Dublin Calling: Challenging European centrality and peripherality through jazz

Each year, Dublin based 12 Points European Jazz Festival1 opens calls for young European artists. Although jazz has been peripheral to the official rhetoric of the European Union, the Festival promotes debates with the various jazz sectors around the state of jazz in the context of cultural production in Europe; and while Dublin has been peripheral to the European jazz scene, the festival has grown to stand as a symbol of the Irish will to be at its core. Drawing from my three‐year research experience with 12 Points — from 2011 to 2014 — and with the network of actors around it, I suggest that jazz is created and reinvented in the process of its dissemination and practice, and that jazz identities in Europe result from the negotiation between discourse and practice and in the interstices between the formal and informal networks that support them. In the narratives around jazz produced by its actors, both jazz and Europe are featured mainly in their ideal interpretations, with common values of cultural diversity, mobility and of a pan‐European reality. ‘Jazz’ and ‘Europe’ serve as white canvases where the diversified notions of what both ideals of what jazz and Europe should or could be are projected.