What We Can Say about Diasporic Jazz and the People it (Might) Represent

Analysing jazz and categorizing people both verge on futility. And yet, both endeavours remain, on some rudimentary level, useful. Tracing the development of jazz around diasporic communities combines the impossible tasks, bluntly displaying the enigma of jazz and the nuances of the communities it has formed around. 

Jazz has morphed and developed -- not exclusively -- around global diasporic communities, including the Roma, Jewish, and African American populations. Like their music, their communities have been forced to adapt under other influences while preserving their own cultural identity. The correlations that do exist between jazz’s development and the survival of diasporic communities illuminate what can legitimately be said about both. 

Many jazz artists welcome the musical cross-pollination across cultural communities. Django Reinhardt (1910-1953), for example, combined his French and Romani backgrounds with his exposure to American Jazz to create a new subgenre, Manouche Jazz (listen to “Minor Swing” in Djangologie Vol6/1937). Amsterdam Klezmer Band (AKB) blends Yiddish, klezmer, and European Romani Music, intentionally leaning into jazz’s eccentricities (listen to “Katakofti"). Perhaps the sheer range of John Zorn’s (1953 --) jazz output best illustrates jazz’s bottomless capacity to morph. These artists acknowledge that influence between jazz and other genres is mutual, and they tip their hats to the common phrase, “jazz was invented in the course of its dissemination” (Havas, The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora, 55).  

Diasporic jazz gives and takes among neighbouring genres for many reasons. If jazz’s hybridity is integral to the jazz genre, then jazz’s hybridity also signals authenticity. So, to survive as a genre, jazz resists categorization. But, this musical fusion, occurring so naturally among diasporic communities, often perpetuates a stereotype associating jazz with uprooted communities. Some bands, such as AKB, lean into this stereotype to produce an ever morphing and globalized product of music keeping the tradition and market alive (Silverman 169). To curate a brand of jazz that sells and survives as a genre, AKB draws purposefully from Balkan, Klezmer, and European Romani music. The band’s trombonist, Joop Van der Linden, says that their music style is defined less by its conventions and more by its “tradition of innovation…essential to klezmer” (166). And he emphasizes the commercial side of innovation, saying that they do what “sells” (166). The jazz’s adaptability and the musician’s livelihoods are co-dependant. 

However, jazz artists hotly contest this adaptive approach, especially when the development of the jazz style is said to be representative of the cultural and ethnic identity of the artists themselves. Some, such as Hersch, say there is no pure jazz to preserve but that each diasporic jazz musician must enact his own diaspora: “members cultivated personalized versions of Jewish identity that rejected a static and unitary Jewish tradition, embodying instead their own complex and changing relationship to traditional practices and beliefs.” Of Jewish descent, John Zorn’s experimental jazz questions all previous, limiting categories of music, genre, and ethnicity, suggesting the only inherent quality of jazz (and, he implies, his ethnic heritage) is its capacity to morph, incorporate, and adapt. Bernstein, who combines American jazz with Jewish music, writes that “to play ‘pure’ Jewish music…or define himself as "Jewish musician" would be to oversimplify his identity and impede its evolution, because "my identity hadn't been defined yet"; it is unfinalizable.” He ties his evolving American-Jewish identity to diaspora: "[t]hat's really the concept of diaspora; it's going forward to other places and taking the tradition with you." For Bernstein, his music resembles his own diasporic experience. 

To claim that jazz is both essentially representative of a culture and adaptive among cultures blurs the boundaries of the jazz genre and the ethnic groups. Thus, those wanting jazz to represent a distinct ethnic heritage fight to preserve a specific form of jazz that best expresses their cultural and ethnic journey. For example, in contrast to the AKB and John Zorn, The Other Europeans attempt to preserve the distinctions between Klezmer and Roma styles in their jazz albums to identify (and not be identified by) other influences. Silverman points out that while more open-handed jazz artists gain traction among jazz enthusiasts, The Other Europeans struggle to find performance opportunities (173). Regardless of the cultures represented, it seems that jazz must continually improvise, even on the level of genre, to survive. 

Thus, as long as jazz continues to morph, adapt, and thus survive, the ability to draw neat conclusions about the heritage of the people represented will diminish. Although there is a clear correlation between the development of jazz and the histories of diasporic communities, the study of people through the study of their jazz resists providing concrete conclusions. In his book, Theology, Music and Time, Begbie writes, “links between musical practices and wider socio-cultural realities will be traced. However, it needs to be said that the links are often extremely hard to trace with any precision… Furthermore, it is wise to resist a social reductionism which would seek to account for music exclusively in terms of socio-cultural determinants, or which would forget that various kinds of music may be socially and culturally conditioned to different degrees” (14). Similarly, Johnson, in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies writes that the diaspora model of jazz history implies jazz flows from a single source, which is “deeply misleading… to recognize this is to open the door to radically new jazz narratives” (13). Sometimes, our common methods of research are ill-equipped to decipher certain phenomena, such as the enigma of jazz and the nuance of diasporic histories. It is at these roadblocks that an appropriate sense of academic reservation does more justice to the nuance of the issue at hand than forcing the dissonance to resolve. 

Despite the lack of clear causal relationships between the origins of jazz and histories of diasporic communities, diasporic communities have used jazz to express their own experience of displacement, capitalize off of the perceived similarities, or even to try and correct popular misconceptions. Although jazz may not articulate the nuance of the histories of each diasporic people group, jazz nevertheless honours the nuance by not trying. Instead, jazz remains a morphing interface between cultures, encapsulating what life is like, what life is – something more complicated and improvised than we are at times content to admit.  

Image courtesy of Irfansevket2905 via Wikimedia, ©2016. Some rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.