Swedish Stories? Culturally Dependent Perspectives on Jazz Improvisation as Storytelling

Abstract This article is based on my Ph.D. empirical study which includes extensive qualitative interviews with fifteen Swedish jazz improvisers regarding their views on the term ‘storytelling’ as a metaphor in the field of jazz improvisation. Through comparisons with American literature on jazz music, this article points to a number of interesting relations between “American” and “Swedish” storytelling in jazz. While the notion of authenticity emerges as central to both American and Swedish jazz, the results from the Swedish interviews point to interesting interrelations between two aspects of authenticity: tradition-authenticity and self-authenticity.