ABSTRACT
More useful for actual performance was sheet music which, by the early 1920s through an expanding global music publishing industry, shipped jazz repertoire as far afield as New Zealand, Russia and South Africa. Estonia’s first professional jazz band began in 1918 using sheet music brought in by crews of ships to the port city of Tallin. The international jazz diaspora is thus a case study of the negotiation between local cultural practices and global cultural processes, between culture and mass mediations. As both idea and practice, jazz came into being through negotiation with the vehicles of its dissemination, and with conditions it encountered in any given location. The earliest diasporic practitioners were jobbing musicians seeking to remain abreast of the developments in their profession, apprenticed in a range of demotic entertainments, with the closest approach to jazz training being versions of minstrelsy and ‘ragging’, drawing on a musical vocabulary that was also etched with their own local musical traditions.
