‘Jazz’ at large: ‘Scapes’ and the imagination in the performances of Moses Molelekwa and Nah Youn-Sun

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)As I look through my collection of jazz albums, I am bombarded with a flow of images and information: iconic photos of John Coltrane seated with a soprano sax across his lap or Miles Davis staring thoughtfully into the distance; recurrent titles such as 'Summertime' and 'Autumn Leaves'; clips of reviews from magazines such as Downbeat, integral in defining an aesthetic standard of excellence in the imagination of jazz audiences. However, this flow is occasionally punctuated by albums bearing images and text discordant with the rest: place names drawn from the urban African space of Johannesburg, such as 'Tembisa' and 'Rockey Street'; quotes from reviews written in Korean rather than Roman characters; photos of an East Asian female vocalist on the cover. These images and texts evoke a complex multiplicity of musical memories and imaginings, drawn both from lived experiences and from imagined worlds I have never occupied. In this paper I will discuss how these dynamics enable the 'work of the imagination', as articulated by Arjun Appadurai (1996), in undermining dominant, fixed definitions of the genre of jazz. In particular, I will explore this process by showing how the musical activities of Nah Youn-Sun (1969-) and Moses Molelekwa (1973-2001) may be understood in terms of their engagement with various media- and ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1996: 33).A number of scholars have discussed how jazz has been constructed as being the creative product of the United States of America (Atkins 2003; Anderson 2007; Muller 2001; Nicholson 2005). It is this 'centering'1 in the US that makes 'jazz' a particularly interesting site in which to investigate the dynamics of imaginary contestation of dominant constructions of center and periphery. Although scholars have discussed how other genres such as world music have allowed places previously marginal to global popular music to achieve wider currency, world music has from its inception emphasized its utilization of 'exotic' sounds from beyond western centers (Stokes 2003; Nicholson 2005; Taylor 2007). Jazz, on the other hand, has involved constructions and negotiations of nationhood in its definition throughout its history (Anderson 2007). For this reason, investigating the potential of the imaginary engagement with semiotic configurations involved in the performances of two jazz musicians from outside the US-thus allowing for reconfigurations of center/periphery relations and renegotiations of a genre whose definitions have previously been authorized and articulated within that nation state-represents a useful lens through which to analyze the dynamics of globalization.I hope to show how the music of two non-Americans, Moses Molelekwa and Nah Youn-Sun-frequently described as 'jazz' artists in media reviews-may be understood as challenging which sounds may be classified as 'jazz', and who may be included in its audiences. In particular, I will focus on their active involvement in-frequently trans-global-collaborations with artists outside or on the peripheries of the genre of jazz. I will also explore the conditions of globalization that make possible these reconfigurations of the dynamics of genre making and re-making, and how these dynamics relate to broader processes of reimagining global geographies of power and music.In his book, Modernity at Large (1996), Arjun Appadurai explains that, in recent times, a disjuncture has arisen between the global landscapes of economics, culture and politics. He proposes that such disjunctures should be explored by analyzing the relationship among five theoretical dimensions: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. In describing the nature of these theoretical constructs, he explains that the shared suffix of 'scape' 'allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes' and underlines the fact that 'these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors' (1996: 33). …