Cold Commodities: Discourses of Decay and Purity in a Globalised Jazz World

Jazz has been a global music since its inception. In conflating Scandinavian jazz with the production of the ‘Nordic tone’, several accounts of European jazz present the music as a refreshing alternative to a corrupt and stagnant American tradition, a form that is promoted as globalised and uniformly problematic. This chapter examines the tensions bound up with discourses of the global in jazz and the romance of the local, and explores ways in which traditional distinctions between regional, national and international jazz scenes can be both challenged and reconfigured.