Editorial: The Global Circulations of Jazz

Abstract

Every night, somewhere in the world, three or four musicians will climb on stage together. Whether the gig is at a jazz club, a bar, or a bar mitzvah, the performance never begins with a note, but with a question. The trumpet player might turn to the bassist and ask, 'Do you know "Body and Soul"'?-and from there the subtle craft of playing the jazz repertoire is tested in front of a live audience.Faulkner and Becker (2009)The history of jazz has often been built around the idea of a 'jazz tradition' of essentialist inspiration. This history brought together different musical genres, different places, different styles and multiple socio-historical contexts in an evolutionary progression, as shown by Scott DeVeaux (1991). However, the history of jazz can also be regarded as a multiplicity of stories, sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, with different branches, linked to various places and social worlds in which jazz was listened to and played. In places such as Sweden, Greece, France, India, Brazil or Portugal, to name a few, local musicians and audiences developed different, and even competing, definitions of jazz. Musicians, when climbing up on stage, have, almost everywhere, to develop the knowledge of a 'repertoire', that is to say a song reservoir-jazz standards-in order to make jazz music together, as Faulkner and Becker put it (2009).Early works on the development of jazz in the United States, from its origins in New Orleans to the present day were followed by more specific studies focused on national stories, such as in Great Britain, France, Italy and Sweden. Taking into account the transnational character of jazz, and especially its developments in non-Western cultural areas, remained limited in the Anglo-Saxon academic world for both scientific and geopolitical reasons. On the one hand, a majority of jazz scholars come from North American or European academic traditions, while local systematic studies of popular music have developed in many countries in Latin America, Asia and South Africa. On the other hand, the mapping of cultural exchanges tends to flourish with the rise of formerly dominated cultural areas.One should not, however, conclude that this transnational jazz movement has been independent. Far from it, the weight of creative industries majors such as Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment- let alone Viacom and Time Warner-is increasing and still contributes significantly to defining the conditions for the circulation of cultural forms (Hesmondhalgh and Born 2000; Hesmondhalgh 2007, 2012). Contrary to common opinion, musical forms do not circulate spontaneously, but require the establishment of distribution networks, the work of cultural actors, and the involvement of public institutions or private organizations. Therefore the international dissemination of music, including jazz, did not happen by itself, as Pierre Bourdieu points out regarding the circulation of ideas (Bourdieu 1999).In this issue, we will look at some musical forms, labelled as 'global' jazz, whose history is little and poorly known. Jazz music circulated globally very early on and engendered particularly rich and fertile musical and cultural progeny around the world. Global jazz prefigured the great movement of globalization of popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but remains poorly documented. This issue brings together researchers from different countries, whose studies address these secondary circuits of diffusion.Some local surveys have been published since the beginning of the 2000s, primarily in the United States and in Europe. Among the pioneers of this research trend, we find E. Taylor Atkins, who published a survey on the beginnings of jazz in Japan (2001) and a relatively comprehensive collection of existing works in English (2003). These works have found relatively few echoes until recent years in the academic world. Among those who have innovated within this trend, we find the historical work of Catherine Parsonage on Britain (2005) and the research on South African women by Carol Muller (2011), as well as the work of the historian Robin Kelley, specialist of African-American studies, who worked on the reciprocal influences of Africa and the United States in the political definition of modern jazz (2012). …