ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to survey the extents to which jazz discourses and infrastructures were created as part of the diasporic process itself, both beyond the supposed fountainhead of New Orleans and beyond the United States (US). Apart from its stylistic sub-sets, the printed record indicates that the word jazz itself seems to have been a polysemic formation derived from outside New Orleans. The material supporting mechanisms of any cultural form largely evolve in association with its discourses, and accordingly a great many of the jazz infrastructures also developed outside the US. Gennari writes of the emergence of ‘an aestheticized discourse of jazz’ in the 1930s and 1940s ‘carried out in collectors’ “hot clubs” and in the Modernism-inspired “little magazines” attached to them’, that ‘defined the very idea of jazz-down to our time’. The 1988 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz lists around 350 annual jazz festivals globally, most of them in Europe and the US, where relatively manageable distances make them accessible to musicians.
