inside the geopolitical boundaries of the United States) has