Until the late 20th century, the only country that was regarded as having anything significant to offer to our understanding of jazz was the United States. Full-length studies of diasporic jazz can be dated from Goddard's Reference Goddard1979 monograph, Jazz Away from Home, and region-specific studies began to emerge at around the same time, stretching from Australia (Bisset 1976) to Finland (Haavisto Reference Haavisto and Freundlich1996). The Cambridge Companion to Jazz felt the topic had achieved sufficient critical mass by 2002 to include a chapter on diasporic jazz (Johnson Reference Johnson, Cooke and Horn2002), and as far as I am aware, the first scholarly anthology that presented an aggregation of global perspectives was E. Taylor Atkins' Reference Atkins2003 collection, Jazz Planet, nearly 90 years after the music had become a major global phenomenon. In the last decade, the flow has suddenly become something approaching a torrent (it happens that I have two collections in print as I write, one covering Australasia, another on jazz and totalitarianism). These developments in jazz scholarship were 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). In particular, there have been numerous studies of jazz in the UK in the last decade (see, for example, Parsonage Reference Parsonage2005; McKay Reference McKay2005; Moore Reference Moore2007; Heining Reference Heining2012; Gelly Reference Gelly2014). And now Black British Jazz. A summary of its contents is available at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472417565.
This is a brave project, considering the sensitivities framing the isolation of ‘blackness’ as a theme, the subject of the final chapter (Dueck). These sensitivities arise partly because of the multiplicity covered by the term ‘blackness’, not to mention the term ‘jazz’ itself – ironic in view of the perennial assertions of the relationship between blackness and authenticity, and the lengths jazz discourse went to in order to differentiate itself into the 1960s (jazz as ‘fission’) before it embraced self-conscious fusion. But the focus here on blackness in British jazz provides an opportunity to foreground some performers who have been either too commercially successful for jazz attention, like the wonderful Winifred Atwell (McKay); or whose blackness was in the wrong place at the wrong time (Bilby, Banks and Toynbee, and Doffman, continue the process of according proper recognition to Joe Heriott); or whose blackness challenged the jazz stereotype, like the now almost forgotten Reginald Foresythe, the ‘trickster in the works’ for theorists like Adorno (Burrows).
Inevitably these essays are traversed by issues that establish connections with other jazz destinations, providing material for the general theorisation of the jazz diaspora. The role of racism, xenophobia and the unions in regulating exposure to black US performers in the early years exemplifies the point: Will Garland's touring revue (Rye) came close to suffering the same deportation as the musicians of The Colored Idea revue in Australia in 1928, leading to a ban on black US jazz musicians that lasted for decades (and speaking of connections between peripheries, it is notable that one of Australia's pioneer progressive but also boogie jazz pianists, Don Banks, is given recognition for his role in the UK avant-garde scene – Banks and Toynbee).
The thrust of diasporic jazz studies is towards a de-centring away from the United States, and this centrifugal impulse is increased here. While London has been the major centre of jazz in England, the collection also notes the contributions made by regional centres including Birmingham, Liverpool and the north (editors), Cardiff (Tackley) and Edinburgh (Rye). These disclose not only the astonishing cultural mix that fed into the field, but also the tenuousness of national identity as an explanatory principle. Also evident are the ways in which various centres generally regarded as discrete peripheries actually formed networks that bypassed the United States; Evan Parker's interest in Stockhausen rather than Charlie Parker (Banks and Toynbee) parallels the case of Australian modernist Frank Smith whose innovative approach owed as much to Hindemith as to any US models.
The centrifugal thrust of these studies is given impetus by UK demographics, the ghettoisation of black communities, notably of Caribbean extraction into peripheries (Bilby). There is ‘decentering’ also from the cerebral aesthetics that accompanied the attempts to distance jazz from its more visceral (read: vulgar) competitors emerging in the postwar period, notably rock. Rye reminds us of the importance of dance in early jazz (and therefore by implication of women). Dance also intersects issues of the politics of the body (McKay in his analysis of the performance conduct of Winifred Atwell; also touched on in Burrows' discussion of Reginald Foresythe). The importance of physiology has been generally neglected in jazz studies, which is odd given the emphasis on its often ecstatic physicality. Jazz studies have given much attention to race, place and gender, it would be interesting to hear more on the matter of sonicity vis-à-vis other mediations of the issues addressed here, through cross-disciplinary work encompassing the physiology of sonic affect.
These studies help to fortify the understanding of the serious limitations of US-based models of jazz history (and of modern popular music history more generally) through the insights they provide about the globalisation process that are unavailable to US-centric models. It has, after all, been diasporic jazz that created the central jazz meanings and discourses. New Orleans musicians certainly did not think of themselves as harbingers of modernity and its mediascapes. It was not US writers who laid down the earliest critical discourses and histories. Even many of the material structures through which jazz became a global music were largely diasporic creations: festivals as we now understand them, dedicated jazz clubs, as opposed to cabarets, nightclubs, restaurants and dance venues where jazz was secondary to socialising. The traditional theoretical model of jazz history situates the United States at the dominating centre, and Everywhere Else a pallid and clumsy reflection. Imagine a line running from theory ‘down’ to empirical data. There will be a point on that line where the two come into tension, requiring either a revision of the theory or a falsification of the data. The higher up that tension appears – that is, the closer to theory – the better for the health of the scholarship. And the way to force that point upwards is through the most painstaking, open-eyed engagement with the grass-roots data. Such work provides a continuing challenge to complacent but specious ‘master narratives’, and is very much on display here, taking us ever closer to what William James called ‘the bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’ of life.
