Identity crisis
Stuart Nicholson
The re-release of Europeana, an evanescent album by pianist Joachim Kühn and the Hanover Philharmonic Orchestra, once again raises the question of whether there is such a thing as European jazz. A seemingly straightforward question, but one to which, like so many questions in the world of jazz, there are no straightforward answers.
A European playing jazz does not always result in European jazz. While jazz may be a universal language, the dialect in which it is usually spoken is American. To break the mould poses problems of ‘authenticity’ — particularly for Americans to whom a music shaped by the Afro-American experience becomes less meaningful when played by non-Americans in a nonAmerican way.
This culturally imperialistic view was reflected in the ten-part television history Jazz by the American film-maker Ken Burns, screened by the BBC in June 2001. In it, the narrative of jazz history was set exclusively within the borders of the United States. It completely ignored how jazz has acquired other histories in other parts of the world such as Europe, which embraced the music as an engagement with modernity after the horrors of the Great War.
Today ‘European Jazz’ is a vast catch-all that includes ‘global’ American styles played à la mode by Europeans, and a variety of hybridised local — or ‘glocal’ approaches to the music. One way in which a ‘glocal’ response to jazz has been shaped is through the incorporation of local folkloric traditions into the music. This can be traced back to the American saxophonist Stan Getz’s 1951 recording of a traditional Swedish folksong called ‘Ack, Värmeland du Sköna’. It was subsequently recorded twice by Miles Davis as ‘Dear Old Stockholm’ and effectively gave the green light to local musicians to introduce ‘local’ folkloric elements into jazz.
In 1962 the Swedish trumpeter and arranger Bengt-Arne Wallin became a pioneer in combining folk and jazz with his album Old Folklore in Swedish Modern (now re-released by the ACT label). The album became a favourite of the record producer Siggi Loch and inspired the idea of a jazz album using folkloric themes from around Europe arranged for symphony orchestra and jazz soloists. The result was Europeana, but although the album was originally released in 1995 the suite had never been performed in public until 10 September this year, when Europeana had its world première in Hamburg’s Laeizhalle with the NDR Pops Orchestra conducted by Jörg Achim Keller, the jazz soloists Joachim Kühn, Nils Landgren, Klaus Doldinger, Markus Stockhausen, Christof Lauer, Lars Danielsson and vocalist Viktoria Tolstoy.
It was a stunning event. The arranger Michael Gibbs’s orchestrations sounded fresh and dynamic while each soloist seemed to rise to the occasion with performances of profundity and joy that perfectly matched the music’s intention. After the concert, the Norwegian trombonist Nils Landgren said, ‘It says a lot about European jazz that we can take our own music and mix it with jazz. If we were to ask Bengt-Arne [Wallin] about it today, I feel sure he would say that back in 1962 when he did Old Folklore in Swedish Modern it gave European musicians a chance of finding their own identity by using music from their own culture, which was not the case before because everybody was trying to imitate as best they could the American way of playing jazz.’ In a concert that was never short of high spots, a memorable moment was provided by Viktoria Tolstoy, whose vocal on ‘Ack, Värmeland du Sköna’ was nothing short of inspirational. With it the wheel seemed to turn full circle, from the realisation in 1951 that jazz could be enriched from ‘local’ sources outside the United States to Tolstoy’s vocal, which was a triumphant celebration of what has become the distinctive European approach to jazz. ‘Folk music defines us, gives us a sense of identity,’ she said. ‘Every country has its own style, energy and tone language, I really think it is a big part of our identity as Europeans. Jazz in Europe is very much alive, it comes through more and more now, it is important we don’t hide in the music where we come from. From my perspective European jazz is now more in the air than American jazz, that’s my opinion.’
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