Ever since the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton first spoke of a “Spanish tinge—“Cuban rhythmic flavour —in early New Orleans jazz, critics and historians have made a point of the music’s polyglot tendencies. The very first jazz recordings reveal a music stitched together from European marching-band music, ragtime, and the blues, while the beboppers of the 1940s indulged a taste for Afro-Cuban rhythms that ultimately begat Latin jazz. Yet bebop also fostered a puritanical strain of modernism that encouraged successive generations of musicians to shun other, less sophisticated genres. As the jazz world became increasingly insular and partisan, efforts to combine jazz with more popular forms like rock in the 1960s and 1970s were hotly contested, and often rejected outright. In recent years, the pendulum has swung decisively in the opposite direction. Never before have so many jazz musicians been actively involved in mining so many musical veins with such apparent ease and sophistication. Never before, of course, have musicians and their audiences had such unfettered access to so many different kinds of music. Walk into one of New York City’s more adventurous jazz clubs and chances are good that the music you’ll hear will sound a great deal like something other than jazz—be it hip hop, electronica, or world music.

“We’re far from seeing the end of all these fusions,” says André Menard, co-founder and artistic director of the Montreal Jazz Festival, the largest jazz festival in the world and one of the most consistently adventurous. “It’s a reflection of the era, and it’s only natural that it would accelerate thanks to the availability of music, the immediacy of its creation, and the way that you can now broadcast your music all around the world over the Internet.” In short, hybridization and cross-pollination have become the way of the world. “If you listen to contemporary pop music, that’s just the way that music is made now,” notes trumpeter Dave Douglas. “There are constant references being made to all kinds of music. In a way, jazz is just catching up.”

Douglas himself was an early exponent of jazz without borders. In the early 1990s, he sparked a fad by fusing jazz with Balkan music; as a founding member of saxophonist John Zorn’s Masada Quartet, he helped mate modern jazz with Jewish music; and he has had a long-standing interest in combining jazz improvisation with twentieth-century classical music. “So many of us are looking for a new vocabulary and new sounds—just as the beboppers were, and the sixties avant-garde,” he says. “It’s all a part of trying to grow the music.” Douglas’s most recent project, Keystone, blends jazz with electronica. In a recent performance at Carnegie’s hip new Zankel Hall, drummer Gene Lake set down the stuttering rhythms of techno and funk; Adam Benjamin generated all manner of freaky space-gun sounds with his Wurlitzer keyboard; turntablist DJ Olive spun, scratched, and beat-matched to his heart’s content; and Douglas and saxophonist Marcus Strickland improvised at length over the ensuing musical stew. The members of Keystone have played with everyone from Ornette Coleman to modern soul artist D’Angelo, and they bring that collective experience to bear in every bar of their music.

Younger players like Robert Glasper, twenty-seven, are achieving an even subtler rapprochement between jazz and contemporary pop music. On his recent Blue Note release, Canvas, Glasper rarely uses electronics, and his melodic and harmonic language comes straight out of the modern jazz piano tradition. His rhythmic orientation, on the other hand, and the forms he gives to his compositions, are deeply marked by hip hop. A typical Glasper tune loops and repeats in ways that are more neo-soul than neo-bop, and his solos have the kind of slippery, elusive feel with which the best DJs flavour their work. Moreover, his drummer and bassist slip easily between swing and the furious, interlocking patterns of drum “n’ bass. They are not alone: many young rhythm-section players have become adept at reverse-engineering the computer-generated patterns that lie at the heart of contemporary pop by playing them on acoustic instruments. Like Douglas, Glasper sees his willingness to reference other genres as something that links him to, rather than distances him from, his forebears. “They touched on what they had, but now we have so much more music to influence us than they had back in the day,” he says. “If Coltrane were around today, he’d be doing the same thing.”

Both men’s music defies easy categorization. Is this stuff jazz, or hip hop, or something in between Questions like this are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as musicians and audiences grow ever more inclined to accept musical miscegenation as a way of life and taxonomical exercises become confined to the radical fringe. Most audiences, particularly young ones, simply respond to what they like, regardless of what it’s called. During a recent appearance at New York’s Knitting Factory, a club that has largely abandoned jazz programming in favour of broader alternative-music fare, Glasper and his trio had the crowd whooping and hollering with an enthusiasm rarely seen at jazz shows. And Keystone filled Zankel with the kind of twenty- and thirty-something audience that more conventional jazz acts no longer attract.



A member of the jazz police might question whether all of this is really part of “the tradition” (if that tradition is taken to be swinging 4/4 jazz with an emphasis on ballads, blues, and standards). Yet there’s more to the tradition than a received repertoire or a specific set of musical devices; there’s also a commitment to exploration, experimentation, and adventure. “To me, it’s all about trying to pay homage to jazz as a progressive music,” says Douglas. “Learning the music of Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy and Woody Shaw was all about learning this cutting-edge stuff. I’ve looked toward the Balkans, toward klezmer, toward contemporary classical music for the same reason. Working with electronics is just another way of getting at something new and different.”

The same might be said of recent attempts to combine jazz with various forms of world music. Much is made of the way in which American music and culture have spread around the world like some kind of post-colonial plague. But the same global marketplace that has allowed jazz to colonize musical ecosystems from Norway to Benin has also allowed music from the far corners of the world to appropriate jazz. The routes of musical exchange have become so complicated, and personal and cultural identity so densely layered, it’s virtually impossible to keep track of who’s playing what.

Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s parents, for example, emigrated from Bangalore to the US, where Mahanthappa grew up with little connection to his Indian heritage. Nonetheless, while attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, he became fascinated by Indian music. For the past several years, he and pianist Vijay Iyer have cunningly applied Indian musical techniques to jazz, often in ways so sophisticated as to be barely audible.