Edinburgh Napier University

  Since the 1970s, jazz from Scandinavia has represented a distinct reimagining of the erstwhile American music form with the term “Nordic tone” being liberally applied in the marketing and critical discussion of jazz from the region. While undoubtedly affording a body of Scandinavia’s jazz musicians a collective brand identity and a point of difference from American jazz, the term is fundamentally problematic in its application to a musical practice that sits uncomfortably within any nationalist or geo-cultural framework.

Scandinavian influence on jazz can be traced back to the first half of the 20th Century to Swedish dance bands incorporating ‘jazzified’ popular national songs within their otherwise American repertoire (Nicholson, Jazz and Culture in a Global Age). The influence of the previous century’s National Romantic classical composers on the harmonic language of Scandinavian jazz is also well documented by James W Dickenson and others. Seminal 1964 albums Waltz for Debby by Monika Zetterlund with the Bill Evans Trio and Jazz På Svenska by Jan Johansson built on the practice of incorporating national songs and language in the appropriated jazz genre, paving the way for Nordic tone’s most prominent Norwegian figurehead, Jan Garbarek. On the back of Norway’s newly acquired oil-wealth, cultural funding programmes supported growth, stability and export of a nationally framed interpretation of jazz and carved a place in global cultural consciousness for jazz with a Nordic tone.

Such a selectively potted history, however, glosses over significant fault lines in the discussion of jazz from Scandinavia. Combining the Scandinavian countries as a single cultural entity is in itself problematic, the term ‘Nordic’ is both vague and misleading in its application to a specific aesthetic within Scandinavian jazz and, crucially, the creators of the region’s music can be heard to draw on a substantially more nuanced array of influences than simply those of American jazz and homespun folk and classical cultures.