ABSTRACT
The potential benefits of studying the global jazz diaspora, however, go beyond that simple calculus. Few of the issues that traverse jazz can be adequately contextualised within modernity while the story of the music remains confined within the United States (US). Jazz studies presented as ‘histories’ are overwhelmingly dominated by the US, with some passing references to such outlanders as Django Reinhardt or Antônio Carlos Jobim, exceptions who prove the rule. The relationships between popular music, modernity, place, space, politics, identity and the high/low cultural binary that have become perennial fields for researchers can find prototypes in the century-long history of jazz. The canonical account of the history of the music itself relies on the recognition that jazz was in a process of continuous formation in the diaspora within the US. It is harder to be more remote from the jazz circuit than Australasia in the 1920s, yet from that region comes a dramatic lesson in the multiple paths of globalisation.
