Globalization Globalization allowed for the rise of ethno jazz. The
Industrial Revolution of the 19th century created new global trade networks that facilitated the spread of cross-cultural phenomena.
Philip Bohlman, ethnomusicologist at the University of Chicago, described jazz as the "music of the African Diaspora," describing the movement of ideas between the Caribbean, the United States, and Western Europe. Jazz in America grew out of racial tensions, and was seen by African Americans as a form of resistance. These ideas of resistance were spread and redefined through globalization. Globalization brought jazz to larger audiences through recordings and touring performances. Examples include a New Orleans band, the "
Original Creole Orchestra", which toured Canada for the first time during the fall of 1914, performing at the
Pantages Playhouse Theatre in
Winnipeg, the first jazz performance outside the United States and the beginning of jazz as an international movement. The
Original Dixieland Jazz Band toured Europe in 1919 and was popular enough to continue touring England for a year. Their music spread around the globe. Countries like China began jazz festivals with enough public support to become annual traditions. Traveling to and learning from other cultures was another factor that influenced the development of ethno jazz. For example, a variety of musicians like pianist
Randy Weston, trumpeter
Lester Bowie, drummer
Max Roach, and multi-instrumentalists
Yusef Lateef and
Ornette Coleman had a fascination with other cultures' music. They went to Africa and studied different countries' melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, and adapted them into their jazz playing and compositions. Intercultural musical exchange was well received internationally, inspiring many musicians to take on cross-cultural influences. Many of these musicians brought foreign artists as well as their musical styles back to their home countries, which resulted in a number of big jazz names hiring immigrants to perform in their ethno jazz projects.
North America John Coltrane is generally understood to be the father of ethno jazz, having incorporated
African, Middle Eastern, and
Indian musical elements in many of his compositions. One of the first recognized examples of this fusion can be found in the African rhythm of his 1961 track "Dahomey Dance", which Coltrane discovered after a trip to
Los Angeles earlier that year. "Amen" and "Sun Ship", recorded four years later and released posthumously on the album
Sun Ship, both feature extensive
improvisation on commonly used
conga and
bongo rhythmic patterns, as opposed to more common, chordal improvisation, with the vocal quality of Coltrane's tenor saxophone intentionally paralleling the sound of an African horn he had heard in a
Kenyan recording from the late 1930s. His 1967 avant-garde track "
Ogunde", named for
Nigerian musician
Hubert Ogunde, was recorded in the free, lyrical style of the same name, which embodied a movement to return to traditional African music uninfluenced by European elements. Coltrane's Afro-Eastern sound is best exemplified in "Africa", from the album
Africa/Brass, which was created after drawing rhythmic and
timbral inspiration from many African records. Coltrane's incorporation of Indian and Middle Eastern styles in his music was more limited, but still prevalent. In 1961, he stated his intention to use the "particular sounds and scales" of India "to produce specific emotional meanings, as in [his own composition] 'India'". Both "
Impressions" and the chords of "
So What", the all-time most popular jazz track, recorded with
Miles Davis, are centered on
scales Coltrane invented as a mix of
Indian ragas and Western scales. and on the
lead sheet to his own composition "All or Nothing At All", Coltrane reportedly handwrote the phrase "Arabic feeling".
Latin and South America One of the most popular genres of ethno jazz is
Latin jazz, characterized by a combination of jazz elements with traditional Latin American music. In addition, instrumentation plays an important role. While standard jazz bands feature a rhythm section (piano, guitar, bass and drums) and winds (saxophone, trumpet or trombone), Latin music makes use of many more percussive instruments, such as timbales, congas, bongos, maracas, claves, guiros, and vibes, which were first played in a Latin setting by
Tito Puente. Musicians combine these two instrumentations to create a Latin jazz sound. Cuba and Brazil were among the first countries to develop this music, and thereby some of the most influential.
Cuba Afro-Cuban music developed in Cuba from West African origins, and is characterized by the use of Cuban claves. There are two kinds of clave: the
rumba and the
son, both of which are typically used in a two-measure pattern in
cut time. Both add a base, mood, and flow to the music, creating polyrhythms and asymmetry within their traditional settings. When combined with jazz, which was more symmetrical and featured a heavy
back beat, a new Cuban-jazz fusion was created, known as
Afro-Cuban jazz or Cubop. The musicians known for planting the seeds of Cubop were
Mario Bauzá, a Cuban trumpeter, and Frank Grillo, a Cuban
maraca player who was also known as
Machito. Both immigrated to the United States, where they performed Cuban music and were influenced by jazz. One of the most important collaborations was when Bauzá was working with famous jazz trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie. Bauzá introduced Dizzy to
Chano Pozo and Chiquitico, conga and bongo players, respectively; together they began a big band that combined jazz and Cuban music. In 1946 they performed the first Afro-Cuban jazz concert in
Carnegie Hall. The concert was a sensation because it combined Latin syncopated bass lines, percussion drumming, cross rhythms, and
bebop language over a Latin feel. Some of the most famous recordings from this band were "Cuban Be", "Cuban Bop", "Algo Bueno", and "Manteca".
Brazil Brazilian jazz has its roots in
samba, which comes from a combination of African dances and march rhythms from the 19th century. The samba rhythm is characterized by an emphasis on the second beat of each measure. Unlike Cuban music, this style does not have a clave pattern, resulting in a more relaxed sensation and less tension. Brazilian music was introduced to the United States around the 1930s by Hollywood, with songs like "
Tico-Tico no Fubá" and "Brazil", but lost popularity over the coming years until its revival in 1962, when saxophonist
Stan Getz and guitarist
Charlie Byrd recorded the album
Jazz Samba with
Verve Records after Byrd was inspired by a trip to Brazil; the track "
Desafinado" reached #1 status in the pop charts and won a Grammy for Best Solo Performance. Gilberto's "Bim-Bom," often described as the first bossa nova song, was inspired by Brazil's post-WWII modernization movement in the 1950s. In 1958, Jobim and de Moraes recorded "Chega de Saudade", but it was Gilberto's version that launched the bossa nova movement. After the release of
Jazz Samba, Stan Getz invited Gilberto to record an album together. They released
Getz/Gilberto in 1964, which also featured Gilberto's wife,
Astrud Gilberto, whose soft vocal style became definitive of bossa nova. The former of the two makes use of the
provikvane (a Bulgarian folk element characterized by an ascending
leap to the
leading tone of the scale) and interplay between the two
genres via
call and response. Throughout "Blues in 9", the call is commonly a
modal portion of a Bulgarian folk tune, answered by its response in the style of
pentatonic blues.
Eastern Europe Jazz was introduced to
Moscow by
Valentin Parnakh in 1922. This event was followed by the arrest, imprisonment, and deportation of many jazz musicians throughout the
Soviet Union for their Western influence, as ordered by
Joseph Stalin. This only made the genre more appealing to young musicians, resulting in multiple "underground"
jazz bands and orchestras, among the first of which was a handful of
Azerbaijani ensembles directed from 1926 by A. Ionannesyani and Mikhail Rol'nikov. Ethno jazz was more recently represented in the
Eurovision Song Contest by
Georgia with entries such as "
Three Minutes to Earth" by
The Shin and
Mariko Ebralidze in the
2014 contest and "
For You" by
Iriao in the
2018 contest.
The Middle East Much of the Western music introduced to
Iran (and subsequently neighboring Middle Eastern countries) after
World War II by the modernization policies of
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was met with
censorship similar to that what had occurred in the Soviet Union decades before. Jazz became popular
contraband after the
1979 Revolution. In 1994,
saxophonist and
bandmaster Peter Soleimanipour received the first musical permit after the revolution, which led to public performances of his band Atin, who played jazz standards alongside original compositions that combined Iranian musical elements with jazz. Soleimanipour has described his music as
talfiqi (trans. "fusion"), explicitly avoiding the label of "jazz artist", while incorporating African and
Latin rhythms, Iranian
instrumentation, and jazz elements on works as recent as his 2003 album
Egosystem. ==See also==