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Abstract
This paper presents an ethnographic account of jazz music in Athens. The small scene under scrutiny is mainly populated by professional session instrumentalists of the Greek popular music scene who perform jazz as a side activity for their own pleasure. In the process, they construct a conceptual dichotomy between ‘work’ and ‘play’. Drawing on the author's extended involvement in this scene, and focusing on private interviews with musicians, this article unveils the discourses of cosmopolitanism invoked through local jazz music-making. The ethnographic material presented aims to illustrate how even a small subculture can serve as a terrain for contesting cosmopolitan imaginaries.
Acknowledgements
This article is an expanded version of the prize-winning student paper presented at the 2008 annual conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, held at Cardiff University. The author is grateful to Marina Roseman, Suzel Ana Reily and Fiona Magowan, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this text.
Notes
1. The quotations in this article are taken from private semi-structured interviews that took place between January 2008 and June 2009 in Athens. Some of the names have been changed in cases where informants have chosen to remain anonymous.
2. For a critique of the cultural imperialism narrative, see Born and Hesmondhalgh (Citation2000:25).
3. In an important review of anthropological and ethnomusicological work on globalisation from 1980 to 2004, Stokes situates Slobin's ideas in the optimistic/liberal extreme of the spectrum (its Marxist counter-approach being characterised by the work of Veit Erlmann), since ‘Its only consistently organizing force is consumer choice, which … offers modern subjects more-or-less limitless opportunities for self-fashioning’ (2004:49). I—conversely—take Slobin's terminology as a useful tool within Tsing's and Turino's conceptualisation of globalisation and cosmopolitanism as projects, since it alerts us to the consideration of social positioning, visibility, and power asymmetries between different domains of cultural production.
4. George Lipsitz has argued that all cross-cultural exchanges and blends include an element of miscommunication, which can often be productive; he refers to this as ‘creative misunderstanding’ (Citation1994:159–69).
5. Translated from Greek by the current author.
6. Kathimerini (newspaper), 1 August 2001. http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_civ_2_01/08/2001_5000028 (Anonymous 2001, accessed 16 June 2010).
7. Their jazz influences can be heard in recording compilations such as Relaxing with Yiannis Spartakos and his Golden Trio (Spártakos Citation1975) and 40 Years of Jazz (Pléssas Citation1981).
8. For a detailed examination of the aesthetics, politics and controversies surrounding the term laïkó tragoúdi, see Tragaki (Citation2005).
9. Pinckney reports a similar situation in India, where the growth of nationalist, anti-Western feelings contributed to the decline of jazz in the 1950s (1990:37–8).
10. For a sample of Sphinx's music, see http://www.falireas.com/product_info.php?info=p33_Sphinx--The-first-Greek-Jazz-Album.html&XTCsid=fn15frj8skuep7l2pvraefba45 (accessed 16 June 2010).
11. The title features the word ‘jazz’ in English and Greek, thus denoting the magazine's intention to represent a balance between international and domestic jazz production.
12. Page One (Page One Citation1994) and Beyond the Blue (Page One Citation1995).
13. Since the late 1990s, the Greek music industry has been a site of struggle between the multi-national corporations (Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal) and the Greek companies (Heaven and Legend) over the signing of established local pop stars. However, this has not affected the work of freelance instrumentalists, who do not generally perceive this struggle as capable of bringing any qualitative changes to the local music market.
14. Polychronakis (2007) presents an interesting case of a Greek pop star's brief success at reaching international audiences. In addition, the Greek diaspora serves as an enthusiastic audience for Greek popular music stars (see Panagakos Citation2003). However, given the limited distribution of Greek recordings abroad, these audiences primarily contribute to the Greek music industry by attending the few concerts that are held in large Western urban centres.
15. For a discussion of Greek popular music genres and their history, see Papanikolaou (2007), Tragaki (2005) and Cowan (1993).
16. This term is widely used in the Greek jazz scene in its English form. The implied gender connotations are not perceived as problematic since the overwhelming majority of professional instrumentalists in Athens are male. This gender imbalance is even stronger in the jazz scene.
17. Indeed, the very fact that the US jazz musician in the second half of the twentieth century managed to transcend his (gender specificity intended) social boundedness and enter the industry of widely circulated popular music is precisely what makes this intercultural affiliation imaginable in contemporary Athens. The fact that several jazz autobiographies (for instance, Davis Citation1991; Mingus Citation1981) have been translated into Greek stands as an example of this universalising phenomenon.
18. Sadly, since the Greek economic collapse in 2010 and the imposition of severe austerity measures, most of these small venues have not been profitable and are threatened by bankruptcy. Whilst this article was being written, the Paráfono Jazz Club, the oldest among them, was (and remains) temporarily closed.
19. Musicians that I spoke to used this expression (frequently in English) to describe a feeling of collective engagement through jazz performances (see Tsioulakis Citation2012). Elina Hytönen (Citation2010) has also elaborated on the ways in which experiences of ‘flow’ and the achievement of ‘altered states of consciousness’ are articulated among Finnish and British jazz musicians.
20. Elsewhere, I have argued that professional musicians also use life narratives and private discussions as discursive spaces for the symbolic subversion of social hierarchies (Tsioulakis Citation2011). Our private interviews often served as an opportunity for musicians to express their ideological consciousness and to undermine the authority of the power-holders of the work setting, engaging in what I call ‘discursive resistance’. Similarly, occasions of musical play provide the stage for the performance of such resistance in musical terms.
21. To my knowledge, Belfast has no specialised jazz music venues; the weekly number of jazz gigs there is in fact a fraction of those taking place in Athens.
22. Atkins presents an image of the Japanese jazzman as a ‘musician who spends hours a day practicing, who performs for less than transportation expenses, and who will be lucky to record for a small independent label’ (2001:8). According to Christian, British jazz musicians ‘are only too glad to get the chance to play something more to their taste and with more freedom of expression even for very little money’ (1987:224). And Ford reports that, even in the United States, ‘by the mid-1980s, it was clear that jazz's continued health as an art form was dependent on the support of charitable foundations and nonprofit arts organizations’ (2008:124).
23. Kevin Dawe uses the term ‘ethniki mousike’ to refer to ‘world music in Greece’ (2007:178). However, the Greek word ‘ethnikí’ (ϵθνικηη) means ‘national’. Greek musicians and audiences use the English ‘ethnic’, rather than the Greek ‘ethnikıí’, to describe ‘exotic’ music; this includes the ‘non-national’ and the neo-traditional that incorporates cosmopolitan fusions.
24. Juniper Hill (Citation2009) has shown how experimental improvisation was employed by teachers at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as a training method in Finnish folk music. Kapsokavadis's (2010) research in Athenian secondary music schools, however, has suggested that in the Greek context the same thing occurred as an unintentional side-effect of the official educational policy.
25. See Dawe (Citation2007).
26. The pieces ‘Funky Vergina’ and ‘Ivo’, respectively, from the album II (Mode Plagal 1998).
27. See in particular his album Torch Dance (Rakópoulos Citation2001).
28. For an analysis of the role of a traditional instrumentalist in Iasis’ album Amalgama (Iasis Citation1998), see Kallimopoulou (2009:153–4).
29. The 2005 album Pséma san Alítheia, which features well-established guest musicians from both the jazz and the neo-traditional scenes, is a good example of this band's experimentation with instrumental combinations. For a sample of Checkmate in Two Flats' performances see Video Example 1, available online at http://www.informaworld.com/REMF
30. For a detailed discussion of purist discourses and the debates over authenticity within the Athenian neo-traditional scene, see Kallimopoulou (2009).
31. Stokes has identified such attitudes as intrinsic to academic ethnomusicological work itself, asserting that outright hostility towards invented national traditions has established hybridity as the new authenticity (Citation2004:60–1).
32. One jazz pianist told me that at the height of the ‘ethnic’ aesthetic in the 1990s: ‘I would get more jobs if I studied oúti for a year than what I get now for playing the piano since I was six years old’. Tina K. Ramnarine reports a similar phenomenon in Finland where musicians equated the ability to play folk instruments with opportunities to travel and perform around the world (Citation2003:202).
33. White (Citation1987:194) has also shown how Swiss jazz musicians suffered from the fact that local jazz clubs preferred foreign musicians as both more ‘authentic’ and cheaper.