Jazz Freedoms: Balkan Rhythm, Race, and World Music

Abstract In the late 1980s, a group of young, well-educated white jazz musicians invoked a legacy of jazz freedom in their experiments with Balkan music. Yet they were not embracing a timeless, unchanging concept. Instead, they employed an incipient mode of freedom, one that was deeply informed by a broader political discourse that emerged in the 1980s. This form of freedom, which emphasized individual consumption amidst a world of newly commodified ethnicities and musical traditions, seemed to promise an exciting new direction for musical exploration, yet it also proved starkly incompatible with a still-dominant understanding of freedom shaped during the Cold War era. By examining the emergence of and reception to the small Balkan-influenced jazz scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, I seek to demonstrate that the last decades of the twentieth century warrant a closer examination of precisely how the public debates about race, innovation, and historiography in jazz were symptomatic of a broader underlying contestation. I suggest that these debates were informed in part by the clash of two competing modes of freedom, one that emerged from new political goals and economic policies of the 1980s, and another that had formed in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement.