A feature by Cam Scott

Jazz, one understands, is freedom music. As an art form of African-American origination, fashioned in the crucible of Jim Crow and the endless aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade, jazz has always demonstrated the immanence of creative resistance to any instance of oppression. As historian Gerald Horne writes, jazz “is the classic instance of the lovely lotus arising from the malevolent mud.” For this reason, however, a dubious American nationalism tends to inform popular understandings of the form. Jazz spans the world, not as an American export, but as a music of African provenance, distributed by the machinations of empire. Defying the historical strictures from which it originates, this plural music issues a deep and de facto internationalism, anti-colonial at its core.