Just as the globalization of American jazz can be claimed a worldwide phenome- non, so too is the glocalization of jazz, which is “producing” unique outcomes in different geographic areas. In these instances, local jazz musicians seek to create original music that is both part of a universal language of jazz and a singular ex- pression of identity (often cultural identity). Beyond the borders of the United States, the transformations brought about by glocalization occurred gradually, since initially most local musicians struggled to keep abreast of successive shocks announcing the new emanating from America following the decline of the big bands circa 1945: bebop was followed by hard bop and cool jazz, which was fol- lowed by free jazz and modal jazz, and so on. It was not until the 1960s that the most significant developments in glocalization occurred, given impetus in part by America’s unpopular Vietnam campaign, which prompted widespread protest, including significant unrest within America itself. While Europeans had embraced American-style consumer culture and the improving lifestyle that accompanied it—the rise of the motorcar, the easy availability of white goods, the popularity of fast foods, easy access to movies, television culture, and the rest—as well as American social attitudes absorbed through film, theater, television programs, and literature, Vietnam prompted a lively debate about the extent and nature of the national soul, causing many to openly question American values, including many young jazz musicians. For example, in the United Kingdom the British Li- brary website noted:
By the early ’60’s, jazz was considered part of the mainstream American es- tablishment, to the extent that it was being actively used by Washington to promote us interests and culture abroad. America’s aggressive pursuit of an im- perialistic and anti-communist agenda in both Vietnam and Cold War Europe increasingly alienated the anti-establishment subculture that was blooming in Britain in this period. Musicians such as sme (Spontaneous Music Ensemble) [which included drummer John Stevens and saxophonist Trevor Watts] and amm [which included Keith Rowe on guitar, Lou Gare on saxophone, and Eddie Prévost on drums] began exploring ways to separate jazz from its American role model, taking inspiration instead from European influences, such as the avant-garde experiments of Stockhausen.127
Recalling these times in a 2002 interview, saxophonist Trevor Watts of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble recalled: “In the ’60s we reacted against the jazz music scene here, and the fact that you were compelled to play jazz like an Amer- ican or not at all. So the music of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble came about from the fact that we didn’t want to dote on American jazz, but take the spirit of that music for ourselves, and move things along in the way we wanted. Quite a
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novel idea in 1964!”128 The year before, on the tenth anniversary of his big band, the doyen of British jazz, bandleader, composer, arranger, and alto saxophonist Johnny Dankworth was interviewed by the British Melody Maker magazine. Under the headline “Our Jazz Is British!” he said: “I think there has not been a positive enough attempt by the [British] musicians to grit their teeth and say, ‘We will have a British style,’ and do something about it. One shouldn’t say, ‘I’m going to make this sound like an American.’ It has been proved we can produce records that do sound American. To me it should be the exact opposite.”129
For bandleader Mike Westbrook, who in 1969 topped the “Arranger” category in the Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition section of the 1969 Downbeat Inter- national Jazz Critics’ Poll, the 1960s was a period when “the American influence remained strong,” and “[one had] to be very strong in one’s convictions to ques- tion the American orthodoxy and to work on developing an independent voice. I had a sextet and occasional big band to write for throughout the ’60s and was lucky to have a platform at [Ronnie Scott’s] ‘Old Place.’ I started to write extended compositions, including an anti-war piece, Marching Song.”130 Ambitious, critically acclaimed, and spread over two twelve-inch long-playing recordings, Marching
Song was just one of several classics of British jazz Westbrook recorded during
this period with his big band that also included Celebration, Release, Metropo-
lis, and Citadel/Room 315, prompting trumpeter Ian Carr to write: “This body of
work, probably more than anything else, was responsible for the emancipation of British jazz from American slavery.”131 Equally, for pianist Michael Garrick, whose own ensembles created several classics of British jazz during this period, such as
October Woman, Promises, Black Marigolds, The Heart Is a Lotus, Cold Mountain, Home Stretch Blues, and Troppo, British jazz seemed to be undergoing a process of
self-discovery: “The 1960s saw an upsurge of originality in British jazz,” Garrick re- flected in 2002. “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.”132 In 2010, Gar- rick published his autobiography, which he called Dusk Fire: Jazz in English Hands. Trevor Bannister, writing the book’s introduction, said: “In the twentieth century British jazz was that played by British musicians putting the American ethos be- fore everything else. By contrast English jazz emerged with the culture and histor- ical heritage of England foremost in mind. Michael Garrick was arguably the first to give expression to it.”133
Vocalist Norma Winstone was a member of Garrick’s ensemble on such clas- sics as Troppo and Home Stretch Blues before establishing herself as one of the great vocalists in jazz.
Michael Garrick gave me some songs he had written and I learned them, and I sat in with his sextet and sang one or two of them, and I realised after I had sung these songs, which I had never heard anybody sing before, written by
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an Englishman, that I didn’t use an American accent. And when I sang stan- dards again, when I came to one of the words—that either was “da-r-nce” or “da-e-nse”—I pulled up short and realised I had found out something about myself. The way I sang. I realised I felt uncomfortable singing in an American accent—even singing standards. I worked in the 1970s with—shall I say—a lot of original voices in jazz in England, they were trying to do their own thing that felt right to sound English and not be so influenced by the Americans. Of course, when it comes to language it’s fairly obvious if you are putting on an American accent. I mean, Cleo Laine doesn’t, she sings with an English accent, and I started to do it, and if that is one way I have retained an “Englishness,” I don’t know, but fine!134
In Holland, up until the 1960s, as pianist Jasper van’t Hof told the daily news- paper Ahlener Zeitung, “Most Dutch players were focussed on the usa. Real jazz in their ears had to come from there. Whatever happened in Germany, Belgium, France, Poland was largely ignored. What a pity.”135 The rising protest across Eu- rope against the Vietnam War saw several Dutch free jazz musicians embracing political issues, participating in a series of concerts dubbed Musicians for Vietnam, while others sought to remove American influences completely from their music. One such was German bassist Peter Kowald, who called his music “Kaput-play.” Jazz musicians in Sweden were also questioning their country’s willing embrace of American values and influence following the Vietnamese conflict, which prompted lively debate around Swedish nationalism and the national soul.
Jan Johansson, one of Sweden’s foremost jazz musicians, was saxophonist Stan Getz’s pianist of choice when he lived in Sweden and then Denmark (1958–60). As a member of Getz’s quartet, Johansson became the only European jazz musician to appear on Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic concert program. Playing in a blues influenced, hard-swinging style favored by the saxophonist, Johansson can be heard on albums such as Stan Getz at Nalen (November 1959) and Stan
Getz at Large featuring Jan Johansson (January 1960), which reveal him perform-
ing in an accomplished, driving post-bop style. Equally on the album Don Byas at
Nalen we hear signs of artistic growth in his mastery of what might be called a
straight-ahead American style. It is especially interesting, therefore, to compare his often extrovert playing with Byas, recorded on February 5, 1962, to his playing on his own recording session a matter of days later, on February 28, 1962. This was one of three sessions that produced Jazz pår Svenska, an album comprising jazz versions of Swedish folk tunes from Svenska Låtar, the huge collection of Swedish national folk tunes. Here Johansson is the model of restraint, and with just Georg Riedel on bass, he allows the melodies to speak for themselves with sparing em- bellishment and understated improvisations that are at one with the mood of the album: one Swedish journalist described it as “a rural symbol of security in
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a Sweden which in the ’60s was marching towards anonymous, big-city wilder- nesses.”136 Described as a “visionary statement,” Jazz pår Svenska was in tune with the national mood following the debate surrounding Swedish nationalism and remains the best- selling jazz album in Sweden to this day, a striking example of a
local musician playing jazz that makes sense of his own local musical surroundings
with immediate relevance to his own local musical community.
In South Africa, Township Jazz emerged as a recognizable glocal variation of American jazz that evolved out of marabi, the oral tradition of African songs adapted by South African jazz instrumentalists. This early musical confluence of the global (that had been copied from American jazz records) and the local was originally called marabi, but by the 1940s, brass instruments had the effect of mod- ernizing marabi as much as the influence of the bebop musicians in the 1950s. As guitarist General Duze recalled: “Marabi came from Natal,” he said. “We enjoyed playing their stuff, but we changed it because of the orchestration thing. To them it was just a line of melody and improvisation thereafter. But it did add something to jazz, because many people had started with . . . [and] enjoyed marabi. So they could pick up the music from there, and then we played the instrumental version of the same thing.”137 Danceband Highlife music, often referred to as Highlife, emerged in Ghana and spread to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and other West African countries including South Africa prior to World War II. Inspired by the American big band recordings and their question and answer riffs, Highlife was typically played over a rhythm similar to the clave in which electric guitars and local per- cussion played a vital rhythmic role. In an example of how cultural flows can move in different directions (as opposed to those who see globalization as a unitary process “from the West to the rest”), American jazz musicians that have recorded examples of Highlife music have included Pharaoh Sanders, Randy Weston, Sonny Sharock, Wayne Shorter, and Craig Harris, while the Highlife style was featured by the Danish band Pierre Dorge and his Jungle Orchestra.
In Brazil, Acácio de Camargo Piedade, professor of music at the State Uni- versity of Santa Catarina, points out that “Brazilian jazz [was] born within the instrumental world of bossa nova and involves from the outset . . . [a] friction of musicalities”—Brazilian and North American jazz musicalities.138 Once again it is important to emphasize that glocal jazz does not emerge from some hermetically sealed forum, developed in isolation from American jazz, but from direct interface with it, a point emphasized by Piedade. He describes how Brazilian musicians see the bebop paradigm as “both valuable and fearsome,” since it “demonstrates tech- nical know-how and mastery of the jazz language, which symbolically is a passport to global communicability, but at the same time it teleologically points to the need for dissolving bebop itself and expressing what distinguishes it from Brazil- ian jazz, that which is nearer to the root of Brazilian musicality.”139 In order to do that, Brazilian musicians found it necessary to deconstruct the bebop paradigm in
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a creative process that embodies the global and the local: “When a [local] soloist has free space for expression,” writes Piedade, “there are moments when he gives himself frankly to bebop, seeking the weight of the jazz tradition that gives him legitimacy and confers on him the symbolic status of global improviser; but at the same time he tries to express something more Brazilian, making use of traits of other [local] Brazilian music genres, such as chorinho.”140 Piedade points out that the localization—or glocalization—process at work in Brazilian jazz com- prises an amalgam of regional Brazilian “musicalities”—Northeastern, chorinho, samba, Afro-Bahian, free (urban atonalism, outside scales) that is bound up in [local] discourses regarding cultural imperialism, national identity, globalization and regionalism.”141 Once again, demonstrating that cultural flows can move in different directions, many American jazz musicians have adapted and performed Brazilian jazz, including most famously Stan Getz, whose “Desafinado,” released in June 1962, reached 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, and “The Girl from Ipanema,” released in April 1964, which reached 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
It is important to emphasize that these examples are not intended to be a definitive listing of glocalized styles that have occurred around the globe; in- deed, that would be a book-length task. But since, for example, Brazilian jazz or South African Township jazz is easily accessible on the Internet, it provides the opportunity to identify aurally certain characteristics that differentiate them from each other and from American hegemonic styles of jazz in which they are rooted. Students should seek to identify aurally the commonalities and the dif- ferences between American jazz and local characteristics. As the New York Times has noted, the French-Vietnamese guitarist Nguyen Le is “one of the most cre- ative of the many jazz players exploring the marriage of ‘America’s classical music’ with traditional music [and] Le focuses on his roots, in Vietnam,”142 while Lionel Loueke, the acclaimed guitarist from Benin, West Africa, who rounded his jazz studies at Berklee and the Thelonious Monk Institute, extensively draws on his African heritage, even incorporating the Kalimba (African thumb piano) into his performances.
Joe Zawinul, the late Austrian pianist, moved from Vienna to New York in 1959, distinguishing himself as an accompanist to Dinah Washington, and as a member of Cannonball Adderley Quintet and Sextet, on key recordings with Miles Davis, as a coleader, together with Wayne Shorter, of the celebrated group Weather Report, and with his own ensemble, the Zawinul Syndicate. Throughout he re- vealed a nonpareil command of the American jazz idiom, but between winding up Weather Report and forming the Zawinul Syndicate, he performed solo concerts, often incorporating on electronic keyboards Austrian folk-songs and children’s songs into his “American” jazz expressionism—for example, Austrian folksongs such as “Hairy Little Spider, Sitting in His Web.” He said he learned a lot from the Volksmusik repertoire: “I come from the blues and I come from Volksmusik
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(folk music)—Slavic Volksmusik, Hungarian Volksmusik, Austrian Volksmusik.”143 There are no shortages of examples of compositions from his time with Weather Report and with the Zawinul Syndicate using the simple, singable yet profound melodies we associate with folk music,144 played on synthesizer but patched to evoke, however distantly, an accordion. As the classical and jazz piano virtuoso Friedrich Gulda said of Zawinul, a lifelong friend, “He, just like myself, is ingrained in the ancient Austrian tradition. He is an archetypical Viennese musician through and through . . . [who] opened himself up to international music—not in order to deliver himself to it, but to master it and yet never forget what he owes to his own musical roots.”145
Pianist and composer Toshiko Akiyoshi moved to the United States in Jan- uary 1956 and worked in a variety of projects with her first husband, saxophon- ist Charlie Mariano, and her second husband, saxophonist Lew Tabackin, with whom she formed a big band in Los Angeles in 1973. Since moving to the United States, Akiyoshi has been inspired to musically explore her Japanese heritage, composing pieces with Japanese themes, Japanese harmonies, and even Japanese instruments (such as kotsuzumi, kakko, utai, tsugaru, and shamisen). Securing a recording contract with rca she recorded Kogun in 1974, using traditional Japa- nese tsuzumi drums on the title track, reflecting a powerful and effective local influence within the conventions of big band jazz that Akiyoshi systematically broadened with a series of albums for the label that for many propelled her to the forefront of big band jazz in the 1970s and early 1980s. Today her rca albums are seen as the finest of her career: Long Yellow Road (1975), with “Children in the Temple Ground” that draws in Japanese culture; Tales of a Courtesan (1975), with the title track again drawing on her Japanese culture; and Insights (1976), with the extended suite “Minamata” that on the “Consequence” section includes a tradi- tional tsuzumi drummer. Road Time (1976) included a stirring live performance of “Kogun” (including kotsuzumi and ohtsuzumi drums performed live by native Japanese drummers—the album was recorded live in Japan).
At the age of twenty, South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela joined the Jazz Epistles, which included pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, and both musicians would escape the apartheid regime and carve out their own distinctive careers, which studiously reflected their South African heritage, a powerful glocal element that remained a constant feature of their music. Masekela’s first album as a leader,
Trumpet Africaine (1960), produced by Hugo Montenegro, was made in New York
and signed with mgm records, which released The Americanization of Ooga Booga in April 1966. Masekela explained: “[It] was my way of saying I was combining the traditional music of South Africa with the sounds of America,”146 as good a definition of glocalized jazz as you could wish. After mgm he formed an enduring relationship with producer Stewart Levine, forming the Chisa label that would re- sult in eleven albums, including The Promise of the Future (1967) that produced the
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number one hit and 4 million–seller written by the Zambian composer Philemon Hou called “Grazin’ in the Grass.” Masekela has always believed his politics and his music were inextricably lined—be it hard bop, jazz ballads, or infectious Township beats. In the 1970s he embarked on a “pilgrimage of music,” immersing himself in the traditional sounds of Guinea, Liberia, Zaire, and Ghana, where he performed as a guest with Fela Anikulapo Kuti and made several innovative highlife/ Afro- beat albums with “Hedzoleh Soundz.” In 1982 he settled for a time in Botswana, and in 1988 Masekela and his group formed the background of the commercially successful Graceland project with Paul Simon. He then embarked on a tour with his wife, vocalist Miriam Makeba, and his own Kalahari band, just as international attention turned to the hit musical Sarafina! for which he had cowritten the score