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luca cerchiari INTRODUCTION I t is curious that a comprehensive book on jazz in Europe still doesn’t exist. There are hundreds of titles dedicated to the history of jazz and African American music in the United States, but none to its European counterparts. Some recent jazz histories also deal with Europe (and others with Asia, Africa , and Oceania, in that jazz is correctly regarded as an international sonic language), but just in a brief synthesis. In fact, the subject matter is so broad, in historical, geographical, and cultural terms, that such an enterprise would require years of research and an international committee of authors. The bibliography on regional histories and single musicians is quite a rich one, with more or less one hundred titles (among biographies are represented some of the most important European jazzmen ever—Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Martial Solal, Jean ‘‘Toots’’ Thielemans, Jan Garbarek, George Shearing, Ian Carr, Joachim Kühn, Albert Mangelsdor√, Gorni Kramer, Giorgio Gaslini, Enrico Rava, Joe Zawinul, Willem Breuker, Tete Montoliu). Almost every European country has produced a serious book on its own jazz history, and in some cases (France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia) more than one. A major problem is the language: whereas in the United States the common ground is English, in Europe , though English is also the language of the jazz community, almost every country speaks something di√erent. Europe has also recently become, in geopolitical terms, a larger entity: the European Community, at present, includes twenty-seven countries, while new nations are waiting to be admitted to the Brussels-Strasbourg organization. In any case, be it the result of the research of a committee of authors, or the e√ort of a single scholar, the history of jazz in Europe has yet to be e√ectively written. For the present publication we have chosen a di√erent approach, a theoretical one. The idea of this book—not a history of jazz in Europe, but a series of essays dedicated to the complex, broader subject of the relations between Europe and jazz—came to me in 2008, when I invited my French colleague Laurent Cugny, professor at the University of Paris IV, to lecture at the University of Padua. We then met with our third editor, Franz Kerschbaumer, professor at the Austrian Graz University of Music and Dramatic Arts, and approved our project, which intended to co-opt several scholars, both from Europe and from the United States. Thanks to Friedrich Körner (and then to Kerschbaumer), Graz has become, since 1969, an international center for jazz research, besides o√ering a jazz program for instruments and related musical disciplines. In fact, viii Introduction courses in jazz musicology and history, since the seventies—sometimes in connection with disciplines like ethnomusicology, anthropology of music, or popular music, sometimes not—have been proposed and taught by an increasing number of universities and conservatories, not to mention private seminars, schools, and associations founded all around Europe, a list of which, and their related courses, would probably amount to a surprisingly high number. This academic network, or, better, these separate entities, sometimes connected and sometimes not, have so far produced a meaningful amount of research, developing with scientific purposes and methodologies a field that was at first approached, in the late twenties, by jazz critics both in Europe and in the United States, in some cases with relevant results (historiography, criticism, discography), in others with a limit of perspective that for a long time confined jazz to a status of lesser importance, unrelated to general musicological matters and to other cultural disciplines. The many di√erent relations between Europe and jazz can be divided into di√erent categories, as we have done, choosing three main ones for the organization of this volume. The first concerns Europe as a source of jazz. Jazz has always been regarded as a typically twentieth-century expression of the broader African American contribution to world music history. The African and American roots of jazz have been thoroughly investigated; the European ones much less, although few current books have not forgotten to quote the European contribution to this music. Some relevant exceptions are such brilliant and innovative volumes as Origins of the Popular Style, by Peter van der Merwe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, edited by Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Cross the Water Blues: African American Musicians in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn (Jackson...

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