Mediterranean Improvisations

Despite decades of debate over the Mediterranean as a historical, anthropological and cultural category, jazz remains conspicuously absent from Mediterranean studies. Conversely, scholarship on Mediterranean music has rarely acknowledged jazz as anything other than a series of local scenes, individual musicians, or examples of stylistic hybridisation. This dual absence is theoretically significant. It suggests that the conceptual frameworks through which the Mediterranean and jazz have been understood have obscured the very forms of mobility, exchange and cultural negotiation that Mediterranean jazz reveals. Although musicians, critics, producers and festival organisers have invoked Mediterranean jazz for decades, no comprehensive scholarly framework has emerged (apart from perhaps one Italian exception in the 1980s).

This paper argues that Mediterranean jazz cannot simply be added to existing Mediterranean music scholarship as another genre or regional manifestation of a global jazz tradition. Such an approach risks reproducing the essentialisms, geographical determinisms and centre/periphery models that critical Mediterranean scholarship has dismantled. Thus, the methodological issue is not how to define the musical characteristics of Mediterranean jazz, but rather how jazz can compel us to rethink the very notion of the Mediterranean.

The paper proposes an approach that brings New Jazz Studies into sustained dialogue with historiographical, anthropological, postcolonial and decolonial critiques developed within Mediterranean Studies. Rather than presupposing Mediterranean coherence, we should try to understand the region as a field that has been produced and contested throughout history, and which is structured by migration, colonial legacies, unequal mobilities, borders, diasporas, cultural memory and competing imaginaries. Consequently, jazz should not merely be considered as sound, but as a situated cultural practice.

Although Salah Ragab is anointed the “Father of Egyptian Jazz,” nobody seems to know much about him. A quick internet search yields minimal but consistent results: a military man from a military family, a drummer, music that interpolates jazz with Cairo’s sonic landscape, and a collaboration with the popular American Afrofuturist jazz musician Sun Ra. Relying entirely on the material artefacts of Ragab’s discography, this chapter ventures the first critical narration of the life and music of Egypt’s first jazzman, Salah Ragab.

Scavenged, salvaged and tediously constructed, the research involved detective work: scrutinizing tracklists and design elements, searching for cited musicians and institutions, comparing the fine print of albums and the later reissues of these same albums, and so on. I expand upon the insights derived from this archival research by situating them within a broader political, cultural and social context.

As such, this chapter puts forth a scavenged account of Ragab’s time in the military under Nasser, his collaboration with European and African American musicians, the formation of the Cairo Jazz Band and the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, and the peculiarities of creating jazz music as a state employee. What emerges is a microcosmic yet immensely expansive set of insights about the logics of state-making through “cultural” output, the convoluted politics of jazz-driven transatlantic solidarities in Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s, and, ultimately, the negotiations and complications that accompanied the first realized project of a distinctively “Egyptian” jazz.

Despite its fascist, xenophobic and racist policies, Italy of the 1920s and 1930s discovered jazz. One of Mussolini’s sons, Romano, became a jazz pianist. Gorni Kramer (1913–1995) was one of the most active pioneers before the Second World War. He remained so afterward, in an Italy that the Christian Democrats sought to anchor in the Atlantic alliance. By situating jazz within a popular culture that blended operetta, variety songs and ballroom dance music, he succeeded in popularizing the genre, making it an omnipresent feature of television programming.

I am neither an ethnomusicologist nor a music historian. What interests me is how sounds, in their travels and transformations, sustain other, altogether more contingent and improvised, maps of the Mediterranean. In refusing to be confined to local and national boundaries, the very materiality of music constantly proposes unauthorized geographies while sustaining deeper histories.

I propose to consider the critical consequences of this perspective in relation to the Palestinian oud player and singer Kamilya Jubran. In the crossover, creolization, and entanglement of Arabic musical performance and avant-garde experimentation lies the centrality of improvisation in both the composition and execution of her work. Her musical practices invite us to consider questions that interrupt received understandings of the Mediterranean, its histories, and cultural formations.

Messod Muyal (1936–2009) was an eclectic man. A pianist, arranger, community member and sojourner of the limits between worlds: the world of the acceptable-public and the world of the objectionable-secretive. His two-volume compilation of traditional Moroccan cantillation included Song of Songs and Sephardi, Amazigh and Andalusian jazz arrangements. They stand as a testament to the variability of his aesthetic taste, embodying the diversity of linguistic, musical, religious and national strands to his life. The way he notated a very oral tradition, faced with his own active musical involvement with singing and playing these repertoires, stands as an improvisatory map of a life lived on the edges of all traditions.

His private life exposes the very liminality with which he lived. Muyal’s relationship with his brother Jacques, who produced Dizzy Gillespie, Randy Weston and other jazz musicians, illuminates his distinctive approach to improvisation. Jacques’s career loomed over his musical world; Messod invoked it only to turn towards his own practice of bringing Sephardi sounds into jazz idioms. His personal life involved similar negotiations of belonging. Messod married an Algerian Kabyle woman, clearly stepping outside of traditional Jewish family norms by marrying a Muslim woman; after their return to Tangier, he continued attending synagogue, maintaining his participation in communal liturgical life alongside his personal choices. His tragic death in 2009 from a gas leak in his apartment was soon followed by his daughter’s terrible death as one of the victims of the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015.

Through Muyal’s notation, arrangements and repertoire choices, this paper explores improvisation as both a musical practice and a way of negotiating social and religious norms. It asks how a musician’s movement between Mediterranean soundworlds might reveal forms of belonging that remain difficult to articulate publicly, and how the written traces of an oral repertoire preserve the improvisatory possibilities of such a life.

The history of jazz in Greece began relatively early, in the 1920s. From the outset, its relationship with “light song” (elafró tragoudi) was shaped not only by stylistic affinities, given the latter’s ongoing dialogue with Central European and American musical cultures, but also by the specific contexts of musical performance. In the theatres and clubs of Athens, the capital of the modern Greek state, increasingly oriented towards the West, jazz came to represent both a modern form of musical exoticism and an expressive vehicle for the cultural aspirations of the established and emerging middle classes.

A comparable encounter between jazz and dimotikó (Greek traditional/folk music), however, never took place. By contrast, in the United States (according to a common legend), Benny Goodman was impressed by three successive generations of Greek clarinet virtuosos: Kostas Gantinis, from Siatista in Western Macedonia (near Epirus), and Tasos and Petroloukas Chalkias, from Epirus. Despite the documented fascination and musical interest generated by these encounters, no actual musical collaboration ever occurred. It was only many decades later, during the period of World Music fusions known in Greece as “ethnic”, that younger Greek jazz musicians began to “discover” dimotikó and to explore its possibilities as a source of musical inspiration.

This presentation examines the paradoxical relationship between the Greek jazz scene and traditional music through its various manifestations. It focuses on encounters between jazz musicians and virtuoso folk musicians; on the movement of younger musicians from the folk tradition towards free improvisation; and on new musical projects that emerged around jazz while drawing creatively on folk-music influences. In doing so, it explores the shifting boundaries between jazz, traditional music, and improvisation, and considers the changing ways in which Greek musicians have negotiated questions of musical identity, tradition, and modernity.

The paper will examine the compositional concepts behind Dimitrios Vassilakis’s award-winning Labyrinth — Daedalus Project album on Candid (2000), leading to his jazz-mapping research and the concert presentation with Shimon Robot on vibraphone, performing with his Athens Quartet. The presentation, in collaboration with Georgia Tech, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Demokritos Research Center, took place at the Athens Concert Hall in November 2022, to coincide with the remastered release of the Labyrinth album with added bonus tracks, “Live at Birdland” (Candid, 2022).

While the album has, apart from the obvious references to the ancient myth, literary and conceptual references to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow”, the recent jazz-mapping research connects jazz improvisation with poetry and prose, revealing the syntax behind thematic development ideas and the storytelling nature of a jazz musician.

For the concert with Shimon Robot, we presented a tune from the Labyrinth album and trained Shimon Robot on a dataset of annotated improvisations using the jazz-mapping methodology. Using Markov models and genetic algorithms, Shimon was able to produce two choruses (64 bars) of improvisation over the form of “Pasiphae’s Dance” and was also able to exchange four-bar phrases with the saxophone and piano, reacting to their input in real time at the concert. The form of this tune is based on Miles Davis’s “So What”, with an added twist of 12-tone combing clusters.

We will examine how a set of rules, together with a limited number of targeted examples from an annotated library, succeeded in training the robot, and we will also comment on and reveal the Mediterranean and Balkan influences in the music.

Why did Rome, previously overshadowed by the established centres of new music, become a major centre for free and collective improvisation within just a few years? This paper examines this development in light of postwar transnational exchanges and American cultural diplomacy programmes during the Cold War. Through the reception of John Cage and the experiments of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and Musica Elettronica Viva, it shows how an aspiration to freedom, nurtured in part by American influence, was taken up and transformed in Italy, giving rise to practices aimed at liberating musical form.

Oriental jazz is likely one of the last jazz-related subgenres to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century, alongside Latin jazz, Afro-jazz, Ethio-jazz, Cape jazz and others. This compound term is problematic on two counts, as it inherits both the controversies surrounding the definition of jazz and decolonial critiques of Orientalism.

The presentation reflects on the process of establishing this category through an analysis of the musical practices and discourses of contemporary oud players from countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean who have migrated to Europe. What meanings does the label “jazz” convey for these musicians? To what extent are representations of the “other”—the European musician—shaped by those of the “self” or “us” of the Arab musician?

The presentation will also be an opportunity for self-reflection through an analysis of my own personal journey, representations and practices as a musician from the Global South based in Europe—a form of reflexivity inherent in any practitioner-researcher position.