The globalization of jazz was also the globalization of black US popular culture. This essay discloses, and provides a model for, the ambiguous dynamics of popular music migrations and the race politics that frame them. In diasporic destinations, those politics are generated by cultural histories very different from that of the United States, and which also exhibit their own synchronic and diachronic heterogeneities, thus introducing distinctive local complexities. In the context of the black-centered jazz canon, these circumstances have produced regional jazz narratives that are derived from the US model, but with often radically different inflections from place to place, and over time. Apart from documenting the perennial ubiquity of the blackness/jazz nexus, the study identifies a broad historical trajectory, in which the focus shifted from African American blackness to a pan-African model that anticipated the World Music phenomenon.
