When the recording machine caught jazz’s first stirrings as a provincial music in America’s Southern States in the second decade of the 20th century, the music was immediately exported around the globe courtesy of the gramophone record. Jazz went global almost from its beginnings because its birth coincided with two significant events unique to the 20th century – the rise of the phonograph industry and the dawn of the America’s industrial and commercial preeminence. Wherever the dollar went, American culture and technology followed in its wake, including phonograph records. When the first jazz recording was made in 1917, an aurally transmitted heritage of an otherwise inaccessible milieu was suddenly opened up for global appreciation – and crucially imitation – by recordings that passed unhindered through national borders and political and social barriers around the world.
‘Jazz Mania’
The speed with which jazz was disseminated owed much to a fast expanding leisure revolution that was global in scope. In 1911, a dance craze swept American society and quickly spread to Europe, given huge impetus by the popular dance duo of Vernon and Irene Castle. But it was the million selling success of the Original Dixieland Jazzband on one of Victor’s early Black Label records – “Livery Stable Blues” coupled with “Original Dixieland One-Step” – that was highly influential in locating ‘Jazz Mania’ within the global dancing craze. Europe, drained after the World War I, eagerly copied all the latest American fads – cocktails, bobbed hair, the Charleston, the Fox Trot, the Quickstep and jazz – as signs of a new life.
It meant that as jazz history evolved inside the United States, it was also acquiring other histories in other countries, something routinely ignored in the narrative of jazz history that customarily situates the evolution of the music exclusively within the borders of the United States. Europe, in particular, has long held a curiosity and fascination for American entertainment and pre-jazz forms that dates back to the 19th century, so helping pave the way for the speedy acceptance of the music in the early years of the 20th century – Sweden, for example, boasts one of the first recorded examples of a cakewalk with “At A Georgia Camp Meeting” made in 1899.
Tradition has it that jazz arrived in Finland in 1926, on the s/s Andania. Photo: Finnish Jazz & Pop Archive.
Helsinki discovers the jazz
In Finland after World War I, Jussi Homan brought back ragtime sheet music from the United States, with ragtime subsequently gaining a foothold in the country between 1922–23. When jazz arrived, it was as part of the dance craze that was sweeping the western world post-World War I. Fashionable Helsinki restaurants quickly discovered that orchestras that could play ‘Jatsi’ drew more trade than their competitors. The first jazz orchestras from outside Finland were brought in by restaurant owner K. E. Johnson, while the first Finnish jazz group, the Hugo Huttunen Trio, opened at the Konsertti Café in 1923. But it was the arrival in Helsinki of the American luxury cruiser s/s Andania in June 1926 that really sparked the jazz/dance craze in Finland. On board were over 600 ex-patriate Finns who were entertained by a ship’s band who performed with genuine jazz inflections and considerable gusto. Their music was greeted with wild enthusiasm in Finland, and the band went out on tour to great success with audiences who embraced jazz as an aspect of modernism.
Subsequently, jazz was absorbed into the cultural norms, symbolic meanings and contextual rules (collectively referred to as cultural capital) of many European countries, with many, like Finland, able to look back at a history of engagement with the music that is almost as long as that of the United States. However, like most jazz that was played across Europe, jazz in Finland tended to follow the prevailing hegemonic styles from the United States – for instance, the Ronnie Kranck playing American big band hits such as “Teddy the Toad”, “Skyliner”, and “Opus One” or the authentic bebop of pianist Valto Laitinen. This trend that began to change in the 1960s when local jazz styles began emerging using the basic syntax of the classic and contemporary globalised hegemonic American jazz styles – in this context ‘hegemony’ means ‘the rules of the game’ by which others routinely play – widely disseminated around the world (the ‘globalisation’ process) through recordings and personal appearances of US jazz artists, but reinscribed with local significance (the ‘glocalisation’ process) that involved incorporating elements such as national imagery, folkloric, and cultural concerns that gave the music relevance to its ‘local’ musical community.
Jazz ‘glocalised’
In Finland, hybridised or glocalised versions of jazz, in effect a cross-fertilisation of local indigenous musical traditions with hegemonic American jazz styles, emerged in 1963 at the hands of Esa Pethman whose album Flame drew on folkloric sources, as did his recording later that year with Heikki Sarmanto, Heikki Annala and his brother Anssi of “Paimenlaulu”, the first Finnish jazz composition based on folkloric melodies. Interaction such as this is what Roger Wallis and Krister Malm in their book Big Sounds From Small People (1984) call ‘transculturation’ and reflects how local musical identity adapts hegemonic musical forms into heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty.
In practice, globalised and glocalised styles now coexist alongside each other and are not mutually exclusive – indeed, some musicians may play in a ‘globalised’ style in some circumstances and a ‘glocalised’ style in others. In an era of political turmoil and complex negotiations of personal and cultural identity, glocalised jazz styles in the broader forum of the global cultural economy are now providing a means for musicians around the world to assert their cultural identity within the music. The Japanese writer Yui Shōichi (1918–1998) called this phenomenon ‘Jazz nationalism’. He wrote that contrary to the cultural imperialism thesis, where jazz and/or Western consumer products threaten the vitality and existence of local culture, jazz actually provides a means of rediscovering local tradition. The movement for “national independence” that surged through each country became the motive power for what must be called jazz nationalism, “to be free of America”, he wrote.
Esa Pethman was a pioneer of ‘glocalised’ jazz in the early 1960s. Photo: Finnish Jazz & Pop Archive.
Lingua franca in music
This process is analogous to the way the English language has reacted as a global lingua franca. In the world at large, English as a lingua franca and jazz as a musical lingua franca are both viewed as tools for expression, not as something that is ‘owned’ by the Americans or the British. In this respect jazz and English show very similar properties in the sense that they both are taken into a given community, says Dr. Elizabeth Peterson, a former sociolinguist at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington DC:
‘But the community that absorbs them and uses them doesn’t actually have any sort of reverence for, or need to pay heed to, the way English or jazz are used in their parent cultures; there is no notion of “authenticity.” In choosing to use English or play jazz, the adopting culture makes English or jazz all its own, just as we no longer think of pasta as being Chinese or of the Rubik’s cube being Czech. English and jazz are both viewed in the world at large as tools for expression, not as something that is “owned” by anyone.’
New dialects of jazz
Yet within the United States, American traditionalists try to enforce the notion of only one right and true jazz’, otherwise their supposed ownership of jazz is rendered meaningless. However, they are powerless to prevent entirely new forms of jazz evolving around the globe, just as English teachers are powerless to stop new versions of English emerging, such as Spanglish among the Latin American community in the United States or Singlish in Singapore. As the 21st century develops, we will see the increasing ‘multi-dialectism’ of jazz, just as we will see the growing use of English. As Mary Louise Pratt, former director of the Modern Language Association of America, has pointed out, ‘The future of English, like that of any lingua franca, does not belong to its native speakers’, and once again the analogy to jazz is again strong at this point.
Jazz, an art form that originated in the United States, has also become a means of asserting cultural identity in the world beyond American shores, where it has become a more pluralistic form of expressionism than in the land of its origin. In the United States arguments rage over the ‘possession’ of jazz history because of the cultural legitimacy it confers. Increasingly, American jazz is becoming a fixed culture, one of consolidation rather than experimentation, although it is naive to assume consensus on this in the American music community. Jazz in the United States is adapting less to changing times, more to the tradition orientated currents flowing through the music exemplified in the music of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. In America, by instinct a conservative nation, the main area of jazz activity has become conservative because there was a growing realisation there was much to conserve.
The members of the Trio Töykeät belong to the first generation of ‘academic’ jazz musicians trained at the Sibelius Academy. From the left Rami Eskelinen (dr), Eerik Siikasaari (b) and Iiro Rantala (kb). Photo: Tanja Ahola
Death of jazz?
The Finnish drummer Edward Vesala (1945–1999) was disturbed by this trend, seeing it as glib revivalism whose surface slickness, he believed, masked the music’s loss of faith. His opposition to this perceived emotional sterility was voiced most forthrightly on his 1989 album, Ode to the Death of Jazz (ECM), a denouncement of the status quo that he felt had come to prevail in jazz – ‘This music is first of all about feeling and the transmission of feeling. This empty echoing of old styles – I think it’s tragic’, he said. ‘If that is what the jazz tradition has become then what about the tradition of creativity, innovation, individuality and personality?’
By the 1990s, a belief was being widely expressed among many European jazz musicians (not least Vesala), animators and critics that the evolutionary zeal that had carried American jazz forward for almost a century had now burnt itself out, and that task of carrying the music forward had crossed the Atlantic to Europe – to Scandinavia, Holland, Germany, Italy, Spain, France and Britain. Although glocalisation in jazz has been occurring since the 1960s, it had often been ignored because events in the United States proved more compelling. But since the death of Miles Davis in 1991, there have been no significant developments in American jazz while many glocalised styles of the music have become so strong they can no longer be ignored and now represent the next step in jazz’s evolutionary continuum.
Edward Vesala was one of the key musicians in the Finnish jazz scene of the late 1960s and early 70s to re-inscribe jazz with local significance along with the likes of Juhani Aaltonen, Eero Koivistoinen and Pekka Sarmanto (who was inspired by the poetry of Lauri Viita and Pentti Saarikoski). Vesala came to international attention in 1973 as a member of Jan Garbarek’s trio on Triptykon, which stands as the saxophonist’s most abstract statement on record. Subsequently, Vesala toured extensively as a co-leader of the Tomasz Stanko-Edward Vesala Quartet which was wound-up in 1978 after recording five albums.
Music and myth
Vesala’s music for theatre included settings of the Finnish national epic Kalevala, which drew on very old folk ballads and his experiences growing up in the remote forests of eastern Finland, where he became conscious of Finnish folk music’s magical/religious function and the role music and myth played in the lives of the rural community. The albums that followed provide an exemplar of the ‘glocalisation’ process within jazz (assimilation. appropriation, hybridity). In 1974 he recorded Nan Madol, that established him as one of a handful of European jazz composers to make sense of his cultural heritage alongside the dominant Afro-American ideology of jazz expressionism. Satu from 1977 continued Vesala’s restless experimentation with a larger ensemble. In the 1980s his Sound & Fury music workshops, part percussion clinics and part music school, produced his experimental ensemble Sound & Fury: Lumi (1986). Vesala also performed on 1999’s Lill’Lisa with Kari Heinilä, Severi Pyysalo and Uffe Krokfors that drew on traditional Finnish and Swedish melodies.
At the time of writing, the author’s book Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved To A New Address), dealing with globalisation in jazz, was just to be published by Routledge. Photo: Routledge
Glocal Finnish musicians
Other Finnish musicians who play in a glocalised style, incorporating local folkloric, nationalistic, and cultural concerns that are relevant to their own needs and their own musical community, include Eero Ojanen (Kalevala cantata from 1974), Kari Komppa’s suite Free Aspects based on Finnish folk songs from 1981 while a deep knowledge of Finnish folkloric tradition informs Seppo Paakkunainen’s music, who has written symphonies based on the Lappish yoik tradition, choir pieces based on the Kalevala and Kanteletar (a collection of Finnish folk poetry) and big band suites based on folk themes. Other musicians that allow glocalised influences to flow through their music include Trio Töykeät, Jukka Perko’s and Severi Pyysalo’s The Poppoo, and former Edward Vesala sideman Tapani Rinne’s group Rinneradio who have collaborated with yoik singer Wimme Saari.
In 2001, the best selling jazz CD in Finland was Sakari Kukko’s Spirituals From the North, which received considerable interest in the media with its strong folkloric influences. Other albums in recent times that include glocalised influences include Samuli Mikkonen & 7 HENKEÄ (Samuli Mikkonen & 7 Persons/Spirits) and the Jouni Järvela Group’s Lento, an excellent contemporary example of glocalised jazz that includes the track “Enkelin Kannel” (Angel’s Kantele) with a soprano saxophone solo by Järvelä that numbers among the finest in jazz of the last two decades.
Jazz and the global village
The arguments for multi-dialectism in jazz are not about challenging the origins of jazz, but of musicians around the world working within the music to find innovative and original ways for it to continue to evolve and broaden the music’s expressive resources. The emergence of glocal jazz dialects represents a way that allows the global village to participate in the music, a global village that loves and enjoys American jazz but at the same time seeks to find meaning in its essential spirit of creativity and individuality that is relevant to its own local musical communities. The result is another way of hearing jazz. Walt Whitman heard America singing in all its variety, and each voice singing what belonged to that individual and no one else. Outside America, a jazz world is singing in just such as way, an assertion of individuality in an ever-more standardised world of cultural identity: a glocalised response to a global phenomenon.
This article was originally published in Finnish Music Quarterly 2/2005.
Featured photo: Trombonist Thad Jones surrounded by pioneers of Finnish jazz: Esko Linnavalli, Matti Heinivaho and Carola Standertskjöld (detail; original photo also featuring Eugen Malmsten and Klaus Salmi). Photo: Finnish Jazz & Pop Archive
