Does the United States have the right to be chauvinistic about jazz?

Contemplating this perspective before I arrive in Bremen tonight to Jazzahead 2026

As I prepare to travel to Bremen, I have been In my thoughts about my previous post, “American Exceptionalism Could Be the Road to Ruin.” Therein, I tried to name something that many in the presenter, artist, booking and management community feel but rarely articulate.

I know I promised you all a case study on the British jazz scene, and why it has succeeded, but in doing extensive research I realized this article has already been written by others. In addition, a compelling book entitled Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion has been released by writer André Marmot, which I am now in the process of reading. A qualified endorsement of Marmot’s book was penned by the writer, Richard Williams.

What follows is a futher attempt to describe current economic and cultural realities, stemming from nationalistic politics and the rise of right wing forces around the globe that have left cultural funding in the dust.

Illustration: Tolga Akmen/EPA/the Guardian

This has led to a fundamental mutual misunderstanding of how jazz is funded with economic realities being vastly different than they were 5-10 years ago.

On the American side, a general lack of awareness of recent political and funding realities in Europe creates skewed perception of reality. Similarly from talking to European presenters and musicians, there is a general misunderstanding of how American institutions fund the arts, that is antithetical to the majority of European social democratic policy.

In short, North American jazz musicians and the industry view Europe (particularly Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Poland), as a bastion of money to be pillaged based on old conditions that are no longer real.

This fundamental misunderstanding and a lack of mutual respect for the artistic value of each nation’s music, has caused a significant chasm in how each side perceives each other. A feeling of confusion and misinformation pervades this entire relationship.

U.S.-based musicians and the industry largely believe that jazz unequivocally belongs to the United States. On the one hand, the music was born in the U.S., but as anyone paying attention to current reality would quickly conclude, the music is a global phenomenon. We can no longer stick our heads in the sand and deny this. This all-or-nothing mentality has serious consequences for how jazz from the U.S. gets received in places that are not within our borders.

Unlike the U.S., the rest of the world have created an economic and cultural infrastructure so that American jazz musicians can go abroad and make a living touring in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa.

At the same time, somewhat ironically, foreign musicians cannot enter the U.S. to have the privilege to work without significant up-front investment (often to the tune of $3000-$8000 (numbers based on varying degrees of rushing) per musician for a work visa). And there seems to be zero interest in changing this reality on a legislative level on the American side.

For the sake of keeping this conversation somewhat contained, I am limiting this conversation broadly to European countries for the moment. Of course, Europe is not a monolith. I spoke to human rights attorney, newly minted artist manager at New Village Management and a prominent cultural leader in The Netherlands, Mike Bindraban.¹ He responded with an admonition.

“If I look to, for example the development of Norwegian improvised music, that’s a different trajectory from Dutch music and a different etiology. To get to the nitty-gritty of this debate, I think that discussion on what is European jazz or what is the French heritage or the Scandinavian heritage or the British heritage or the Dutch heritage…I think you need to differentiate that.”

In retrospect, treating Europe as one entity is indeed unfair. Going forward (in future entries in this series), I will attempt to differentiate each European countries’ traditions separately, getting deeper with stakeholders in each country.

My own perspective

Over the past two decades, my work has placed me in a uniqute position. I’m known in Europe as an advocate for American musicians. In America, my work has often involved the promotion of European and other non-U.S.-made jazz.

However, as a listener, I don’t think I ever heard a single European jazz player before I entered college (perhaps beyond Django Reinhart).² Since then, I have been exposed to a ton of non-U.S.-made jazz. In my early 20s, through my work in radio and slowly picking up stuff from reading the WIRE and my work in PR, I was made aware of musicians like e.s.t. (Esbjorn Svenssen Trio), the late Peter Brötzmann, and later Michael Wollny.

The poster for the 2024 International Jazz Day Concert from Tangiers, Morocco. How many of these artists can you name without doing a reverse image search?

My pre- and post-college perspective forced me to confront how much extraordinary music never enters the American discourse. Foreign jazz doesn’t fit the America-first model of chauvinism, even among liberal types.

These days I’m asking myself hard questions about power, cultural exchange, and what an actual cultural exchange might demand of us.

A long evolution of economic imbalance is playing out between the United States and Europe. There is more than just a tinge of resentment among European presenters and other stakeholders that European music is not taken seriously in America and that Americans expect everything on a silver platter when they come to Europe.

At the same time, most of the music that comes across my plate on a day-to-day basis is by New Yorkers or other Americans. I am incredibly biased; a product of a NYC-centric world view.

However, if a person logs onto Apple Music, Spotify, Qobuz or Tidal, one is confronted with a very different reality. Jazz from France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Spain, Denmark and Norway, to mention just a few are incredibly well-represented in playlists and featured album placements.

Despite the streaming ecosystem, most of the music that I, and my fellow Americans actually get a chance to see played is by Americans.

European jazz is not a monolith…

What even prompted me or others to lump European jazz into a codified sound, as I did in my previous entry. I could easily name a dozen European record labels of today and yesteryear that present vastly different sounds. ECM, Edition, ACT Music, Stunt, Smalltown Supersound, We Jazz, and Hubro are just a few European labels with a distinctly non-U.S. sound. I can’t say many of them sound similar to each other. Each has its own unique sound world. And each artist on these labels of course, sounds different from one another.

And yet, most of us on my side of the Atlantic are ignorant. Unlike the average U.S. consumer, I’ve not only had the opportunity to see a ton of jazz from European countries, but I’ve worked on dozens of campaigns for French, German, Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Polish, Spanish and Belgian musicians. They all sound different!

Some deeply value Black American aesthetics (swing, sway, a sense of connectedness to forebears like Louis Armstrong or John Coltrane or Anthony Braxton). Others are charting their own path entirely.

Some truly excellent music I’ve heard in the past few years has come from the French pianist Eve Risser. France’s answer to Kris Davis or David Virelles, Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra and White Light Orchestra are two of the most stunning large ensembles to emerge from French creative music in the last decade. I am not as up on her small group work but if I ever see her name on an album, I know it’s a sign of quality and experimentation. I first encountered Risser through my work with the Orchestra National de Jazz, led by electric bassist and record producer Daniel Yvinec.

Two others whom I always know are going to deliver the goods are German-Swiss drummer Christian Lillinger and Austrian pianist Elias Stemeseder (who lives in New York). Stemeseder came to NYC over a decade ago and quickly joined the band of American expat drummer Jim Black. Recently via their work on Intakt Records with various New Yorkers like Peter Evans, Brandon Seabrook and Russell Hall, they have been gaining more and more looks from the American scene; and not just musicians.

As noted before, the British pianist and a true original Pat Thomas is a titan of modern improvised music. As I stated on my instagram late last year:

Having been in the music business for close to 20 years professionally, it’s rare that I become newly enamored of a living elder. I thought I’d heard all the old heads in my 20s and 30s, if not live, then at least on records…it took this solo album, Hikmah on the TAO Forms label, to make me realize what a true original U.K. pianist Pat Thomas is. Thomas stands at the forefront of Black creative music. His music truly contains multitudes - the entire span of Black music.

Others who can really play annd deserve greater notice include Eivind Aarset, a Norwegian guitarist whom I was privileged to work for on the Jazzland label. Aarset is heavy, along the lines of an Adam Rogers or a Raoul Bjorkenheim. And yet almost no one knows him in the States; even guitar nerds, which is a shame.

In recent years I’ve come to be aware of the French musicians Emile Parisien (a soprano sax specialist) and his frequent bandmate, the virtuosic accordionist Vincent Peirani. They form the core of the French supergroup Les Égarés, along with Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal, which miraculously has toured in the United States a couple times.

Additionally the Swedish trumpeter and bandleader Goran Kajfeš recent knocked me out. His band Tropiques for Helsinki-based We Jazz Records I’d heart a few times on Bandcamp, before finally getting knocked out by his music on Perth, Western Australia-based jazz show.

Of course anyone who has not been living under a rock has heard Jakob Bro, the preeminent Danish guitarist. Known both for his extensive work with Europeans and New Yorkers starting notably with Balladeering with the late Lee Konitz and many others. He is now releasing tons of music on his Loveland imprint, with much more on the way. Just in the last year, he’s released music by or with Palle Mikkelborg, Thomas Morgan, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille and Mark Turner, among many others.

The Norwegian trumpeter Matthias Eick has been capturing my ears for a good 22 years since I heard him on a Jaga Jazzist album at my college radio station. Another fine Norwegian trumpeter, whose sound often reminds me more of a clarinet than a brass instrument is Arve Henriksen. His appearance on Bro’s 2023 ECM album Uma Elmo (linked above) with Jorge Rossy on drums is one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever hear. He is truly unique and an international treasure. I was first introduced to the music of drummer Kresten Osgood and saxophonist Kjetil Møster via Mark Christman’s Ars Nova Workshop, who has had his ears open to Nordic sounds since the early 2000s, often partnering with the Norwegian consulate in NYC to bring Norwegian musicians to U.S. audiences.³

Peter Margasak, who writes the Substack Nowhere Street, left Chicago, made the move to Berlin to immerse himself in the European scene that he had chronicling in America since the early 2000s. Margasak is not an all-or-nothing guy. He loves music made by all kinds of people from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, Finland, Germany, Norway, Australia and so many other countries. He long ago got past the nationalistic rhetoric that defines so much jazz discourse in and around the U.S. (“America’s classical music” or “the most American thing since Baseball”).⁴

“This move was not about a handful of people I wanted to see… The infrastructure of Chicago, they brought tons of these people to the United States and no one in New York was calling. Chicagoans had always been intrepid about bringing in Europeans."

The influence and engagement with jazz from the U.S. is is evident in the sounds of European jazz. Kurt Rosenwinkel, Steve Coleman, Jim Black, Tim Berne and more recently, Ambrose Akinmusire and Robert Glasper loom large in the European consciousness.⁵ However, European musicians are and have been (for some time) adapting those influences to their own contexts, creating something distinct — often less tied to the blues, swing, and other more literal lineages that define much jazz being made in the States.⁶

In my interview with Bindraban, he addressed this very issue: “A lot of the European-based improvised music has a classical tradition in it. A lot of the improvised music is institutionalized in conservatories.” Furthermore, “the multicultural[ism] of certain cities in Europe, the idea of superdiversity⁷ is reflected in a way that people make improvised music and reference the Black American jazz to…correlate and translate that into their own style. Hence the development of, for example, acid jazz in the 90s….in London, which has a distinct sound, which is for me [is] very much London and….Northern UK-based...it comes from a black American tradition somehow, and it has had its own development.”

There also exists a powerful and relevant modern example that complicates the idea of American hegemony over the jazz narrative. The extraordinary success of British jazz. This worldwide success (admittedly of only a few artists), including in the U.S., calls into question whether the U.S. can truly remain chauvinistic about jazz.

My old friend, the Norwegian concert promoter and curator, Jan Ole Otnaes, told me last year, “History is repeating itself,” he wrote. “Twenty five to thirty years ago we had a similar situation as the British scene today. [Norwegian jazz keyboardist and electronic musician] Bugge Wesseltoft released his New Conception of Jazz and Nils Petter Molvær released Khmer.

[The British writer] Stuart Nicholson published a book “Is Jazz Dead (or has it moved to a New Address)?” and Wesseltoft was interviewed in the New York Times. He spoke quite negatively on jazz from the U.S. Some Norwegian and European festivals claimed that nothing was happening in the US scene and preferred to focus on what was happening in Europe.”

It was right at this time that Otnæs was appointed as festival artistic director at Molde Jazz. He wanted to focus both on Norway/Europe and on great talents on both sides of the Atlantic. Otnæs booked artists like Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Tony Malaby, Ikue Mori and many more, in addition to artists from Norway and all of Europe. “I got some criticism from Norwegian colleagues because of this,” said Otnæs by email.

What Stuart Nicholson had been saying all those years ago is now coming true but from within his own country, predominantly.

Look at the undeniable ripple effect of players like Shabaka, Nubya Garcia, Theon Cross, Yazz Ahmed, Moses Boyd, Yussef Dayes, Camilla George, Alfa Mist, Kokoroko and Ezra Collective. I don’t personally love all these artists. Some I find more remarkable than others. But you have to admit they have broken through, well beyond the UK.

How did this happen? How has British jazz broken through globally when other European scenes have struggled, relatively speaking? The answer lies partly in intentional cultivation and partly in incredible marketing and branding.

Organizations like Tomorrow’s Warriors and jazz re:freshed have quietly played an outsized role. Janine Irons and Gary Crosby founded Tomorrow’s Warriors to create a more inclusive and representative jazz ecosystem rooted in community, access, and cultural integrity. Drawing on backgrounds in music, education, and leadership, they sought to support artists often excluded by structural and financial barriers. Their work has centered on nurturing confidence, honoring Black musical traditions, and building sustainable pathways so emerging musicians can develop their voices and contribute meaningfully to a broader, more equitable cultural landscape. They have nurtured two generations of musicians who understand the American jazz tradition, but aren’t beholden to it. Their music blends jazz with grime, Afro-Caribbean musics, Nigerian high life, UK club culture, and London’s Superdiversity, to quote Bindraban.

My colleague, Yvette Griffith of jazz re:Freshed told me that my work with them in 2017 in the U.S. promoting shows by Shabaka, Moses Boyd, and Theon Cross, actually had an outsized influence in legitimizing U.K. Jazz in America. I wish that my advocacy could have included a larger swath of the music there (so much incredible U.K. jazz — from Pat Thomas to Orphy Robinson to Neil Charles to Tom Ollendorff to Alex Hitchcock) has been marginalized by the anointment of four or five major artists with a global reach), but I’ll take the compliment.

As has been noted elsewhere, there’s been a serious and admirable (almost punk) DIY ethic to the London and other UK scenes. The saxophonist Nubya Garcia told the British journalist Philip Watson last year, “We had a strong community, and we all played in each other’s projects, and we rose together. It happened slowly and collectively.” She continued, “We’ve been pushing at this since we were 20 and at university, proving that we could fill venues and provide the energy that people didn’t attribute to jazz, changing perceptions and making a difference, a cultural movement. So it’s great [that] the world decided to catch up and take notice and support us. We were very, very strong in knowing that other people’s ceilings [were] not our own.”

This current British scene proves that European jazz can absolutely become a global cultural force. European jazz is not about rejecting American influence. It’s about engaging with it, transforming it, and creating something real enough, urgent enough, to stand on its own terms.

Meanwhile, American musicians find themselves caught in a bind. Without strong national arts funding, without institutional support for domestic or international touring, and facing rising logistical costs. We have fewer and fewer levers to pull.

Agent Sergio Merino of Arco y Flecha says, “I think we’ve got to [consider] the contrast between the E.U.’s subsidized scene and independent promoters. The E.U. has coordinated a cultural industry that is producing and launching hundreds, if not thousands of professional musicians every year to E.U. stages, starting with music schools, management offices, and music export platforms, all subsidized; an incredible amount of support from every country that keeps everybody moving and creates[s] a fertile environment for Europeans and Americans alike. I don’t have information [on whether these] efforts are successful in placing E.U. artists in our ears. In my case, I am an independent aficionado, promoter, booker and producer. I like to [seek out] the free thinkers worldwide because it brings richness to [me].”

Conversely, there’s no easy way for America to formally “reciprocate” unless we are talking about engaging private money—accessing the wealth of individual millionaires or billionaires, who, by and large, are not currently supporting American musicans, let alone European ones.

Further addressing the “trade imbalance” referenced in my first article’s sub-headline, another insidious reality is exposed by Otnæs.

“American musicians [playing in] Norway do not need a work permit and can earn up to $10,000 per year without paying any tax. On the other hand, Norwegian musicians and bands going to the United States have to pay around NOK 13,000 (Norwegian Kroner) to get a work permit, play for low fees and pay tax from the first dollar earned.”

When Brice Rosenbloom and I first spoke of assembling Freedom Riders, NYC Winter Jazzfest’s first touring all-star band spreading a message of unity and a dedication to social justice ideals amid Trumpism, we were advised, wisely and sternly by veteran agent Katherine McVicker of Music Works International—in today’s Europe, collaboration with local musicians isn’t just appreciated; it should be expected.

It’s not about appeasement. It’s about showing that you see and respect the scenes you’re entering.

Jazz was originally music by Black Americans, brought to Europe and the world as such, but we are 100 years on and we face a different cultural reality surrounding the music.

If musicians from the United States want to remain a meaningful part of the global conversation around jazz and funding, we have to listen as much as we enjoy the sounds of our own voices and instruments. We have to engage with European musicians as peers, collaborate in each others bands and find ways to bring Europeans into the U.S. without making them foot the bill entirely.

Organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, Berklee Performance Center, IU Hancher, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the LA Philharmonic and others need to start thinking about programs to put aside some money to subsidize the Visa process. Otherwise we face a potential disastrous effect from Europeans who continue to open their doors to our artists.

As a manager, I’m encouraging all of my artists to develop bands that include Europeans or other foreigners not as a means of cultural diplomacy, but an act of economic pragmatism. There are plenty of European musicians who can play. I’m not saying that every American musician needs a token European in their band to work in Europe, but it wouldn’t hurt.

You only have to look at an institution like UNESCO and The Hancock Institute’s International Jazz Day — a gathering last year in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and the year before in Tangiers, Morocco, both of which drew musicians from every corner of the globe, united by the spirit of improvisation, freedom and Democracy (remember that?) — to be reminded that this music was never meant to belong to any one country forever. That tradition continues next week in Chicago where Herbie Hancock, Kurt Elling and the City of Chicago host international jazz day for the first time. Major props need to go to side person Bryan Farina for helping push this initiative through. Farina had a big role in getting local state politicians to be willing to serve as host city. It would be interesting to know who paid for the visas for the foreign musicians traveling into the U.S. for International Jazz Day.

As a corrolary to all of this, I have to thank my longtime friend and jazzahead’s Artistic Advisor Götz Buhler for recognizing this as a major issue in our industry. He invited me and Lydia Liebman, my fellow U.S. publicist to take part in a talk on European-American relations in the jazz sphere. I think this talk will largely focus on basic awareness of music from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the consideration of jazz from South Africa, South Korea, South America (particularly Brazil and Mexico) and Japan.

This talk will take place Thursday 23 March from 6:30 PM to 8 PM CET in Halle 7 at Messe Bremen. I’m not sure if our talk will be live-streamed but I hope it will be recorded and archived as it’s a very important conversation we need to be having, not just at jazzahead but at Winter Jazzfest, Big Ears, and every major festival or funding institution in the States.

The changes we’ve been seeing across Europe—particularly in talent buyers opting for more and more music from their own shores, isn’t coming with a bang. It’s a slow, but unmistakable progression. Of course American stars (Joshua Redman, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dianne Reeves, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian McBride, Brad Mehldau) will always be welcomed with open arms, but for the “rank and file” American musician, it gets harder and harder.

At the same time, American chauvinism over jazz and a lack of initiative to correct our myopic-ness has made it virtually impossible for Europeans or South Koreans or Africans or Brazilians or Egyptians or anyone without a U.S. passport to even enter our shores to share their art, let alone make an economically viable go of it.

To my knowledge, Yazz Ahmed has never toured the U.S. Certainly enough ink has been spilled on her recent albums that an American tour is warranted. Similarly, Eve Risser has never toured the U.S. except with a state-sponsored ensemble over a decade ago. Pat Thomas has barely done it beyond a handful of dates with [ahmed]. Surely not the Danish-born U.K.-based Jasper Høiby whose fantastic new trio I saw in London last week, since Phronesis disbanded. The list goes on and on. Our closed-mindedness happens without most of us batting an eye.

The door isn’t yet slammed shut in either direction. And there are good actors in this dialogue proposing change. But current trends in Europe are giving us a preview of the future. Whether we walk through that door, ready for real dialogue — or whether we ignore the warning signs — is entirely up to us.

1. Mike is widely known for having founded the Dutch booking agency, Good Music Company. As of Spring 2026, he is an artist manager at New Village Management and Supervisory Board member at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures and Rotterdam Festivals.

2. Actually, I remember reading in a book I had in high school about Polish saxophonist Zbigniew Namysłowski.

3. From following the output of ECM, Hubro, ACT Music, Clean Feed, Dox Records, We Jazz, Challenge, and others, I’ve slowly begun to appreciate players like Iiro Rantala, Verneri Pohjola, Aki Rissanen, Timo Lassy, Petter Eldh, Julia Hülsmann, Giovanni Guidi, Susana Santos Silva, Camilla Nebbia, Tania Giannouli, Francesco Bigoni, Eric Vloeimans, Jozef Dumoulin, Luigi Grasso, Maciej Obara, Sun-Mi Hong, Susanna & The Magic Orchestra, Suzan Venemann, Shabaka, Matthew Bourne, Kit Downes, Gwilym Simcock, and many more. Then there are the living elders or even legends of European jazz: Nils Petter Molvær, Jaga Jazzist, Bobo Stenson, Mats Gustafsson, Fire! Orchestra, Palle Mikkelborg, Joachim Kuhn, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Nik Bärtsch, Louis Sclavis, Michel Portal (R.I.P.), Joëlle Léandre, Paolo Fresu, Stefano Bollani, Enrico Rava, Jorge Rossy, Barre Phillips (R.I.P.), Barry Guy, Carlos Bica, Tomasz Stanko (R.I.P.). Marcin Wasilewski, Emil Viklický and so many more.

4. An interview with Peter will follow shortly after this post. It’s been ready for months, but I feel I may need to add to it once I see the comments on this post.

5. So too do Robert Glasper, Gretchen Parlato, Henry Threadgill, John Zorn, John Hollenbeck, Joe Lovano, Mark Turner, Billy Hart, Billy Harper, Dave Douglas, Cassandra Wilson, MMW, The Bad Plus, and many more.

6. My personal impression of much of the music presented as showcases at an industry conference like jazzahead showcases prioritizes atmosphere and abstraction over traditional structures of groove or emotional immediacy; read Black music. It’s not a betrayal of jazz. It’s just different. And there is plenty of jazz being made all over Europe that is in direct dialogue with its American forbears going back to Bechet, Ellington, Parker, Gordon, Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Ayler, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. However, for whatever reason, at Jazzahead I haven’t personally heard much of that.

7. Superdiversity, a term coined by sociologist Steven Vertovec in 2007, describes a level of population complexity in modern cities that goes beyond simple ethnic diversity. It is characterized by a “diversification of diversity” driven by new migration patterns, resulting in varied combinations of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and social backgrounds, as well as complex legal statuses, genders, and ages.