12 - Jazz Abroad

Summary

With Langston Hughes as tour guide, this chapter sounds the (ostensible) paradox of jazz abroad: on one hand, jazz has often been perceived as indubitably, authentically “Black,” a racially encoded expression. On the other hand, jazz’s inherent multivalences oscillate on transnational frequencies that have resonated and continue to resonate with all kinds of people all over the world. The story of jazz abroad, then, is also the story of Blackness on the move, a journey perpetually navigating a course between authenticity and hybridity, individuation and polyvocality, originality and imitation. This jazz dialectic amplifies Blackness as a floating signifier and allows for the performance of fluid, transnational identities that defy homogenizing taxonomies of race, class, culture, or nationhood. And so, jazz– and jazz abroad especially– is (paradoxically) both, a distinctly Black American art form, and at the same time world music long before we had a term for it.