ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the dissemination and reception of Swedish jazz focusing on concepts that have arisen in the discussions in the previous chapters: nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, and hipness. The research shows how jazz critics and impresarios used Swedish jazz—and the ideas it evoked—to promote their various ideals.
The foreignness of the Swedes from the “north” was romanticized as they were unlikely able to play jazz, an exoticization that is theorized as borealism. The chapter further explores the racial imagination in descriptions of Swedish jazz musicians as intellectual, civilized and with “formal training” in music, even if so had not been the case. Gender was a relevant category as a specific masculinity and femininity were connected to the Swedish nationality of the musicians. A discussion of hipness and Swedish jazz clarifies how the various concepts discussed in the chapter come together. Values from African-American culture became appropriated by white men in the 1950s. In this context, knowledge of jazz and knowing exotic jazz musicians from Sweden were expressions of being hip.
