Can jazz be rid of the racial imagination? Creolization, racial discourses, and semiology of music.

French ethnomusicologist Bernard Lortat-Jacob likes to proclaim: "Music is always much more than music" (Lortat-Jacob 1996). In the same vein, one could declare that today "black music is always much more than black music." If by black music we mean a diversity of genres that appeared in the Americas, fashioned by the ordeals of slavery and racism, it is universally acknowledged that the creative processes through which they were invented were fueled by mixing and blending, and that these musics thereby incorporated elements coming from traditions which were not "black." Then, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, black American music began to travel, under the guise of blackface minstrel shows or in the form of jubilee choirs (Erlman 1999; Gilroy 1991), and it was not long before they became popular in many countries around the world.

In the twentieth century, jazz followed suit, opening the way for Caribbean and South American genres such as calypso, samba, reggae, and salsa, to name but a few. Blackface minstrels and jubilee singers were emulated far from the United States and significantly contributed to refashioning local traditions, as happened in Cape Town, South Africa (Martin 1999). In North America, white musicians participated in the jazz life almost from the beginning (Jones 1968, 13), and as soon as jazz reached the shores of Europe local musicians started appropriating it and developed new ways of playing it, to the point that, in the 1960s, they claimed that as much as they drew inspiration from black American musicians, they were now developing their own brand of improvised music. (2) Jazz is nowadays played almost everywhere, in an infinity of styles influenced by other musical genres: from Brazil to China, from Denmark to Japan, from Russia to South Africa. Whatever differences may distinguish these types of black-American-inspired non-American music from the original model, most often they are still referred to as "jazz," a qualifier being sometimes added to underline that a particular style is also rooted in a particular society: bossa jazz, gipsy jazz, and township jazz, among others. Ska, reggae, salsa, rap have similarly been adopted, and transformed, all around the world.

From their mixed origins to their contemporary universalization, black American musics have permanently exceeded their "blackness." This assertion does not by any means amount to underplaying the decisive role of black experiences in the emergence of totally original musical forms and expressive modes. On the contrary, it locates these experiences, to use a metaphor popular in Trinidad's steel bands, in the "engine room"; it stresses their motor function. Linking mixed origins to universalization emphasizes the uniqueness, the power of attraction, and the capacity to link various musics and fertilize local genres in such a manner that new genres may emerge. But the entanglement of blackness, blending (metissage), and universality actually presents anyone who wishes to analyze as a scholar or comment as a journalist, upon African-American or African-American inspired musics, and especially jazz, with a challenge: how to account for innovative mixing, universalization, and relocation without concealing the centrality of African-American experiences in the creation and evolution of black musics? (3) I would like to suggest that introducing into the current debates the theories of creolization proposed by Martiniquean philosopher Edouard Glissant and the analytical approach formalized by musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez as semiology of music could contribute to elaborating new answers to this question.

Jazz in the Perspective of Creolization

In Glissant's polymorphous works, (4) there are a few references to music, or, more specifically, to jazz. He first affirms the modernity of Negro spirituals and blues, jazz, beguines and calypsos, salsas and reggaes. These musics delivered from silence "are the cry of the Plantation, transfigured in world speech. For the weight of a tercentenary oppression has been so heavy that when this speech germinated, it grew in the field of modernity; that is to say, this speech rose for all. There is but this kind of universality: when, from a particular enclosure, a deep voice screams" (Glissant 1990, 88). Black American musics are "modern," but they are rooted in slavery ("the Plantation") and have provided one of the "traces," (5) which, in spite of the silence that imprisons the history and memory of this period, have enabled black people, in the Americas and in the Caribbean, to transmit feelings, attitudes, world visions forged in the furnace of suffering, thereby furnishing the strength and means to create--original expressive arts, in particular--and proclaim their humanity. "Confronted with the settler's implacable disorder, they [Africans imported as slaves to the Americas] demonstrated their genius, tied to the sufferings they endured, to fertilize these traces, creating--more than synthesis--amazing consequences. (6) ... Jazz music is a recomposed trace which has roamed all over the world" (Glissant 1997b, 19). In other words: "Music is a trace that transcends itself" (Glissant 1993, 280). (7) For "[t]he deported African ... created something unpredictable, from the sole power of memory, that is to say from the thoughts of trace that had remained: he composed ... art forms which are valuable for all, such as, for instance, jazz music" (Glissant 1996, 16-17). For Glissant, jazz, along with other African-American musics, appears as an example of creolization: it is embedded in the experience of deportation and subjugation; it has uncovered traces left by this experience and transmuted them in creations which were both original, specific, and meaningful for all human beings. Although Edouard Glissant was not the first to use the word creolization and to elaborate upon it, (8) he contributed in a unique fashion to broadening the conceptual field it covers, so much so that it can no longer be confined to the West Indies or the Americas. The logic behind the movement of Edouard Glissant's thinking can be roughly summarized in four stages: metissage, creolization, Relation, and the Whole-World.

He starts with metissage. (9) In spite of the load of doom and shame it carries and the controversies it has aroused, Glissant considers that metissage created the conditions from which Relation (10) spread, and assumes that it prevents any negation of otherness. For metissage, intertwining the ontological development of the subject with the existence of the Other allows one to overcome whatever opposition may have been imagined between them (Glissant 1997a, 213-214). The thought of cultures of metissage (cultures of blending, distinct from cultural blending) is a safeguard against limitations and intolerance, and may open up new spaces of relation (Glissant 1997b, 15).

Creolization is constructed against this backdrop; as a matter of fact, it must be understood as an unlimited metissage (Glissant 1990, 46), a dynamic process that does not operate by synthesizing but generates an "unpredictable energy of overcoming" (11) whose results cannot be foreseen (Glissant 1997b, 16, 37). Being a process, it cannot be reduced to one content (like creoleness) and nowadays affects the whole world: