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December
2004:
With
transnational corporate entities uniting and international capital flows
soaring in number, the global financial system will soon be linked in
every facet. Once the world’s economy is fully connected, the cultural
sphere will be next. Jazz is America’s cultural phenomenon, yet many
nations have their own unique music. Once the Bretton Woods regime of
the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund unite economic capital, cultural capital will be next in
line for assimilation. This means jazz musicians may have to start
incorporating other aspects of world music in their style. Don Cherry
was one jazz musician who embraced other cultures’ music; so did Dave
Brubeck (as demonstrated in his opener to Time Out).
William
Parker once showed a class of New Jersey middle school students, via the
internet during a Knit Media jazz school session recorded in New York
City's Lower Manhattan, that Albert Ayler’s
soprano style sounded like Cantonese music. Soon the United Nations
will start promoting musical festivals that place jazz side by side with
South Indian and East Asian music, as well as other distinct art forms
from different cultures. People are against globalization because they
think it generates and permeates the notion of economic inequality, yet
I think it has ameliorative cultural pursuits: further integrating the
arts.
A united world may one day look at jazz as America’s gift to
global culture, but jazz will not be the dominant music of the world. I’m okay with this since I feel our nation’s bureaucratic leviathan has
already contributed to enough of a hegemonic persona abroad. I feel that
other countries shouldn’t be quieted the way they have been in the
past. When Benny Goodman toured the USSR, he was diplomatically
promoting jazz as capitalist foreign policy; now I want to hear what
other nations have to say, through their own music.
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