Focus Group

Sandke’s thoughts might be kept at the forefront of the mind when con- sidering the application of Paul Gilroy’s diaspora/transnational theories to jazz by New Jazz Studies advocates to explain the transmission and

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effect of jazz moving across international borders.53 _{This involves plac-} ing to one side the settled belief (among others, Sassoon’s, previously quoted) that the spread of jazz was the first great musical trend in music history to occur mainly through recordings and instead envisaging its spread through the prism of migratory movement. Gilroy was a professor at Kings College, London, a scholar of cultural studies and black Atlantic diasporic culture and the author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Dou- ble Consciousness (1993), among other works. Since his arguments about black Atlantic diasporic culture have proved to be influential in some cir- cles of British social sciences, it is perhaps worth noting at this point that in British social studies the term “diaspora” is often used, while in the United States the term “transnationalism” is preferred. As Steven Verto- vec has pointed out, “The term ‘transnationalism’ is fairly new and cur- rently en vogue,”54 _{and as a result “it is clear that much more conceptual} and empirical work remains to be done with regard to sharpening the transnational approach to migration research and analysis.”55 _{Thus no one} conceptual model is regarded as definitive. Nevertheless, with caveats ex- pressed about diasporism/transnationalism theory needing “considerable conceptual tuning concerning modes, levels, extents and impacts,”56 _Gil- roy’s thesis, first promulgated in The Black Atlantic (1993), was embraced by the New Jazz Studies, despite concern that his study was dangerously abstracted from the material world and limited by its postnational stance.

Gilroy argues that the black African experience is central to the mod- ern history of the West. He argues against essentialist versions of identity and nationalism in favor of a shared, heterogeneous culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once—a “Black Atlantic” culture that transcends ethnicity and nation- ality which should be treated as “one single, complex unit of analysis” to “produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”57 As defined by Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, transnation- alism is “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi- stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders.”58 _{Thus diasporas emerge as the exemplary com-} munities of a transnational movement, and much sociological discus- sion is centered around diaspora consciousness that is marked by dual or multiple identities—“home away from home,” “here and there,” and “British and something else”—whereby several identities link migrants

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to one or more nations. This involves a reconceptualization of what Gil- roy calls “double consciousness,” which builds on W. E. B. DuBois’s oft- quoted concept as a means of negotiating being “both European and Black.” Here Gilroy argues for a modernity broad enough in scope to in- clude the marginal positions of slaves and places them at the heart of mo- dernity itself: “A preoccupation with the striking doubleness that results from this unique position—in an expanded West but not completely of it—is a definitive characteristic of the intellectual history of the Black Atlantic.”59

Looking to understand other forms of identity not encompassed by national boundaries, “the Black Atlantic” challenges national identity as being fixed to a specific geographical location with its own language, values, norms and symbols, and “links between place, location and con- sciousness.”60 _{Seeking to go beyond the nation and the binaries of Amer-} ica/non-America, Gilroy unpicks the concept of nationality and the nation-state, since his diaspora theory is formulated in direct opposition to the nation-state and “codes of modern citizenship.”61 _{Thus there can} be no allegiance to the nation-state, since “by embracing diaspora . . . more highly than the coercive state of the nation, the concept becomes explicitly anti-national.”62 _{In fact, Gilroy sees the nation-state as a threat} to diaspora/transnationalism: “The nation state has regularly been pre- sented as the institutional means to terminate diaspora dispersal, as in the founding of the state of Israel.”63 _{While some have hailed his think-} ing as influential, others have cautioned against his “transfigurative, uto- pian vision.”64 _{Ien Ang, founding director of cultural studies at the Centre} for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, where she was professor and arc professorial fellow and fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, briefly summarizes Gilroy’s position thus: “Simply put, the nation-state is cast as the limiting, homogenising, assim- ilating power structure, which is now, finally, being deconstructed from within by those groups who used to be marginalised within its borders but are now bursting out of them through their diasporic transnational connections. Global diaspora, in this context, signifies triumph over the shackles of the nation-state and national identity.”65

Since the elaboration of relativism in jazz academe is never made ex- plicit, it is worth reminding ourselves that when the New Jazz Studies describe jazz as a transnational music,66 _{it is to align the music with Gil-} roy’s thesis. At this point we can now see how closely the study “Europe and the New Jazz Studies” follows certain key features of Gilroy’s thesis:67

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As we can see, the New Jazz Studies expressions of conformity to Gil- roy’s theory include the call to “avoid talk of national culture in jazz,”68 since Gilroy argues that we should value “diaspora more highly than the coercive unanimity of the nation.”69 _{There is a reason for this, as Camp-} bell, Davies, and McKay point out: “Critics such as Gilroy . . . are deeply suspicious about constructions of the nation for several reasons—nations enforce racial, ethnic and other hierarchies in the name of national unity and form the very boundaries diasporic thinking is designed to circum- vent.”70 _{Since Gilroy explicitly rejects “distinctive cultures [and the] . . .} fundamental power of territory to determine identity,”71 _{globalization} emerges as a threat because, as, Roland Robertson argues, its dialectical counterpart—glocalization—reinvigorates the power of territory to de- termine identity, ultimately creating “unique cultural constellations” re- flective of the local: what Gilroy dismisses as parochial and the very thing diaspora is intended to subvert by disrupting the “links between place, 1 ~ Aspects of Paul Gilroy’s Diaspora Theory Adapted by the New Jazz Studies

paul gilroy new jazz studies

By embracing diaspora . . . the We should avoid talk of national culture concept becomes explicitly in jazz

antinational

Diaspora is . . . an alternative to The assumption that musical codes nation and bounded culture coded and conventions represent some kind of into the body deep-rooted national consciousness is

deeply flawed

There is a call [with the diaspora Where simplistic [national] binaries theory] to go beyond the nation and remain intact . . . it becomes impossible the binary of America/non-America* to move beyond [them]

Europe is a “bleached continent” [Discussion about] Nordic musicians inevitably contributes to the ideological and imperial bleaching of Europe

Sources: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993); Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in Identity

and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1997); Tony

Whyton, “Europe and the New Jazz Studies,” in Eurojazzland, ed. Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012). *Neil Campbell, Jude Davies, and George McKay, eds., Issues in Americanisation and

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location and consciousness . . . that express and reproduce absolutely dis- tinctive cultures.”72

However, as Ien Ang has written, “There is something deeply prob- lematical about such celebrations of diaspora,” pointing to diaspora’s op- position to the nation-state and national culture.73 _{However, events have} moved on since The Black Atlantic was published in 1993, not least the rise in nationalism and the nation-state that few had predicted. As we have seen (page 111), the fear of cultural convergence and its implicit threat to national culture and way of life has prompted pride in the nation state and national values, something globalization theorists considered initially an aberration. They were wrong. The resilience of nationalist spirit in oppo- sition to the onset of a global culture has been greatly facilitated by state- wide public education that effectively tied national language and culture to the state, thus reinforcing notions of nationalism and the nation-state— precisely what Gilroy contends that diasporism/transnationalism is in- tended to overwhelm by calling for diaspora to be valued more highly than the “coercive unanimity of the nation,” since the concept is “explic- itly anti-national.”74 _{Turning to the music of the nationalists in classical} music, we see it is specifically framed to express “distinctive cultures”— the very thing that Gilroy rejects75_{—whereby the frisson of binary opposi-} tion to the dominant Germanic culture or the Austro- Hungarian Empire (or in the case of Sibelius, the Russian Empire) became a creative spur. In fact, the work of the nationalist composers has to be understood in terms of binary opposition that produced music of enduring beauty and power— indeed, these days it is almost de rigueur at a classical music concert to include a piece by one or other of the nationalists, since their works are so popular within the classical oeuvre.76 _{Equally, glocalized jazz seeks to} express distinct local culture that often does not seek to move beyond the binary of America/non-America. The reason is that some local jazz musi- cians, as a matter of artistic or aesthetic choice, or political opposition to, say, American foreign policy (see the examples at the end of this chapter), or the realization that their creations subconsciously reflect their socio- cultural background, or quite simply for nationalist reasons, do not want to sound “American” in their creations and want to reflect their own cul- tural identity in jazz (see quotations above). Thus for some, it might appear that a rote application of a sociological theory, however en vogue, raises the possibility of diminishing, rather than enhancing, our understanding of jazz in national and local settings, since dismissing glocalized jazz as a “simple inversion of the jazz-as-American/jazz-as-global binary”77 _would

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appear as questionable as dismissing Gabriel Fauré’s Pavane in F minor as a “classical-music-as-Germanic/ classical-music-as-French binary” inas- much as in art it is not the means that are used to create an end but what the end achieves that matters.78 _{At this point students of jazz (never mind} the musically curious, researchers, writers, teachers, and some academ- ics) may notice a curious asymmetry whereby the influence of national culture in classical music, rock, and hip-hop forms a standard area of mu- sical discourse, while in contrast in jazz there is now a call to “avoid talk of national culture in jazz.”79

In examining the congruence between Gilroy’s diaspora/transnation- alism theory and the “Europe and the New Jazz Studies” thesis, certain arguments, when explored in detail, provide a valuable context in which to rehearse subsidiary detail that might contribute toward a better un- derstanding of jazz globalization. For example, when Gilroy specifically rejects “the fundamental power of territory to define identity,”80 _{and thus} the idea of “culture coded into the body,”81 _{it is in turn echoed by the New} Jazz Studies assertion that “the assumption that musical codes and con- ventions represent some kind of deep rooted national consciousness is deeply flawed.”82 _{However, examination of this claim opens up an excit-} ing new dimension in which to consider the effects of jazz glocalization. If we leave aside how the Independent on Sunday dismissed this particu- lar claim by Gilroy as “fundamentally wrong,”83 _{and turn instead to early} music, we see it had a well-defined social function that “validates ritual, accompanies dance and encodes cultural meaning,”84 _{tropes that have con-} tinued to be part of music’s function not only in the Western world but other civilizations as well. In the music of the baroque period, we see that certain musical devices were codified into a musical vocabulary that were used to portray emotions such as joy, rage, sadness, and elation that were well understood by audiences of the time—certain rising musical figures to imply the Ascension, the lowering of musical pitch to imply darkness and the inferno, and so on. This kind of culture-specific signification of specific codes is perhaps an inevitable outcome of a mature musical form, and musicologist Philip Tagg believes that they exist in modern popular music too. He dubs them “musemes,” from biologist Richard Dawkins’s idea of “memes” to describe ideas that propagate through culture.85

Since so much of the world’s music is song, or derived from song, it follows that melodic construction is typically influenced by the meter and rhythm of language (language being both a code and a convention). In classical music, for example, it has long been acknowledged how lan-

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guage influences melodic construction. In their History of Western Music, Burkholder, Grout, and Plassica write how the English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was not touched by the growing interest in folksong among European nationalist composers, suggesting that his “English- ness” was implicit in his melodic lines, which mirrored the intonations of English speech.86 _{This symmetry between music and language becomes} more apparent when, for example, we compare the melodic construction of a Verdi aria and a Schubert lieder. This is an exercise in which we can all participate, since it is not necessary to speak either German or Italian to hear how melodic contour follows the inherent rhythm of language. According to evidence produced by neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel and his coworkers, language patterns of rhythm and melody shaped the music of English and French composers from the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries.87 _{“Their focus on this period was intentional,” writes} musicologist Philip Ball, “both because it was a time when many com- posers strove to articulate a musical nationalism and because it would be hard to make a meaningful comparison with the imperfectly known lan- guage patterns of more distant periods.”88 _{Earlier, we saw how Janacek’s} “speech melodies” and Bartók’s use of field recordings of peasant melo- dies and speech patterns represented “musical codes and conventions” that reflected a “deep rooted [Hungarian] national consciousness.” As the composer, pianist, and conductor Antony Hopkins has pointed out, in classical music, “nationalist elements can be traced to the different ac- centuation of languages [since] rhythm tends to be closely associated with words, even in instrumentally conceived music. A tune by Bartók, Janacek, Dvorˇák, Borodin or Falla will be easily recognised as having na- tional characteristics both rhythmically and melodically.”89

It is interesting to note that despite the research that has been con- ducted on Mother Tongue language influence on melodic and rhythmic construction, it has received surprisingly little attention in the area of jazz studies. Yet the phonetics, phonologies, and syntax of a Mother Tongue language inhere in the very fabric of music; songwriters of all nations have always been very sensitive to matching the inflective contour of mel- ody to the syllables and rhythm of speech patterns—which of course vary from language to language. We are all exposed to the relationship between our Mother Tongue and melody from a very young age, and the mne- monic power of music is such that most of us can remember the words of pop songs from our formative years more easily than the poetry or prose we were taught at school. How musical elements follow the rhythm

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and inflections of Mother Tongue language is hard-wired into our sub- conscious. Some classical music scholars have pointed out how language change over the centuries has influenced the evolution of musical genres, such as the interrelationship between language and melody, citing the example of the development of the Italian madrigal. As Danlee Mitchell and Jack Logan have pointed out, “The overall structure of music and the overall structure of language in Western culture are closely related. The overall syntax of language and the structural layering of musical events in a piece of music are strikingly similar. Both language and music mirror certain socio-psycho forces of our culture.”90

Although the correlation between Mother Tongue language and me- lodic construction has surfaced infrequently in jazz, it is well enough known by some advanced European jazz musicians with a command of several languages. As the German pianist Michael Wollny has noted, “Your native language somehow has a lot to do with how you play your instrument because it . . . reflects national identity; people from Nor- way play differently from people from France, people from Germany will phrase in another way and I think that has a lot to do with native lan- guage.”91 _{Wollny’s observation is echoed by Belgian jazz pianist Jef Neve,} who studied in the Lemmensinstituut in Louvain, graduating with simul- taneous Master of Music degrees in classical music and jazz, and going on to postgraduate studies in chamber music, graduating cum laude (with honor) in 2001. Neve, who is fluent in six languages, observes: “This is the great richness of being here [in Europe], the languages. Each language has its own sound. I can almost tell when a person is a native English speaker when I hear them play. Or French, or Italian or German or Span- ish.”92 _{While Neve makes no claim to infallibility, he does however point} out how language influences melodic construction when a European jazz musician improvises without recourse to certain rote performance habits such as pattern running or reciting certain “licks” acquired from record- ings or study: “My success rate [at guessing their nationality] is usually quite good.” This suggests that a subtle form of localization, or glocaliza- tion, might be at work below an individual jazz musician’s threshold of conscious perception, whereby Mother Tongue language (or codes and conventions) influence improvised melodic construction. That is some- thing the Swedish composer and arranger Nils Lindberg discovered quite by chance after the release in 1960 of his first album, Sax Appeal, now re- garded as one of the classics of Swedish jazz. “When my first lp came out in 1960—it was for four saxes and rhythm section with among others Lars

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Gullin on baritone—it was a surprise to read my music had this Swedish touch,” he recalled. “It was there from the beginning, I didn’t realise it, it was only when people told me . . . I thought my arrangements were Amer- ican jazz, West Coast style!”93 _{Here, it is again interesting to refer to the}