ABSTRACT
Steven Feld’s study of jazz in Ghana is an extended case study in the complex reciprocities of the jazz diaspora. One of the major ways in which jazz is ‘fenced off’ is by the idea of ‘authenticity’, deployed so blandly by jazz writers, particularly those with a deep investment in the canonisation process. Of course jazz is not the only form of music to fall under its shadow but it set the template for modern popular music. Studies of South Africa disclose the incandescent convergence between a music coded as ‘black’ and a local tradition of deeply racialised power relations. But compare this with, for example, a national community perceiving itself as being a white mono-culture for which jazz was actually its introduction to the concept of race, as in the case of Iceland. The history of jazz, including the one authorised by the guardians of its borders, is a history of fusions, hybridities, syncretisms and generic violations.
