Aktuelle Aspekte der Identität von Jazz
und "improvisierter Musik" in Europa: differenziertes Selbstverständnis und Internationalisierung
Because jazz, originally an Afro-American idiom, was brought into contact with other socio-cultural relationships, in which it was initially copied and later developed in a specific direction, additional acculturation processes resulted. The results reach from superficial couplings with other musical influences, over serious attempts at synthesis, up to music forms which stand only in a limited relationship to the jazz tradition. The expansion and limitation of that which is recognized and acknowledged as jazz, cannot occur independently of a music-historical process. Since free jazz, European jazz has become differentiated in its ways of being played, between a relative distancing from jazz and a relative proximity to it. Musical practice has, in the meantime, become more complex than the available instrumentality of carried over concepts and stylistic categories which describe this practice. Along with the fashioning of idiomatic ways of playing jazz, an improvised music grew in Europe which absorbed and reflected upon impulses and ideas in an individualistically distinguishable manner, from contemporary composed music, folk music and rock music. In spite of occasional advances towards so-called "ernste" music, in respect to its sounds, these stylistic directions, however, differ from one another in respect to musical impetus and the conscious or unconscious immanent musical valuations of them. They are tied to the jazz tradition in so far as having to overcome the problem of imitation, thereby actualizing the problem of musical authenticity. In a time of worldwide music communication and influence, European based developments can no longer fence themselves off from worldwide musical events, so that jazz and improvised music only let themselves be defined regionally in a limited sense, but are differentiated according to an entire system of overstrained musical coordinates and valuation frame-work.