Cooling down jazz: Making authentic Swedish jazz possible

Abstract

IntroductionJazz was understood as one of the most American of phenomena in the interwar era in Sweden. The notion of jazz was so closely linked with the nation-state of the US and racial ideas about African Americans that the Swedish public had difficulties regarding a Swedish performance of jazz as authentic. Nevertheless, a possibility for an authentic performance of Swedish jazz was constructed after the Second World War in which ideas of race connected to black and white bodies played an important role. This article discusses different ways in which a Swedish performance of jazz was positioned in relation to the jazz tradition in the United States. This connection was being made in the Swedish jazz press in the early 1950s, a period on which this article focuses. This article also explores how ideas of authenticity that were closely linked to notions of race were dealt with in the Swedish reception of jazz. I will pay close attention to the ways in which issues of race and nationality were central to notions of authenticity in jazz in Sweden2 and how these affected the possibility of a Swedish jazz production.First I have to clarify that my aim is not to define what 'authentic' jazz really is, but rather I'm interested in how a Swedish public dealt with notions of authenticity in relation to Swedish jazz-whether by using this specific word or implying it in various other ways. By authenticity here I mean a set of qualities that the music and musicians were regarded to possess that would make their actions accepted as jazz by a public consisting of critics, record buyers and many other jazz enthusiasts. Furthermore, this text is not about musically determining whether or not a certain music is 'African American'; it is, rather, about how race has been highly influential in contemporaneous thoughts about whether Swedish musicians were thought to be able to play jazz.To analyse specific racial aspects of Swedish thoughts on jazz I use the concept of the racial imagination, as Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman have postulated it, to theorize this way in which the 'other' is constructed. Their definition is as follows: 'we define "racial imagination" as the shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity' (Radano and Bohlman 2000: 5). The racial imagination is thus the way in which people think of differences between people based on race. This process of a discursive construction of difference connects ideas of characteristics to bodily characteristics that form the imagination. This ideology is at the centre of analysis here.Race, however, is not the only focus of analysis. In his study of cultural criticism, Paul Gilroy addresses ethnic absolutism and argues that race, and more specifically the division into black and white, cannot be understood separately from the frames of the nation-state and ethnicity: 'These colours support a special rhetoric that has grown to be associated with a language of nationality and national belonging as well as the languages of "race" and ethnic identity' (Gilroy 1993: 2). Gilroy's contribution here is a further theorization of how race is intertwined with other concepts. He speaks of 'cultural insiderism' (Gilroy 1993: 3) to refer to rhetorical strategies with an absolute sense of ethnic difference and the idea of nations as homogenous to define cultural communities. This means that besides looking at notions of race in jazz from Sweden, connected notions of nationality or ethnicity should also be taken into account. In Sweden a notion of Swedish culture was related to ideas of Sweden as a nation and the posited ethnic and racial characteristics of the Swedes as a people. It can, however, be questioned how precise a Swedish notion of US-American ethnicities was; generally the term 'American' was used to designate anything from the US and this seems to allude to a more general US cultural identity than the different ethnicities present in the United States. …