Editorial: Jazz in Australasia

Abstract

IntroductionAs one of the first musics mediated by modern technologies, jazz was circulated globally with a rapidity unprecedented for any other new music. As early as 1922, US journalist Burnet Hershey reported that in his recent journey around the world he found jazz everywhere (Walser 1999: 26). The speed of its international circulation tells us as much about modernity itself as about the music that became its anthem. Curious, then, that it has taken so long for the history of diasporic jazz to be taken seriously. The jazz narrative has been overwhelmingly US-centric for most of the music's history, with jazz outside the US generally neglected as some kind of inauthentic reflection of the 'real thing'. This is a deeply conservative approach to the study of a modern cultural form, telling us, for example, very little about the dynamics of globalization/glocalization in relation to a genre that may be regarded as having created the modern musical template. Indeed, that jazz came to be regarded as the quintessential new music of the twentieth century was itself a phenomenon of its diasporic process. On the basis of their own reports (see for example Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, especially 3-74) musicians in what is regarded as the birthplace of the music, New Orleans, thought of themselves as bearers of a local semi-folk tradition, not as harbingers of internationalist modernity. It was the new audiences in diasporic sites that made the music the anthem of all that was modern, emancipative and thus threatening to tradition.The further from the source, the more comprehensively was that association defined, and this is partly because of the primary diasporic media. Jazz was a music disseminated, especially beyond the US, largely by recordings, radio and film. It was thus delivered via the medium not of provincial folk traditions but by technologies that coded it as of an increasingly internationalized New World that represented the future. It was in the diasporic process that jazz became, internationally, the soundtrack to modernity (see further Johnson 2000: 7-27; Johnson forthcoming). Jazz was not invented then exported, arriving in some contaminated and enervated form, but was continuously invented in the diasporic process, which thus contributes to, rather than compromises, the jazz tradition (see further Johnson 2002a: passim). Even where diasporic jazz has attracted attention, what are in many ways the most instructive forms have been overlooked and even scorned for their embarrassing gaucherie-that is, the earliest attempts to make local sense of the music, before its international, placeless codification from the 1960s through such infrastructures as the LP, its cover notes, jazz education programmes and fake books. To me there are more telling lessons in a non-US recording from the 1920s of Edwardian dance-band or vaudeville trained musicians still trying to find their feet, than a diasporic 1960s performance by musicians whose greatest pride is to be indistinguishable from their New York counterparts.But from the late twentieth century the situation has been changing, with studies of jazz in Europe, including the early general study, Goddard (1979) and later Atkins (2003), and specific regional studies includ - ing, inter alia, the USSR (Starr 1983); the UK (Godbolt 1984); the Third Reich (Kater 1992); South Africa (Ballantine 1993); Finland (Haavisto 1996); Japan (Atkins 2001) and France (Nettelbeck 2004). The flow of such studies now gains impetus yearly. This shift has been given momentum by the 'New Jazz Studies', and the current centre of gravity of its diasporic interests may be seen as the Hera-funded research project Rhythm Changes (see http://heranet.info/rhythm-changes/index). Australia was among the first regions to receive such attention. Following the 'registry' style privately printed publication by Hayes, Scribner and Magee (1976), extended scholarly monographs began with Andrew Bisset (1979, updated 1987) followed by Johnson (1987), Whiteoak (1999) and more focused, anecdotal and interview-based surveys as exemplified by Williams (1981), Clare/Brennan (1995), Sharpe (2001, 2006, 2008), Boldiston (2007), Shand (2009), Newton (2009), James (2014) and Hopgood (2014). …