Jazz was born a century ago in New Orleans before spreading all over the world and staking its claim as the source of the main forms of popular music that emerged after the war. Still today, jazz remains \u201cCreole\u201d music at its best, both artistically and historically, and the privileged vector of the \u201cPoetics of Relation\u201d so beloved of the Martinican poet \u00c9douard Glissant. Expanding its territories beyond all measure by multiplying shifting zones of exchange and friction at its borders, where styles and genres intermingle to create new hybrids, jazz appears as a privilege space where the composite and syncretic beauty of our globalised humanity comes into its own.<\/p>\n
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Opening itself up to Afro-Cuban rhythms in the mid-1940s and providing a lasting influence on the direction of Latin and Caribbean music in return, throughout its history jazz has constantly ventured beyond its idiomatic borders, soaking up other traditions in search of both kinships of identity (from Cuba to Brazil) and more fantastical filiations (Africa in all its states).<\/p>\n
Following the example of pioneers such as the pianist Randy Weston \u2013 who exuberantly celebrated the historical, aesthetic and political links between African independence and black America committed to the civil rights struggle in 1960, with \u201cUhuru Afrika\u201d \u2013 many musicians would set out on a \u201chomecoming\u201d. These jazz musicians made the link to the land of their ancestors one of the main imaginary and aesthetic \u201chorizons\u201d of their music. Art Blakey, Max Roach, Archie Shepp and the Art Ensemble of Chicago \u2013 among others! \u2013 would play an active part in this fertile dialogue between jazz and traditional music, generating forms of musical crossbreeding of great originality in return, whether in South Africa, Ethiopian or Nigeria, with Fela Kuti\u2019s afrobeat.<\/p>\n
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