The History of Jazz (86 page)

In truth, Europe has played a catalytic role in the history of jazz almost from the beginning. The first example of a trained musical mind writing an insightful review of a jazz performance occurred in Europe, back in 1919, when Swiss conductor Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet contributed an article to
Revue Romande
about the London appearance of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra with New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet. Around this same time, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band spent more than a year in Great Britain and received extensive press coverage—they earned as much as $1,800 per week (equivalent to more than $20,000 in current dollars) and frequently drew standing-room-only crowds. Europe continued to lead the way in embracing this music in later years. Jazz festivals were held in Belgium and the Netherlands in the early 1930s, long before the format became known in the United States. The first great discographer of jazz was Charles Delaunay of France, while Belgian Robert Goffin’s
Aux Frontières du Jazz
, from 1932, represents the first serious book-length study of the music. Goffin and London-born Leonard Feather literally invented jazz as an academic discipline, jointly teaching a class at the New School for Social Research in 1942 that was the forerunner of today’s plethora of jazz education programs. French jazz critic and producer Hugues Panassié ranks toward the top of any list of important early critics of the music, and in works such as
Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music
(1936) and
The Real Jazz
(1942) showed that he understood the nuances of the music in a way that few, if any, American commentators at the time could match.
Orkester Journalen
began publishing in Sweden in 1933 and the French periodical
Jazz Hot
followed in 1935 and both helped establish jazz journalism as a commercial proposition.

Even at this early stage, Europe had its first major jazz star, Django Reinhardt, who, with Stéphane Grappelli, founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. Yet the importance of Reinhardt was not just that Europe could now boast of a jazz artist of the first rank, but even more that his music built on distinctively European ingredients that expanded and enhanced the art form. To this day,
jazz manouche
—the latter word signifying the French branch of the Romani (or Gypsy) people—is a popular performance style, with its own specific techniques, song preferences, and vocabulary. Fast forward to the jazz scene of the twenty-first century and we see this same phenomenon writ large around the world: jazz musicians are finding inspiration in their own local and regional traditions, creating exciting new hybrids that marry the sensibility of African American music to homegrown elements. At a time when many commentators complain that jazz is no longer “advancing,” these exciting cross-cultural fusions prove that new sounds still arise on the foundations of America’s classical music.

Despite the example of Django, indigenous European jazz styles were slow in emerging from the shadows of American jazz. During the second half of the twentieth century, jazz players outside the United States typically needed to move there, or at a minimum to play in the style of the leading U.S. artists, to make a name for themselves. George Shearing is lauded today as one of the leading jazz pianists of his generation, but this would hardly have been the case if he had not moved to New York in 1947. Around the same time, another UK pianist, Marian McPartland, also settled in the United States, initiating a true American success story that not only encompasses dozens of recordings but also entrepreneurship (McPartland’s company Halcyon was one of the first artist-owned record labels in jazz), a sideline writing jazz criticism, and most notably a career in broadcasting destined for even greater fame than what McPartland had already achieved in nightclubs. Her
Piano Jazz
program on National Public Radio, founded in 1978, would eventually become the longest-running cultural broadcast in the history of NPR—an extraordinary achievement considering that McPartland had turned sixty a few weeks before the debut of the show. In 1952 Belgian harmonica player and guitarist Toots Thielemans moved to the United States, where he worked with Shearing, among others. His 1962 recording of “Bluesette,” featuring Thielemans whistling and playing the guitar in unison, was a surprise hit, but his most important contribution to the idiom has been his championing of the humble harmonica, which he established as a legitimate solo voice in jazz. This would hardly have been possible had Thielemans stayed in his native Brussels. His countryman, saxophonist and flautist Bobby Jaspar, followed a similar path, marrying vocalist Blossom Dearie and settling in the United States in the mid-1950s, although his death in 1963 at age thirty-six cut short a promising career. The same phenomenon would repeat in later decades. European-born artists such as John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, and Joe Zawinul would come to the United States, play with Miles Davis and other American jazz legends, and become stars themselves. They deserve their reputations at the top of the jazz hierarchy, but would they have arrived there with a London or Vienna address?

Certainly there were great European talents who stayed home during this period, although none reaped the fame of the better-known expats. While Holland and McLaughlin were making their names in the States, Mike Westbrook, John Surman, Michael Garrick, Kenny Wheeler (Canadian-born, but a UK resident since 1952), Norma Winstone, and others were revitalizing the British jazz scene. Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen earned a reputation as a world-class jazz bassist without moving from his native Denmark—but primarily through his sideman work with American band leaders. In contrast, Lars Gullin of Sweden deserves inclusion on any list of the finest baritone saxophonists of his generation, and as one of the defining talents of the cool jazz style, but because he never relocated to the United States, his name is still unfamiliar in many jazz circles. By the same token, the biggest-selling jazz album in the history of Sweden is pianist Jan Johansson’s
Jazz på Svenska
, a sly reworking of folk melodies that would delight even U.S. jazz fans—that is, if they ever had a chance to hear this music, which is hardly known in America. Even back in the years before World War II, we find significant music linked to unfamiliar artists who simply had the misfortune of pursuing careers as jazz players outside of the United States. Trumpeter Pierre Allier and tenor saxophonist Alix Combelle were playing with a harmonic conception that was quite advanced during these years; British trumpeter Nat Gonella earned the praise of Louis Armstrong; drummer Bill Harty propelled English jazz bands with a swing that would have been the pride of many U.S. orchestras—so much so that when Ray Noble came to New York in 1934 he insisted on bringing Harty along, despite the many experienced American drummers available. Yet today the names of these musicians will draw a blank from even knowledgeable jazz critics.

This situation has changed markedly in the new millennium. Wherever one looks in Europe today, one finds not just interesting jazz but also an elite few who can become global stars without moving to Manhattan. The rise to fame (or at least the jazz equivalent thereof) at the close of the 1990s of pianist Esbjörn Svensson and his trio e.s.t.—featuring fellow Swedes Dan Berglund on bass and drummer Magnus Öström—was a signal event in this regard. European audiences had already embraced the trio’s CDs
From Gagarin’s Point of View
and
Good Morning Susie Soho
as major statements by a visionary band when the Columbia label decided, in 2001, to release a compilation for U.S. audiences, an event that was followed by a three-week American tour. Although this may have appeared like an overnight success story to new fans stateside, e.s.t. (which had started life as the Esbjörn Svensson Trio) had developed both their preternatural group rapport and devoted following during a long period of arduous performing and touring, mounting up to two hundred gigs per year. When Svensson and company finally decided to focus on building a U.S. audience, e.s.t. was already a proven act with staying power and a stack of awards from across Europe.

The band’s music, full of unexpected shifts and turnabouts, was as unconventional as the group’s path to acclaim. The trio was capable of constructing complex, maximalist structures rich in harmonic movement; yet with little warning e.s.t. might shift into a loose, open jam or engage in a laconic dialogue between the instruments. Sometimes bass and drums would fall out entirely, and Svensson would perform solo, but with an unabated rhythmic drive that seemed to suggest he continued to hear a supporting cast in his own head; or else the musicians would incorporate electronic effects into their sonic palette, finding a middle path between the supposed dichotomies of plugged-in and unplugged that many players accept as an unbridgeable divide. One could pinpoint the band’s more obvious sources of inspiration—which ranged from Keith Jarrett’s early ECM recordings, especially
Facing You
, to rock and pop attitudes of various flavors—yet the way these influences were assimilated into a new holistic vision was little short of breathtaking. Svennson’s death in a swimming accident in 2008 at age forty-four ended the career of this artist and his trio. But one can be confident that not only his music but his success in breaking down the “made in America” lock on jazz reputations will inspire many future musicians in their own careers.

Although no combo has yet emerged that can fill the place held by e.s.t., a number of promising European ensembles are making fresh, invigorating music. Swiss keyboardist Nik Bärtsch, for example, describes the approach of his band Ronin as “zen funk,” and his combination of minimalist stylings and groove music might seem to be a contradictory mixture. Yet this hybrid, which has one foot in the music conservatory and the other tapping its toes at a street party, coheres against all odds and creates a different ambiance for contemporary jazz. This particular approach is very much the creation of Bärtsch and his colleagues, but the general mindset of infusing jazz with nonjazz elements is one of the most pervasive—and appealing—themes of the current European jazz scene. Perhaps the musicians are following the lead of European political and social trends, which are tending toward a unification of previously isolated or even hostile communities. Or an even simpler reason might be at play here: European jazz musicians have never felt they owned this art form the way Americans have, and this sense of sharing in a global phenomenon cannot fail to have some impact on how these players conceptualize and execute their work. Whatever the underlying causes, jazz in Europe today has realized, even more than in the United States, an ideal of a music without boundaries or borders. We find countless bands featuring performers of different nationalities working alongside one another, or artists setting up shop outside their home country, or dealing with musical languages that are not their native birthright, and the results of these dislocations and rapprochements can be heard unmistakably in the music.

This blossoming of an indigenous and increasingly self-directed European jazz scene is visible across the continent. The keyboard tradition is especially vibrant in the new millennium, as demonstrated by the work of artists young and old, such as Stefano Bollani, Enrico Pieranunzi, Franco D’Andrea, and Giorgio Gaslini of Italy; Vassilis Tsabropoulos of Greece; Marcin Wasilewski and Leszek Możdżer of Poland; Michael Wollny, Joachim Kühn, Florian Ross, and Herbert Nuss of Germany; George Gruntz and Malcolm Braff of Switzerland; Martial Solal, René Urtreger, and Laurent de Wilde of France; Michel Herr, Nathalie Loriers, and Jef Neve of Belgium; Ketil Bjørnstad and Bugge Wesseltoft of Norway; and John Taylor, Django Bates, Gordon Beck, and Robert Mitchell of Britain, among others. A distinctive European trumpet tradition has also emerged in recent years, less beholden to models from hard bop and more aligned with the lyrical tradition of Miles Davis and Chet Baker, or even the quasi-minimalist soundwashes of Jon Hassell. One suspects that Baker’s long-term residency in Europe and frequent performing and recording around the continent played a role in this turn of events—an ironic one at that, given the tendency of U.S. critics to dismiss this artist’s late career efforts, despite the improvisational creativity Baker retained to the end of his life, in favor of edgier fare. Even so, there is nothing merely derivative about the trumpet work of world-class players such as Tomasz Stanko of Poland, Enrico Rava and Paolo Fresu of Italy, Nils Petter Molvaer, Arve Hendriksen, and Mathias Eick of Norway, Eric Vloeimans of Holland, and Till Brönner of Germany. It is harder to make generalizations about a European saxophone tradition that encompasses the avant-garde sensibilities of Peter Brötzmann of Germany and Evan Parker of Britain, the neotraditionalism of Italian Francesco Cafiso (who earned the praise of Wynton Marsalis while still in his midteens), and the chamber-music-meets-world-fusion attitudes of Jan Garbarek. Yet it seems safe to predict that here as well the scene is in good hands. Among other instrumentalists, clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi of Italy, trombonists Ilja Reijngoud of Holland, Gianluca Petrella of Italy, and Mark Nightingale of the United Kingdom, drummers Wolfgang Haffner of Germany and Han Bennink of Holland, as well as guitarists Nguyên Lê, Sylvain Luc, and Biréli Lagrène of France, to cite just a few, are standout talents, although their names may not be well known even in jazz circles. The state of the jazz vocal tradition in Europe is less well defined, perhaps because the heritage is so closely linked to the English language, yet UK singers such as Jamie Cullum and Ian Shaw as well as Italian-born Roberta Gambarini, David Linx of Belgium, Savina Yannatou of Greece, and Solveig Slettahjell and Silje Nergaard of Norway are top-rank performers by any measure.

Yet the collectives often seem as important as the individuals here. This is evident in AACM-type organizations, such as the F-ire Collective and Loop Collective in the UK, which take on the role of impresarios, teachers, and even record labels, also in the more collaborative structure of many of the leading bands. Ensembles such as the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the Norrbotten in Sweden, the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw in Holland, and the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra also help foster an atmosphere that is less star-driven than the New York club scene. A few decades back, one might well have doubted whether jazz, with its macho and sometimes predatory culture of self-assertion, could ever develop a truly group-oriented culture. Yet if this happens, Europe will have played a key role in showing the way. Starting at the top with substantial government support (at least by American standards), the European jazz culture is far more comfortable with institutional structures and collaborative give-and-take than one would find anywhere in the music’s country of origin.