Waking up to a new world of jazz

It's official - jazz has left the nest, and Europe has become its creative home. And how has the US responded? By wallowing in nostalgia for the tourists, writes Stuart Nicholson.

You could be forgiven for not noticing. There has been no fanfare in the media, no celebratory concert in London's Hyde Park and no souvenir DVDs. But for a while now, an important piece of music history has been in the making. In fact, the unthinkable has been happening. The centre of jazz has failed to hold, and has shifted. Almost without anybody really noticing, the main creative thrust of jazz, once dubbed "America's classical music", is now no longer coming from the United States, but from Europe.

No doubt the ideologues, who believe the only authentic form of jazz is American, will contest such claims. But most people realise jazz is an art form, and art forms don't respect lines drawn on maps. And because jazz's birth coincided with the recording boom after the first World War, it was, almost from its inception, a harbinger of what we now call globalisation.

Almost from the beginning, jazz recordings were passing unhindered through national borders and political and social barriers. It meant that as each "style" of jazz emerged in America, it could be heard months later being imitated by local musicians in London, Paris, and Rome. The classic hegemonic styles - in this context hegemony means the rules of the game by which others routinely play - such as swing, bebop, free and jazz-rock were echoing around the world almost as soon as the latest recording appeared in the US.

Europe, for example, was soon producing jazz musicians - such as George Shearing, Victor Feldman, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Joe Zawinul, Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen - whose mastery of the classic hegemonic styles was good enough to perform alongside the great American jazz masters. But with the globalisation of jazz, it also took on distinctly local, or "glocal," characteristics that separated it from its "birthplace". There are now jazz styles that have evolved outside US borders and which do not necessarily follow the way jazz is played in the US.

In these examples, jazz behaves as a lingua franca in the same way that the English language does, which, as Mary Louise Pratt, former director of the Modern Language Association of America, points out, "break[ s] apart into local hybrids". This process of hybridisation, a bi-product of globalisation, produces local, or "glocalised" jazz dialects, which, like varieties of English, often have no precise counterpart in America at all.

These jazz styles use the basic syntax of the classic and contemporary hegemonic American jazz styles that have been widely disseminated around the world (globalisation), but have been reinscribed with local significance (glocalisation). Glocalisation can involve incorporating elements such as national imagery, folkloric, classical and cultural concerns that give the music relevance to its "local" musical community.

As the 21st century develops, we will see the increasing "glocalisation" of jazz, just as we will see the growing use of English. Mary Louise Pratt's observation that, "the future of English, like that of any lingua franca, does not belong to its native speakers", has a strong resonance in jazz.

These exciting global developments are in stark contrast to the American jazz scene, where young jazz musicians have increasingly become preoccupied with "the jazz tradition" and recreating jazz's glory days. You only have to go to New York, the self proclaimed "jazz capital of the world" to see the effects of this.

Manhattan's oldest jazz club, the Village Vanguard, is open seven nights a week and features bands playing in the hard bop style for crowds of Japanese tourists. Hard bop is a style of jazz that was popular 50 years ago. In midtown Manhattan, despite the a-la-carte menu at the swanky Iridium jazz club, you'll find the choice of jazz extremely limited - hard bop. Go to Smalls on West 10th, the Smoke on Broadway at 160th, St Nick's Pub, Birdland and the Blue Note and it's the same old story. The style of music remains the same, only the faces change.

In Europe, audiences are becoming increasingly bored with American retro jazz. They have been turning to what they believe is a more adventurous home-grown product whereby the hegemonic styles of American jazz have been claimed by European musicians and re-spun in distinctly Euro ways, be it by the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the French, the Italians and yes, even the Finns.

"Ten years ago a number of American artists would sell very well. All of a sudden you can't sell any tickets any more because the audiences have passed on to something else," says Bo Grønningsäeter, former director of the Molde Jazz Festival and the Nattjazz Festival and currently director of the West Norway Jazz Center. "They want to listen to newer and fresher material than the post-bop orientated stuff, playing the standards and recreating jazz of the 1960s."

In Europe, where most countries have some form of governmental support, a thriving scene has been developed over the past 30 years. It has meant that, as a major feature in the New York Times headlined, "For US Jazz Players, Europe Is the Place to Be". The feature went on to say that "[ an American] musician, especially one with a following in Europe, can earn up to 80 per cent of his annual income during a summer tour. It is not unusual for a headliner to make $100,000 or more in a month of concerts."

Now that is all at risk, because European jazz musicians, less obsessed with the "jazz tradition," are mixing and matching jazz with elements from their own culture to produce highly innovative and dynamic versions of Euro jazz that audiences are buying into.

So what impact will this buoyant European scene have on American jazz, if any? Initially the effect is going to be felt financially. Money, as Cyndi Lauper once famously sang, changes everything. Europe has historically been a key market for American jazz in album sales, its extensive festival circuit and year-round gigs. But already European musicians are moving into the space once occupied by American musicians. It poses the question of whether American jazz can survive in a country where the culture is overwhelmingly popular culture and where jazz is in danger of sliding into high-art marginality.

Walt Whitman heard America singing in all its variety, and each voice singing what belonged to that individual and no one else. In Europe, a jazz world is singing in just such a way. With American jazz's preoccupation with its past has come a failure to acknowledge the music had become so big it has outgrown its country of birth, and that its stewardship is no longer an exclusive American preserve. This is not to say the flame of American jazz has completely burnt itself out. It hasn't. There are far too many accomplished musicians there for that. It is just that recapitulation has largely replaced innovation.

The glocalised jazz voices of Europe are pointing the way to the future: the Nordic cool of Esbjorn Svensson or Tord Gustavsen; the Mediterranean flourishes of the Italian Gianluigi Trovesi; the Gallic magic of Louis Sclavis or the Cartarini ensemble; the manic Dutch humour of Yuri Honing or Michiel Bortslap; the post-punk energy of Brit bands such as Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear and the suave touches of Irish magic in the music of Ronan Guilfoyle. Vive la différence!