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Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalization. By Bruce Johnson. London: Routledge 2020. 208 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-57755-8
Australian academic Bruce Johnson sums up his intentions in Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalization neatly on page 165 of this slim volume, ‘What might we learn about jazz by escaping the gravitational pull of the US-centric canonical model which quarantines the music from certain broader fields of enquiry?’ He argues, reasonably, for greater attention to how jazz developed in, and continues to do so in, countries beyond the USA. Broadly, his methodology draws sustenance from the ‘New Jazz Studies’ (p. 157), an approach that owes much to post-structuralism and post-modernism.
New Jazz Studies eschews the grand narrative of jazz history based on a canon of key figures and recordings. While he does not dispense with the idea of a canon per se, Johnson questions narratives based on the ‘US-centred canon’ (p. 156), elevating instead the particular or local against the dominant discourses of jazz history. He contends that ‘jazz that doesn't sound like what we think of as jazz, music that by “canonical” standards is mediocre, corny, quaint and misconceived, but which has been presented under the name of jazz’ can reveal ‘more about the history of the music’ and ‘the various diasporic cultures with which it negotiated’ (p. 3). The need, he suggests, is to shift the focus from ‘texts’ to ‘the larger historical and cultural contexts’ of the music (p. 159).
Jazz Diaspora is not so much about jazz as a music or its history but rather concerned with the researching and writing of jazz history. This begs the issue of ‘who is writing what for whom and why’. Of course, context is crucial in understanding who did what, when, where and so forth – this is the very stuff of history. The danger with Johnson's approach, however, is that the “stuff” becomes merely a matter of one's position to be dissolved into its supposed explanatory context. Furthermore, Johnson seems less keen on examining the theoretical and ideological assumptions underpinning his argument or those of the authors he cites.
For example, Johnson references authors Richard Sudhalter (2001) and Stuart...