The many significances and nuances of jazz in 21st Century European cultural policies

Jazz in Europe, like Europe, is an extremely complex and multi-layered reality. A myriad of jazz subgenres, such as manouche, swing, free, contemporary and fusion jazz co-exist in a continent composed of distinctive nationalities, national histories, cultural landscapes, with around fifty languages and forty ethnic groups. There is not a monolithic sonic representation of jazz in Europe, nor is there one sole European cultural identity and policy. More than a continent, Europe has always been an idealised projection of ‘political significance and immense symbolic weight, without agreed boundaries’ (Wallace 1990: 7). And, as an ideal, Europe has been used as a blank canvas upon which different notions of what Europe is or can be are projected. Across the 20th century, but increasingly more in the 21st century, jazz was and has been used in the narratives and discourses of European political institutions as an optimum metaphor for that ideal: one of unification, diversity and, in the last decade, of a neo-liberal capitalist approach to culture as a value neutral economic and political diplomacy tool.
In the last ten years, my research has been mainly focused on jazz networks in Europe. What I find interesting about networks is that not only do they allow us to map actors within certain ecologies and identify who are the musicians, promoters, educators, and audiences; they can also tell us a great deal about the different processes and dynamics that take place between those actors: namely how different levels and kinds of hierarchies are established, how informal networks sometimes generate formal networks, and, in turn, formal networks generate further informal networks. But perhaps what fascinates me the most about jazz networks is the ways in which those actors build their discourses and negotiate their identities in order to position themselves on a larger ecology. And this means two things: first, that identities are dynamic processes; second, that ground practices are heavily informed by constructed narratives and discourses, particularly those created at the official level designed to support specific cultural policies.
What I suggest (Dias 2016a, 2016b, 2019; Dias, Frota and Martins 2020) is that networking invariably triggers a negotiation of identities: individual, national and – in this case – European. And by negotiating, I mean questioning, not only what one’s music as an individual artist or one’s venue as a promoter represent, but what jazz means to ourselves and others, and, perhaps more crucially, what it means to be a jazz actor in Europe, or even, ultimately, what it means to be a European.