Remixing European Jazz Culture

Kristin McGee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429999284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias europeas

Remixing European Jazz Culture examines a jazz culture that emerged in the 1990s in cosmopolitan cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, London, and Oslo – energised by the introduction of studio technologies into the live performance space, which has since developed into internationally recognised, eclectic, hybrid jazz styles. This book explores these oft-overlooked musicians and their forms that have nonetheless expanded the plane of jazz's continued prosperity, popularity, and revitalisation in the twenty-first century – one where remix is no longer the sole domain of studio producers.

Seeking to update the orthodoxies of the field of jazz studies, Remixing European Jazz Culture:

• 
  
  

• incorporates electronic and digital performance, recording, and distribution practices that have transformed the culture since the 1980s;
• provides a more diverse and multifaceted cultural representation of European jazz and the contributions of a variety of performers; and
• offers an encompassing picture of the depth of jazz practice that has erupted through Northern Europe since 1989.

With an expansion of international networks and a disintegration of artistic boundaries, the collaborative, performative, and real-time improvisational process of remixing has stimulated a merging of the music's past and present within European jazz culture.

1

JAZZ IN POST-WAR EUROPE

From Free Collectives to Electronic Jazz

This chapter prefaces the subsequent chapters, offering an overview of critical elements of European jazz culture following the Second World War, especially those developing following the free, collective networks of the 1960s and 1970s. Phenomena addressed include the expansion of transnational record labels, popular music’s role for stimulating crossover jazz movements, the influence of new technologies and media practices such as DJing within electronic jazz, online jazz zines, and the role of compilation albums for emerging artists. Additionally, interactive dance culture and new audiovisual contexts, from niche festivals to videos for expanding networks, will be treated, along with new modes of visibility within remixed European jazz cultures.

Relatively few jazz scholars have seriously examined contemporary European jazz. While ‘polygeneric’ (those inheriting multiple socio-cultural and musical genes) jazz projects have proliferated throughout Europe since the 1990s, most coverage has occurred within the field of music journalism. One example is music critic and historian Stuart Nicholson, in his book Is Jazz Dead?: Or Has It Moved to a New Address (2005), arguing that America’s previously dominant cultural position and contemporary cultural significance demanded reconsideration. In his now well-cited thesis, Nicholson claimed that during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the most innovative jazz was produced not in the US, but in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. Within particular cities and scenes, he posited the emergence of a ‘glocalised jazz dialect’, noting especially electronic and folk music collaborations within European jazz contexts, most notably artists and labels such as the Munich-based ECM label, which first supported Jan Garbarek’s 1960s and 1970s ‘ethnic-jazz’ recordings.

From the productive intermingling of European folk, popular, and jazz styles, Nicholson witnessed a meaningful and engaged jazz culture stimulated by the national funding of jazz, and engendered by an open approach towards education and experimentation. Notably in Scandinavia, the combination of jazz funding and infrastructure, alongside the desire to develop a local jazz culture, cultivated what ECM’s Manfred Eicher referred to as the ‘Nordic Tone’, a phrase quickly adopted by the jazz press to distinguish Northern European jazz from other regional styles. Here, jazz artists eagerly embraced new technologies such as sampling and sound manipulation within both live performance spaces and digital recording studios. Some more advanced technologically mediated European electronic jazz projects positioned themselves as bold criticisms and reactions to the growing conservatism of American jazz during the 1980s (Nicholson 2005, 208). Furthermore, by 2000 such genre-fusing recordings were influencing jazz artists in the US, reversing the perceived one-directional process of influence. Herbie Hancock, for example, studied the tracks of Norwegian electronic jazz trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær for his crossover, hip hop-influenced jazz and funk recordings of the early 2000s (Hancock’s Future2Future from 2001). This process of influence and interaction, Nicholson argued, proved essential for new forms of mobility and creativity, when he claimed in 2005: “Where once the dynamic for this change and evolution in jazz came from within America, it is now shifting to these glocal communities around the world” (Nicholson 2005, 222). Nicholson thus, like Gebhardt and others, demanded a global or transnational recognition of jazz and its transformation within the New Europe.

Europe’s Free and Collectivising Jazz of the 1970s and 1980s

Parallel to Nicholson’s European exceptionalism, in his book Northern Sun Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz (2005), Mike Heffley focused especially on avant-garde and political jazz activities within Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period, a general shift from the American star system to the European collective marked much of Europe’s free-jazz movement, whilst most non-conformist jazz activities remained tied to state-sponsored finance. Contrary to Nicholson’s positive review of Scandinavian jazz support, European jazz often failed to acquire the generous subsidies given to European art music organisations, including national orchestras and opera companies. As Heffley remarks: “A grassroots network of activist fans and musicians has been the main international and local support of the music since the beginning” (Heffley 2005, 91). Unlike earlier movements in America, where jazz’s concertisation transpired in part due to influential jazz promoters such as Norman Granz, or through the support of civic organisations like the NAACP, new jazz movements in Europe relied upon a combination of subsidised individual artist collectives, and independent entrepreneurs, festival organisers, and transnationally oriented record labels willing to support individual jazz artists and new aesthetic movements (Bakriges 2007).

In addition to independent jazz labels like Munich’s ECM and Enja (which stood for European New Jazz), music festivals increasingly played a pivotal role in sustaining jazz musicians’ careers (McGee 2016; Webster and McKay 2016). These ranged from large-scale pop music festivals such as Sziget to the prestigious European jazz festivals such as the Netherlands North Sea Jazz Festival. They extended to the recently expanding smaller vintage jazz festivals, jazz clubs, and series such as the Vintage Reboot events in Paris. Such festivals provided important sites for the middle-layer of polygeneric jazz performers and their promotion of electronic jazz recordings or reconfigured projects in the neoliberal era.

In the Netherlands, certain expressionistic jazz networks and collectives emerged alongside artistic and semi-political movements such as the Provo or Fluxus movements (Whyton and Gebhardt 2015). The Instant Composers Pool was perhaps the first broadly organised Dutch jazz collective to actively engage, record, and program the works of contemporary improvisers and performers (Rusch 2015; Schuiling 2019), founded in 1967 by avant-garde saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and drummer Han Bennink. Both Bennick and Mengelberg had played and recorded with Eric Dolphy in Hilversum in 1964 for his final recording, Last Date, before his death in Berlin (Rusch 2015, 45). This organisation evolved into one of the Netherlands’ most influential umbrella organisations for a variety of jazz events including combinations of classical, free, and theatrical works regarding improvised jazz (Heffley 2005; Rusch 2015; Schuiling 2019).

In 1973, the organisation split twofold; the Kollectief led by Breuker, and the ICP independently led by Mengelberg (Rusch 2015). The Kollectief gained a reputation for ironic, humorous, and experimental improvised works, later connected to similar free jazz experiments throughout Europe during the late 1960s and 1970s (Heffley 2005, 63–116). Both Bennink’s projects and Breuker’s Kollektief were responsible for international collaborations with European jazz and art music composers, and additionally American free jazz players including Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Eric Dolphy. They were also inspired by musical explorations in tonality, including compositional and performance structures from surrealism, drawing from the philosophical and sociological explorations of John Cage and the Fluxus movement (Whitehead 1998). Furthermore, these organisations profoundly increased awareness of Dutch and European jazz more broadly, helping invite government support through Dutch institutions such as the BIM (The Union of Improvising Musicians, 1971), SJIN (Stichting Jazz en Geimproviseerde Muziek Nederland, Association of Jazz and Improvised Music in the Netherlands) and STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) (Heffley 2005, 78). The Dutch free jazz movement has since been stereotyped and even belittled for its ironic and theatrical detachment from serious or spiritual explorations (Whitehead 1998). However, such European movements emerged as self-conscious alternatives to the star system and the popular music driven by the Anglo-American music industry in the 1960s and 1970s. For Heffley and others, these groups “shared with other Dutch initiatives and voices an ethic of offering an alternative popular music to counter that of commercial mass culture” (Heffley 2005, 79). His term “emanzipation” recalls social protest, media expansion, and student activism characterising the late 1960s and 1970s. Such musical explorations, free jazz, and outdoor music festivals provided the most palatable forum for expressing a modern resistance and reluctance to eager adoption of the American music industry’s commercialism and capitalism.

Whyton and Gebhardt’s recent publication The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This is Our Music (2015) provides further evidence of the role performed by processes of music collectivism, leading up to and within New Europe. Illustratively, Arvidsson and Adolfsson’s chapter on the Swedish music collective Ett Minne för Livet (A Lifetime Memory) explores the role of the musical performance style during countercultural political dissent, as well as resistance to mainstream American musical styles. Their examination of a 1975 broadcast concert revealed how this collective’s integration of folk, jazz, and rock styles relevant for Swedish culture in the mid-1970s facilitated a means of departing from Anglo-American popular music and the modernist art tradition, while critiquing the decolonisation processes of the 1950s and 1960s. They argue that this initiative led to more autonomous musical spaces and practices after the 1970s (Arvidsson and Adolfsson 2015).

Also in this edition, Christa Bruckner-Haring and Michael Kahr (2015) examined varieties of contemporary Austrian jazz forged from the JazzWerkstatt collectives in Vienna and Graz, which, in recent decades, led to the formation of an increasingly trans-cultural identity within their local jazz scenes. Similarly, Scott Currie examined the Freie Initiative Improvisation Berlin (FIIB) collective as something beyond a collective, rather a registered association of artists and impresarios. For Currie, this “collective organization and its festive manifestation played a central role in establishing and maintaining a presence for improvised music in Berlin”. Further, FIIB brought together musicians from the newly unified east and west of Berlin, offering “a common meeting ground that … held together … the fractious constituents of scenes otherwise divided by stylistic markers of generation and geography” (Currie 2015, 65). These recent free collectives directly mediated the transitional periods of unification or reorganisation characterising post-reunification cities in the 1990s and 2000s.

Similarly, Tim Wall and Simon Barber examined the Cowcob Collective’s role in Birmingham as a progressive transnational music endeavour. They revealed the complicated layers of jazz making within a range of spaces, genres, and institutions from the official cultural space of Symphony Hall to local festivals (Mostly Jazz, Funk & Soul Festival), through local jazz Arts Council funded platforms such as Jazzlines, and within local pubs promoting weekly jazz nights. These activities were uncovered as multifaceted approaches towards contemporary jazz practice (Wall and Barber 2015). Finally, Andrew Dubber explores the modern “associative vernacular mediation” practices of the Kitchen Orchestra’s Pulse Online multimedia project which took place in Stavanger, Norway in 2012, exploring not the place-specific character of contemporary jazz collectivism, but rather the affordances of specific media objects for particular modes of interaction and participation. Dubber reveals how, through online mediation, jazz audiences collaborated “rather than simply witnessed” performances within the Tou Scene (Dubber 2015, 223).

As evidenced from these studies, by the 1980s, some political reactions and insular aesthetic dogmatism of the earlier free collectives had given way to a new generation of musicians, exposed to a greater variety of transnational popular musics and performance networks. These were not merely the mass-mediated music industry’s top 40 hits, but world music, transnational jazz collectives, and field music recordings of smaller, but now digitally distributed record labels. With increased access to world musics, younger and often conservatory-trained European musicians sought other forums for improvising and engaging with jazz. This generation was less interested in rejecting Anglo-American mass-mediated musical styles, and some critics argued it lacked a collective political voice in relation to performance. Trends in popular music, and especially electronic dance music, prompted new engagements with youth culture which re-incorporated some of jazz music’s interactive, pre-war, and war-time proclivities such as dance and studio experimentation with soundscapes and textures, which reintroduced the aesthetics of groove into jazz-influenced spaces and recordings.

European Jazz in the Digital Era

Before digitalisation, the recording crisis necessitated new ways of financing music. During the 1970s and 1980s, less established and often younger jazz musicians developed techniques to engage with contemporary culture while simultaneously promoting their work. Musicians naturally sought to modernise jazz practice by connecting jazz performance aesthetics with contemporary popular music genres (Fellezs 2011). The commercial success of fusion, smooth, or crossover jazz artists led to an increase in jazz performers within major labels like Verve and Blue Note (McGee 2013). Parallel to this, during the 1980s and 1990s, other technologically experimental while less industrial forms of jazz began to feature in local clubs and electronic music festivals, reflecting both the ad hoc and ‘improvised’ interactivity of new music scenes. Especially prominent were those most impacted by popular styles driven by DJing networks; from these, new sonic techniques emerged, adopting sampling techniques and sound manipulation capabilities of electronic hardware. Within recording projects, the technical standards of earlier studio fusion and contemporary jazz projects gave way to projects highlighting the danceability and interactive aspects of live jazz. The outcome of such cross-fertilisations quickly gained currency via promoters and fans of these cosmopolitan club circuits as ‘acid jazz’. The appellation was attributed to early UK jazz dance and world music promoter and DJ Gilles Peterson, who had produced his own jazz dance series in London during the late 1980s and 1990s. He later promoted a variety of electronic and mixed-mediated jazz discs on his weekly BBC music programme, Worldwide. In the 1990s, Fiona Talkington too became an important early promoter of genre-fusing electronic jazz projects on her numerous radio programmes for BBC’s Radio 3.

Early acid jazz projects successfully negotiated the prior boundaries between popular music and jazz, and between dance, electronic, hip hop, and digital production technologies, new configurable genres which had radically altered the musical landscape. Since the 1990s, with the acid jazz boom in major urban centres throughout Europe, new styles of jazz continued to attract dancers and younger audiences exposed to a greater variety of audiovisual artists, including live jazz instrumentalists, but also turntablists, sample-based sound producers, dancers, VJs, and DJs.

According to Billboard, acid jazz scenes first emerged in the UK in the 1990s. The UK’s acid jazz scene spawned mainstream artists such as The Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai. Yet acid jazz was only the latest of a longer trajectory of DJed jazz-dance events throughout the UK since the late 1970s where jazz records, competitive dance crews, and the eruption of new fashions and lifestyles culminated around ‘rare jazz’ records, independent record shops, and post-industrial or sometimes disused holiday locations for immersive jazz dance activities. These ranged from jazz dance club nights, to ‘day-timers’ and ‘weekenders’, to designated radio programmes featuring jazz, soul, funk, and Latin music (Cotgrove 2009).

The proliferation of electronic jazz networks was not simply a European phenomenon but, by its very nature, attuned and connected to musical developments within cities throughout the world such as Jakarta (Maliq & D’Essentials), Rome (Jestofunk), and Kyoto (Kyoto Jazz Massive). Music industry journalist Martin Johnson linked the club scene of the 1990s to the mammoth success of mainstream crossover jazz influenced groups prior to 2000, including Beck, Us3, and the Fugees. He further credits mainstream crossover groups for negotiating a more prominent place for jazz in pop culture. Arguably, the role of jazz-influenced dance music and its growing popularity further stimulated multiple sub-genres, including styles such as trip hop, drum ‘n’ bass, and ambient groove in prominent jazz dance cities such as Manchester and London (Hesmondhalgh 2000). These sub-styles of electronic music provided important pathways for younger audiences to experience new currents in jazz. By the mid-1990s, the more local or regionally distributed acid jazz recordings of specialised jazz record stores moved online as these businesses failed to survive in the new digital environment. This was precipitated by the rise of digital distribution networks such as Napster, alongside the incorporation of mass-mediated crossover jazz styles by the majors who increasingly marketed compilations through larger distribution outlets or online (Johnson 1997, 18).

Interestingly, this decade marked the era of the compilation album for smaller record labels, a strategy taken as regional networks of independent record stores faltered. Independent jazz labels produced compilation records that highlighted complementary artists from local acid and crossover jazz scenes. Major and independent record companies reacted swiftly by releasing compilations of both crossover and acid jazz artists on more generic series such as Instinct’s This is Acid Jazz. Drawing on the long-tail distribution and reception model (Anderson 2004), these mixes curated current and past artists within compatible playlists of jazz, Black music, hip hop, and urban dance music intended to appeal to club goers, instrumental jazz fans, and urban music fans. Instinct, a British jazz label, released their own series featuring mixes of jazz and electronic projects from the UK’s many DJed jazz-dance clubs, within scenes which stimulated and depended upon the collaboration and promotion of local zines, event promoters, dance crews, independent record stores, and local band managers such as London’s DJ Patrick Forge and event planner and record label owner Eddie Piller (Cotgrove 2009, 237). Along with Gilles Peterson, Piller was instrumental in successfully distributing Acid Jazz Records, one of Britain’s first independent acid jazz labels (Cotgrove 2009, 239–240). Island’s 4th and B’way series Rebirth of the Cool highlighted more underground trip hop, jazz, and drum ‘n’ bass combinations in the 1990s. Other polygeneric jazz labels emerged outside of the UK including the German label Compost and their Future Sound of Jazz series, similarly promoting jazz and electronic beats projects. In the US, Blue Note’s The New Groove released an original collection of hip hop and classic jazz, apparently inspired by Us3’s success. Moreover, their Rare Groove series spawned a number of re-releases of older jazz artists including John Patton and Donald Byrd. Fantasy Records also licensed some of its catalogue to the San Francisco Bay Area label Luv N’ Haight, eventually initiating its own Legends of Acid Jazz series (Johnson 1997, 21).

By 2000, the internet facilitated numerous forums for dispersing new sounds and cementing new sub-genres related to dance musics, electronic soundscapes, and jazz instrumentals. Such online, digitally driven output sometimes led to cross-generational and mixed-mediated interactions in live music settings. Notably, British DJs and electronic producers such as Roni Size incorporated older jazz recordings in their sets a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Remixing European Jazz Culture – Historical Precedents, Methodological Approaches, and Theoretical Interventions
• 1 Jazz in Post-War Europe: From Free Collectives to Electronic Jazz
• 2 Wicked Jazz Sounds and Blue Note Trips: Dance Tourists and Musical Migrants in Amsterdam’s Crossover Jazz Scene
• 3 DJs and PLOs in Berlin’s Electronic Jazz Scene: The Hybrid Production Aesthetics of Jazzanova
• 4 Oslo’s Jazzland Recordings: Finding Home in a New Conception of Jazz
• 5 Part One: The ‘Revival of the Revival’ or a Swing Dance Continuum? Mediascapes, Time Machines, and Intercultural Encounters at the Herräng Dance Camp
• 5 Part Two: Jazz Records, Dance Media, and Survival Technologies within Herräng’s Professional Jazz Dance Network
• 6 Part One: Configuring Crisis and Sampling Swing in Vintage Festivals and Electro Swing
• 6 Part Two: (Re)Generating the Jazz Past in the Vintage Remix of Caravan Palace and Caro Emerald
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index