ABSTRACT
‘Fission’ provides a platform on which to invoke ‘fusion’, the development of syncretisms between a fully defined jazz formation and other music genres, a stream which from the late twentieth century flowed into the broader deltas of World Music. Although the free jazz movement was pan-European, there was nonetheless a sense of national inflections. To underline the distinctiveness of free jazz in France, in 1967 Barney Wilen proposed the term nouveau jazz. The case of Latin fusions with jazz signals a common source, since much of the former arises from the same geo-cultural traditions as jazz: African influences migrating across the Atlantic through the slave trade. In Africa, in particular, local instrumentation has played a major role in the evolving jazz aesthetic, made more distinctive and conspicuous by the culturally eclectic deployment of instruments, including those improvised from objets trouves, strikingly illustrated in Feld’s study of Ghanaian jazz.
