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jürgen arndt 15 / EUROPEAN JAZZ DEVELOPMENTS IN CROSS-CULTURAL DIALOGUE WITH THE UNITED STATES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE COUNTERCULTURE OF THE 1960S I. I n 1979, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik devoted a whole issue to European jazz. It was a way of reaching a wider public outside the jazz scene, drawing attention to developments since the 1960s, which were often encapsulated in the slogan ‘‘emancipation.’’ Joachim Ernst Berendt summed up this view in his article: ‘‘European jazz has liberated itself. The time has passed when jazz musicians on our side of the Atlantic always imitated only the latest fashions from America. As part of the process of musical and social emancipation in the 60s, the European jazzers returned to their own forms of expression.’’∞ And Ekkehard Jost confirmed in his essay in the same issue: The history of jazz in Europe up until the mid-60s is characterized by the collective e√ort of European musicians to understand the creative processes taking place in the usa through a more or less significant phase shift. . . . From 1965 onwards, the ratio of European music to its American models gradually changed; in the late 60s, the jazz press started to think about an emerging European type of jazz.≤ Which ‘‘type’’ Jost had in his mind became clear not only from his subsequent comments, which mainly concerned the trio of Peter Brötzmann, Fred van Hove, and Han Bennink, the Alexander Schlippenbach Quartet, and the Globe Unity Orchestra. This ‘‘type’’ was revealed also through the musicians who had the opportunity to speak in the aforementioned issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: Peter Brötzmann, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Jost Gebers, Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg, and Gunter Hampel. It provided a focus for the artistically advanced and radically improvisatory e√orts that had developed particularly in the context of the so-called new music. This emphasis underlines the importance of a German perspective—perhaps also a Continental European perspective. But what about the British point of view? Certainly there had been in England, too, developments in improvisation that included the sound patterns of ‘‘new music’’: for example, Derek Bailey, who 343 Cross-Cultural Dialogue and Counterculture was inspired by the particular sounds of Anton Webern. But the British perspective adds another important line of development: here we must mention John McLaughlin, another English guitarist, one shaped by the intense blues scene in London and no less a contributor to jazz. Stuart Nicholson emphasizes in his study of jazz rock the special significance of European jazz musicians: ‘‘When jazz rock emerged at the end of the 1960s, it was the last coherent radical jazz movement (and the only movement in jazz where European jazz musicians played a major inceptive role).’’≥ Alyn Shipton confirms this point: ‘‘The earliest moves toward jazz rock began not in the United States, but in Britain, in the same musical melting pot of rhythm and blues, traditional jazz, skiΔe, and bebop from which the ‘British invasion’ rock groups of the 1960s emerged.’’∂ It is apparent that European jazz musicians have been successful in a number of respects at establishing particular signatures: in blues-based as well as advanced concert music. Both these trends are based essentially on intercultural dialogue with contemporary developments in the United States. They owe their distinctive characteristics not to a rejection but to an increasingly intense engagement with African American musical culture and developments in avant-garde art not only in Europe but also in the United States. On the one hand there is the blues, traveling from the Mississippi Delta to the industrial city of Chicago, interpreted at once in a traditional and a modern style, and the extension of the blues into modern jazz since the 1940s. Muddy Waters and Miles Davis are representative of these trends. McLaughlin recalls his activities in the early 1960s: ‘‘I started with Alexis Korner. Alexis had everybody in his band at some point. But then I listened to Miles Davis. . . . Miles formed a new school, and I knew at once: This is my school. I kept playing rhythm and blues and it was great because we were playing real jazz solos. It was blues but at the same time it was much more than the blues.’’∑ On the other hand, there was a focus on artistically advanced developments in jazz, which had a close a≈nity with the new music. Bailey remembers the music he played in the 1960s with...

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