IEJCGRMI · Improvising Europe: Jazz, Cultural Globalisation and the Reinvention of Multiethnic Identities

Improvising Europe: Jazz, Cultural Globalisation and the Reinvention of Multiethnic Identities

Free improvisation, also known as creative, spontaneous, or real-time music, is celebrated for its utopian qualities and aesthetic radicalism. Musicians from diverse musical, cultural, national, and ethno-racial backgrounds come together in non-hierarchical settings, free from predefined guidelines, transcending fixed musical genres and identities. Often positioned at the fringes of “legitimate culture,” this movement has served as the “ultimate avant-garde” since the 1960s—a dynamic space for experimentation, collective risk-taking, and unrestrained creative flow. Despite its transnational essence, this artistic movement is deeply shaped by the local characteristics of urban scenes, offering a lens to explore postcolonial Europe’s sonic landscape through improvised music. The research project Improvising Europe: Jazz, Cultural Globalization and the Reinvention of Multiethnic Identities focuses on contemporary European music scenes to provide a comprehensive view of the social and artistic diversity inherent in free improvisation. Based on in-depth interviews with 37 artists from Spain, Hungary, and the UK, this study examines the movement’s utopian claims, exploring its intersections with race, colonialism, and gender. Combining cultural sociology, popular music studies, jazz studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnomusicology, the research delves into musical socialization, cultural assimilation, financial strategies, and gender inequalities within the jazz and improvised music scenes of Barcelona, Budapest, and Manchester/Birmingham. Each city’s jazz/improvised music scene is shaped by its unique historical, ethnic, and racial dynamics related to migration and diaspora activities. Through semi-structured interviews and ethnographic methods, this qualitative investigation reconstructs how these practices reflect, shape, and reinvent Europe’s cultural landscape. As a transnational and interdisciplinary project, it generates new knowledge on contemporary racialized and gendered expressions of cultural diversity and assimilation through improvised music, contributing to the fostering of intercultural dialogue. The four main objectives of the research tackled distinct domains of improvised music as a community- and scene based cultural practice across the three research sites: 1) Objective 1 (O1): To map the relationship between musical socialization and cultural distinctions. 2) Objective 2 (O2): To analyze the diasporic (re)inventions of jazz traditions; 3) Objective 3 (O3): To explore the role of gender in symbolic and economic hierarchies; 4) Objective 4 (O4): To construct a three-dimensional model of artistic labor.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union