ABSTRACT
The discourses and infrastructures that have sustained it are themselves in many cases creations of the diasporic process and can only be understood as such. It is necessary to develop alternative narratives and methodologies, to continue to shift emphasis from the ‘text’ to the larger historical and cultural contexts, but also to think in terms of different kinds of discourse. These alternative ‘off-centre’ perspectives will also sustain a healthy scepticism about the criteria of evaluation that are deployed in jazz historiography, including the dubious instrument of ‘authenticity’ and its associated aesthetics. Framed by the appropriate checks, the particular case of testimony also points towards research models which are specific to jazz as a cultural practice. A music which not only has its own distinctive forms and performance protocols, but which has always been in conditions of such vigorous flux, is not going to be tractable to an aesthetic of fixity inherited from art music.
