Ethno-musicologist Gerhard Kubik is a truly remarkable man. His life and personal history suggest less a late 20th/21st century academic and more a 19th century polymath or explorer, traversing both academic and continental boundaries with equal courage and tenacity. The image of him cycling across Africa with a tape recorder in his bag gleaned from his comments about his first research trip in 1959 is a wonderfully romantic one. In this sense, it is almost impossible to separate the man and the work.

When I tried to contact Dr Kubik recently at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna – he is also a qualified psychoanalyst – his colleague told me that he was conducting field research in Uganda and they were unsure when he would return. Given that he is 86, this is astonishing in itself but then Kubik has made the study of the musics of Africa and their transformations in the New World his passion and his life for nearly 60 years. His research has taken him across Africa but also to Latin America and the USA. He is the author of more than 300 books and articles and the collector of some 25,000 field recordings.

In a way, the two volumes of Jazz Transatlantic can be seen as the summation of his life's work and as a follow-on from the essential Africa and the Blues (Reference Kubik1999, republished 2008). One might describe his research methodology as a kind of participant observation, a term he himself uses. Kubik is alive to the attendant dangers of such an approach, of becoming too close to one's subject(s) but then better that by far than the imposition of Western, European and North Atlantic assumptions on the very different cultural traditions of Africa's peoples of much early ethno-musicology. Instead, Kubik recognises the need for the researcher to find a way of get inside these traditions to gain insight into their practices and values, indeed much as a psychoanalyst might with an analysand. His is an holistic approach and there are frequent references to him checking out with African colleagues his interpretations. As he notes at the end of Volume II,

In this respect, it is important to remember that Kubik is also a musician (he plays clarinet), who works with Malawian and other African musicians. In fact, he knew and worked extensively with the Malawian guitarist Donald Kachamba, until his early death in 2001. He can be heard, for example, in Kachamba's Malawi/Concert Kwela, released by Chant du Monde in 1994. For me, Kubik's approach and active involvement in African music-making make him an excellent guide in these matters.

The two volumes divide usefully between the examination of African ‘undercurrents’ in North American jazz culture (Volume I) and the subsequent influence of jazz upon African musics (Volume II). Their scope is too wide to cover adequately here. Therefore, I will focus on specific elements in each.

Volume I is lent even greater authority through Kubik's extensive investigations into African musics. From the outset, the author counsels against the search for exact translations between African music and jazz. What has been carried forward has been transformed by several centuries of African-American life on another continent with all its privations. Moreover, the music knowledge and traditions brought by the slaves to the New World came from diverse and different cultures and were often supressed, for example the belief in some (although not all) states that drumming might be used by slaves to foment rebellion.

Following Ernest Brown (Reference Brown and DjeDje1991) and Melville J. Herskovits (Reference Herskovits1941), Kubik looks more for ‘family resemblances’ (Brown) and to the identification of ‘deep structures’ or ‘roots’ (Herskovits). This leads him to look more at musical practices and how these could have been preserved intergenerationally. In this regard, he focuses on how African musical techniques and compositional practices on xylophones and lamellophones much later emerged in boogie-woogie piano styles and how West African playing techniques on the algeita oboe relate to jazz saxophone timbral alterations and manipulations.

Of even more interest to me is his argument that supressed and barely remembered musical knowledge could have been preserved and passed on through behavioural and linguistic traits, in ways of walking and moving, in cultural practices and in rhythms of speech. This may be hard for some readers to accept but the argument is a valid one if one considers the black churches of North America and comparable religious practices in Africa. Indeed, as Kubik reminds us, the idea of music as being separate from social context and social life is essentially a Western notion inapplicable to African music. Perhaps, we critics (and musicians and fans) pay too little attention to the often communal and spiritual, or spiritually inspired, nature of much jazz.

On his journey, Kubik effectively debunks the received wisdom that African music is devoid of harmony. This, as he points out, stems from a cultural bias on the part of many ethnomusicologists that results in inferences being drawn from small numbers of cases and then extrapolated to all ethnic cultures on the continent. Further to this, he criticises the way that Western musical theory has been used to explain non-Western approaches. He is particularly instructive in his examination of what Western theorists have explained as syncopation and, in an illuminating chapter on ragtime, Kubik points out that this is in reality an African practice of utilising sequences of asymmetric pulse units. Similar points are made in the chapter on swing. Through examination of the contributions of gospel, blues, ragtime and Afro-Cuban influences (through Mexico), Kubik restores to jazz the primacy of its African origins. Those influences from European sources, like the European instruments upon which African techniques were deployed, were, from this perspective, material for transformation according to what Kubik calls ‘Afrologic principles’.

Volume II touches upon jazz in North and West Africa but pays most attention to Southern Africa where jazz established its firmest foothold on its return to Africa. En route, Kubik examines African counterparts to New Orleans brass bands and the return of the banjo, an African instrument in origin, to the continent. In relation to jazz in South Africa, Kubik makes the observation that it was the evils of Apartheid that led black and coloured South Africans to identify with jazz and, in particular, the New Thing of those such as ‘Daddy ‘Trane’ and ‘Bra Shorter’. This identification was born of the sense of a shared struggle for civil rights. Given Kubik's psychoanalytic training, it is a shame that this aspect of the book is not developed further. However, he does explore in detail the significance of kwela in the development of jazz in South Africa, something which I must admit I had not really understood. In addition, he offers a survey of key figures in South African jazz not well known outside the country, such as the remarkably gifted tenor saxophonist Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi and coloured pianist Leonard Pillay. The volume concludes with an elegiac memoir of Donald Kachamba that is deeply moving.

If there are disappointments with these two volumes, these are slight and mentioning them feels a little like carping. However, Kubik makes a number of references to black racism, for example claims by certain African-American jazz musicians that white musicians cannot truly play the music. Prejudice is prejudice but the use of the term racism grates. It is a reminder of the tactless and thoughtless use of the term ‘Crow-Jimism’ by Down Beat in the 1960s to describe an alleged unwillingness on the part of African-American musicians to hire white players. This has been echoed decades later in the debates over statements by Winton Marsalis, Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, with white musicians and critics making claims of ‘reverse racism.’ This is a reminder that jazz and its adherents have no coherent theory or understanding of racism, despite the origins of music in circumstances of the most extreme discrimination. Racism operates not only at an interpersonal level but also at communal, societal and international levels. It is simultaneously institutionalised and embedded in cognitive structures and involves the power to discriminate and deny access and resources whether by legislation or informally. The impact of prejudice on the part of black people towards whites is miniscule compared with its effects on black people, even in so-called democratic European and North Atlantic states. To talk of racism in this way trivialises it.

The other issue of note is that Kubik has little to say about the New Thing. Many of the musicians associated with the new jazz of the 1960s looked very much to Africa and their own understanding of the roots of jazz in the continent. It would have been intriguing to hear what Kubik might have had to say about the music of Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and others, in relation to how that music might relate to more traditional African music practices.

These comments aside should not detract from Kubik's achievements. These two volumes are thought-changers. Kubik has thrown down the gauntlet to jazz historians. It is now for us to respond.