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mike heffley 17 / REVISIONING HISTORY LIVED FOUR EUROPEAN EXPATS, THREE MEN AND ONE WOMAN, WHO SHAPED ONE AMERICAN LIFE IN TWO AMERICAN CULTURES M y time in Europe doing interviews and research for my book Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz (Yale University Press, 2005) exposed me to many variations on the trope of American ‘‘expats’’— mostly African American musicians who lived and worked full time in Europe as expatriates—and those who toured there regularly and often enough to have a comparably consistent presence and influence. Many European musicians told me about hearing their first jazz on the Voice of America radio station, or through their contact with American gis, or at clubs and festivals that presented visiting Americans and/or expats. When my friend and colleague Dr. Franya Berkman recently invited me to speak to her Lewis & Clark College History of Jazz class in our home city of Portland, Oregon, about the ‘‘free jazz’’ period spanning the late 1950s and the ’60s, I found myself rooting around on iTunes and in memories of my own childhood and early years as a fan and budding young trombonist-composerarranger on the West Coast during those decades. I wanted to give these Oregon students a glimpse of their specifically regional music-cultural history, as I had lived it. While at that time I certainly didn’t know or think of the influence of anyone or anything European as seminal to my formative years in this American music, the hindsight of my prep for this talk alerted me to how deeply some European expats in America did influence my not-atypical coming of age in even its most Afrocentric aspects. Once this premise is in play, it suggests a broader survey than I will present here. A German (Alfred) Lion and (Francis) Wol√ raised me and many other European-American ‘‘wild children’’ in their den (Blue Note Records), teaching us how to understand and speak African American music’s language as fluently as, if not more so than, our own more native musicultural tongues. Turkish-born Ahmet Ertegun and (especially with the jazz side) his brother Nesuhi did the same with their Atlantic Records, redirecting the inroad African American music had made into the first part of the century’s mainstream culture as ‘‘jazz’’ to the second half’s even vaster grassroots of R&B and rock genres. Also, the first serious 382 m i k e h e f f l e y books about the music most of us read then were by two Frenchmen, Hugues Panassié and André Hodeir. My background was even more jazz-specific than that general milieu, in ways both cultural and musical. It started me o√ in the thick of the West Coast jazz scene (the one most popular in Germany then, as it happened), shaping my knowledge, tastes, and aesthetics down some lines rather than others as a result. That led me to associations with some people rather than others when I started working as a musician and writer about the music. To summarize it, I would start with the bromide that the West Coast scene was the ‘‘whitest’’ and most Eurocentric part of the American jazz culture in the 1950s–’60s era, in part for certain reasons having to do with Hollywood’s draw of modern composers for film work, and of the most formally trained and disciplined musicians for studio work At the same time, for the same reason, it was more conducive than its East Coast and Deep South counterparts to the flexible aesthetic of the music’s structure, function, and voice needed to accommodate both the Third Stream and the ‘‘free jazz’’ breakthrough’s assertion away from the ‘‘jazz’’ rubric altogether, and down from a momentum of the pre-1960s ‘‘black uplift’’ and ‘‘jazz-as-modernist-avant-garde’’ to one of an African American presence in the Maverick school of American experimentalism-cum-world-music— which may yet prove a thicker and ultimately more fruitful and enduring branch than jazz-as-genre in American music history. (I pointedly don’t assert such advantage over the midwestern scenes, to which the West Coast scene is more linked in ways I will touch on ahead.) The four European expats I will discuss all played key and direct roles at di√erent times in the evolution of that part of American music I engaged with at di√erent stages of my own personal and professional growth, and those engagements...

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