As one of the first musics mediated by modern technologies, jazz was circulated globally with a rapidity unprecedented for any other new music. Within two years of its first recordings in 1917 local musicians performed under its name as far afield as Australia (1918) and Norway (1919). As early as 1922, US journalist Burnet Hershey reported that in his recent journey around the world he found jazz everywhere (Walser Reference Walser1999, p. 26). The speed of its international circulation tells us as much about modernity itself as about the music which became its anthem.
It is 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 negligible inauthentic reflection of the ‘real thing’. This is a deeply conservative approach to the study of a cultural form, telling us, for example, very little about the dynamics of globalisation/glocalisation in relation to a musical genre that may be regarded as having created the modern template. And even within that neglected field, where diasporic jazz has attracted attention, the most instructive forms have been overlooked and even scorned for their embarrassing quaintness – 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 performance by musicians proud to be indistinguishable from their New York colleagues.
But from the late 20th century, partly in association with the ‘new jazz studies’, the situation is changing, with studies of jazz in Europe (including the early general study, Goddard (Reference Goddard1979), and specific regional studies such as, in chronological order, Australia (Bisset Reference Bisset1979); the USSR (Starr Reference Starr1983); the Third Reich (Kater 1993); Finland (Haavisto Reference Haavisto and Freundlich1996); Japan (Atkins Reference Atkins2001); and France (Nettelbeck Reference Nettelbeck2004). The current centre of gravity of this growing critical mass may be seen as the Hera-funded research project Rhythm Changes (see http://heranet.info/rhythm-changes/index) with a UK base. The UK is also served with increasing abundance since Godbolt's first history (Reference Godbolt1984) and Carr's Reference Carr1973 study of contemporary jazz in Britain – including McKay (Reference McKay2005), Tackley (2005), Moore (Reference Moore2007) and Heining (Reference Heining2012).
And now we have this new semi-memoir account by Gelly, which chronologically segues neatly into Heining (Reference Heining2012), and in some ways takes a similar narrative line: covering the full stylistic field and contextualising the music rather than focusing on formalist analysis. One valuable lesson to be learned from these two studies is further confirmation that the cliché of the disjunction between jazz and The Beatles-led pop scene in the UK is seriously misleading. Apart from the crossover of multitudes of jazz-based musicians into the later scene, there were infrastructural/cultural continuities – from the bop scene to the Mods; Chris Barber to the Marquee; Ken Colyer via Alexis Korner, to UK R&B; and the work of film director Richard Lester spanning the 1950s trad scene, Spike Milligan, to The Beatles (and there goes an article I was going to write). John Lennon's notorious reported loathing of jazz has obscured a thick skein of continuities.
Gelly's account also reminds us of some of the common threads in the jazz diaspora, such as the importance of wartime contact with US service musicians (in the UK, Sam Donahue's, and in Australia, Artie Shaw's navy band). But at the same time, these studies identify distinctive and complex local lines of forced local patterns that counter monolithic assumptions about the dynamic of diaspora. In the UK, the union ban on US jazz musicians was paralleled in Australia by a decades-long ban on African American US jazz musicians following the 1928 ‘Coloured Idea’ revue scandal. Although both ‘quarantines’ reduced to negligibility the live exposure to US performers that was enjoyed by continental audiences, they contributed to very different outcomes: Gelly's study reminds us that diasporic developments can actually bypass the centre altogether. Thus, the fact that ‘Empire’ musicians were allowed to tour in the UK, ironically allowed Australian musicians – the Graeme Bell band – at one critical point to exercise a stronger direct influence on the UK jazz scene than the Americans. By introducing their then-heretical ‘jazz-for-dancing’ policy in the late 1940s, the Bell band transformed the social function of jazz, opening it up to the kinds of audiences that would go on to help sustain the 1960s pop scene. In a literature that has rather averted its eyes from this colonial insolence, it is refreshing to read Gelly's acknowledgement of this instructive twist in the politics of diaspora, although his description of the Bells as being ‘taken on’ to play at Leicester Square jazz club does dilute their impact, as also in a recent account of jazz venues in postwar London (Williams Reference Williams2013). According to the participants including Lyttelton, the Australians started the club themselves (see Johnson Reference Johnson2000: pp. 153, 155–6).
In the 1990s I was informed by an American director of one of our leading tertiary jazz education programmes that we ‘discourage our students from thinking about the idea of an Australian jazz tradition, because there isn't one’. Things change, but slowly: on the day I write, at a music conference in Melbourne, a senior teacher from one of Australia's regional jazz education programmes rather huffily asked why we should be interested in an ‘Australian’ identity in our jazz. Books like Gelly's, which explore the diasporic context, will help to answer this question.
