Global village
Stuart Nicholson
Almost without anybody noticing, the London Jazz Festival, which opens on 11 November and continues full pelt until 20 November, has grown in stature and significance. It’s now over a decade since the first festival, and it’s a fair bet that during the hand-to-mouth existence of its early incarnations even the most optimistic crystal-ball gazing by the organisers would never have envisaged the size of today’s festival or that it would be picking up sobriquets like ‘a major cultural event’ or ‘London’s widest-ranging music festival’. This year, ticket sales are expected to exceed 50,000 and, through the festival’s association with Radio Three, it is anticipated that almost 2 million will tune into concerts broadcast on Radios Two, Three and Four, BBC4 and the BBC website.
Yet the growth of the festival has not taken place in a vacuum. It has to be seen against a gradual raising of jazz’s profile in recent years, in which the festival itself has played no small part, and an interest in the music among younger audiences. It recently prompted the distinguished classical music critic Fiona Maddocks to observe that we are witnessing ‘a seismic change in British musical life: jazz is everywhere’.
Today, more young people than ever before are participating in jazz at all levels of education. In 1999, the Associated Board launched the first national jazz examinations for piano and ensemble, defining a set of standards for the early stages of learning jazz between Grades One to Five. It was followed two years ago by the syllabus for trumpet, trombone, saxophones and clarinet (also Grades One to Five). Opportunities to learn jazz have not been so plentiful since the National Curriculum included improvisation in primary musical education, introducing pupils to rudimentary improvisation at Key Stages One and Two. At Key Stage Three, the National Curriculum requires that jazz be part of general music education. Thousands of teachers have attended Associated Board workshops around the country, which now means the average music teacher can introduce young people to jazz. For students who want to pursue jazz at higher-education level there is no shortage of universities offering jazz, and, as Fiona Maddocks pointed out, during the past three years applications to jazz courses at London music colleges have risen by 20 per cent.
But as jazz moves slowly and inexorably up the cultural agenda there are some who see this as simply another manifestation of the cultural imperialism thesis, with jazz another example of Americanism being thrust down our throats. Yet, while jazz originated in the bordellos, speakeasies and nightclubs of the United States, it very quickly moved out into the world at large. In fact, jazz was a harbinger of what we now call globalisation, because the birth of the music in the early years of the 20th century coincided with the rise of a record industry that was global in scope, ensuring that almost from its inception jazz had a worldwide audience. It’s meant the emergence of jazz styles from outside the borders of the United States that use the basic syntax of the classic American styles that have been disseminated around the world (the globalisation process), but have been reinscribed with local significance (the glocalisation process).
This cross-fertilisation of local culture, custom and practices with American jazz has produced a wide variety of jazz styles with quite distinct ‘glocal’ characteristics. Jazz in the United Kingdom, for example, had broadly followed the hegemonic American styles until the 1960s. Pianist and educator Michael Garrick, an important voice on the London scene during that decade, making several key albums such as Troppo and The Heart Is a Lotus, notes that, ‘The 1960s saw an upsurge of originality in British jazz. All the wonders that the great American prototypes so gloriously exhibited were no longer enough. What began to surface and receive delighted attention were those doing something fresh and home-grown.’ These ‘homegrown’ dialects of glocalised jazz are primarily a response to identity from musicians who want to play jazz but don’t want to sound ‘American’ and so bring elements of their own culture into the music. Not for nothing is Michael Garrick’s orchestra, which appears in the London Jazz Festival on 13 November, called Mike Garrick’s Jazz Britannia Big Band. Today, it is these glocal jazz voices, particularly from Europe, that are reinvigorating the music with a new vitality. It’s meant the classic American styles from the likes of McCoy Tyner (14th) and Branford Marsalis (15th, 16th) now sound a bit old hat.
In fact, it is the ‘glocalised’ jazz sounds that provide the festival with its colour and diversity — be it the Norwegian cool of Tord Gustavsen (11th), the shimmering Mediterranean flavours of the Italian Instabile Orchestra (12th) or the panstylistic Courtney Pine (19th). And while the Maria Schneider Orchestra provide an exemplary example of the American way of doing things (16th), hers is just one more voice in the global jazz village. Walt Whitman heard America singing in all its variety, each voice singing what belonged to that individual and no one else. Outside America, a jazz world is singing in just such a way and pointing the way to the future. The globalisation of the music has meant that, in being played by everyone, jazz today is ‘owned’ by no one.
Stuart Nicholson's new book Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved to a New Address)? (Routledge, New York) is available through all leading internet booksellers (£10).
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