Theorizing musical practice as part of global cultural flows that are locally interpreted by musicians has become a salient narrative of contemporary jazz studies. Scholars and musicians use social structures such as the nation, ethnicity, and geographical location as categories by which to research and discuss the development of approaches to jazz and their perceived differences. The prefixes we give to topic areas like Australian jazz, British jazz, South African jazz, post-jazz, free jazz are central to how we understand the social meanings of musical practice in relation to extramusical politics. Jazz musicians in Australia have often defined their music as different from jazz in the United States by using narratives that identify their music in terms of the nation. However, the politics and music of these musicians reflect something altogether different.1In contemporary Australian discourse, there is a constant tension between, on one hand, imaginings of a free and open society that prides itself on equality, and, on the other, an exclusionary impulse of difference based on fear of losing connection to Anglo-Australian culture. Indigenous Australians are believed to be one of the oldest cultures in the world with sophisticated systems of agricultural, economic, and social activity.2 In 1783, the continent was colonized by the British for use as a penal colony following their defeat in the American War of Independence. In the process of colonization, conflict with and genocide of Indigenous Australians took place across the continent.3 The isolated British population declared the land to be terra nullius (belonging to no one) and set about establishing Western systems of agriculture and industry and imposing European notions of “civilization.”4 State-sanctioned practices of cultural genocide, including the forceable removal of Indigenous children from their families, only ended in the 1970s. As a result, Australian identities have been characterized by conflicting messages emerging from a troubled historical past. Narratives of an isolated and resourceful nation, versus those of a state that actively destroyed and suppressed its Indigenous population, continue to have a lasting impact on how the nation and individuals imagine themselves. National identities exist on a spectrum ranging from the perception of a country built on the backs of forcibly transported convicts who struggled to survive in an isolated country to one that was responsible for the systematic dispossession and persecution of Indigenous people.When we consider the racist reception jazz initially received in white Australian society, as well as the state's troubling treatment of people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background, there is necessarily concern if we gloss over the way white Australian identities have often excluded those considered other.5 Australia's predominantly white settler population has drawn from European musical traditions in terms of musical enculturation; thus, the intersection of jazz and local music culture has limited connection to the First Nation musical cultures and their strong relationship to place. The sound of music in Australia also owes much to migrant groups since World War II, meaning that the majority of Australian musical identities are derived from sources beyond the nation's shores. Such a situation makes it difficult to find an unproblematic and marketable name for jazz made by Australians that is different to jazz made in other Western countries. This article explores how the term Australian jazz is often used to categorize the study and performance of jazz-related music made in Australia, but the meanings of the two words—Australian and jazz—are often in tension.6Core to recent scholarship on the nature of musical and social identity among jazz musicians in Australia are issues of cultural hybridity, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and national identity. Despite its usefulness in allowing for simultaneous identity positions, scholarship on jazz in Australia has until recently avoided the term cosmopolitanism because of a perceived need to differentiate Australian jazz from other global forms to assert its difference.7 However, the use of the term need not negate the existence of identities formed by locality, nation, migration, and interaction. Pnina Werbner describes a concept she theorizes as “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” which functions as “an oxymoron that joins contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment” and “is at the crux of current debates on cosmopolitanism.”8 Vernacular cosmopolitanism is an essential concept in that it distinguishes cosmopolitanism from the idea of globalization by closing the “cosmopolitan-local distinction” used in sociological and anthropological scholarship9 and demonstrates how far the concept of cosmopolitanism has moved from the Kantian idea. The diverse subject positions of cosmopolitanism brought about by the blurring of cosmopolitan and local identities described by Werbner and Hannerz show how the constituent parts of cosmopolitan identities can work to articulate nuanced cultural positions in relation to the specter of the global.10Instead of relating to a Kantian notion of the universal citizen, cosmopolitanism refers to a particular set of beliefs and practices that shape people's identities through the way they act and interact with others, embracing difference, learning from difference, and recognizing its role in forming their own identities.11 In musical practice, these elements are often most overt in the hybrid nature of musical practice and need to be accompanied by an embrace of difference and a self-aware internal transformation of identity through learning to be considered cosmopolitan.12 Steven Feld's Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra demonstrates how cosmopolitanism allows jazz musicians to navigate local, national, and global structures and articulate identities that exist in the “in-between spaces.”13 Feld's exploration of cosmopolitanism is not essentialized. It allows for discrepancies in how and why culture is articulated based on location, class, perhaps gender (although this line of analysis is not played out), histories, education, religion, and spirituality in and through people.14 The results, as Feld documents, are idiosyncratic hybrid cultural practices that rely on many cultural sources and have connections to meanings well beyond the context of performance.15The concept is equally worthy of consideration in relation to jazz in Australia, given the problematic nature of Australian identities’ colonial and discriminatory past, as well as the lack of connection of this past to the views and practices of contemporary jazz musicians in Australia. Cultural hybridity is also asserted in this article to play a more important role in considering global jazz development in the U.S. jazz diaspora. As has been well documented, hybridity is central to jazz's foundations and continued development and, far from being a recent development, is a core narrative of jazz history.16 I also suggest it is worth decoupling this cultural process (hybridity) from issues of modernity and globalization, based on research by Brian Stross17 on cultural linguistics and Philip Bohlman18 on global music traditions, both of which chronicle the existence of hybrid practices that existed centuries prior to modernity. In Stross's view, a central narrative of human development is the combination of different cultures’ features that existed prior to any form of culture being refined into a recognizable whole.19In this article, I critique the use of the term Australian jazz as the default category for historical research and its adoption in creative practice research. I examine how local musical practice has been articulated as individual and distinctive in historical and creative practices. I further suggest that there is potential to situate local musical practice and the identities it creates across styles and borders more accurately by adopting the sociological perspective of cosmopolitanism, to various degrees.20Research into jazz in Australia and the use of the nation as its topic category has a short history and primarily emerged at the end of the 1970s with the publication of Black Roots, White Flowers: A History of Jazz in Australia, written by Andrew Bisset.21 Bisset's historical work emerged from an honors thesis eventually published as a monograph. It documents the refusal by 1920s Australian governments to allow African American performers to visit and perform, but it suffers from limited engagement with the musical styles performed by the musicians it discusses. Dixon22 comments that the early chapters “are mostly a dullish catalog of dance bands, which could only by a real stretch of the imagination be said to play jazz” in the 1910s and 1920s. Dixon's forthright critique highlights the issue of stylistic interpretation in the initial historicizing of jazz in Australia. Writing at the same time, Bruce Clunies Ross argues that in Australia an individual style developed based upon tradition from 1920s New Orleans and Chicago recordings and some contact with American war-time jazz musicians.23 This continued up until the U.S. traditional Dixieland jazz revival in the 1940s. He points to performers such as Ade Monsborough and Dave Dallwitz as the source of this style, which had connections to ragtime and blues, but with a “distinctly Australian flavour.” Clunies Ross argues this movement would eventually become diluted by the international traditional style revival.24 Both Bisset and Clunies Ross are unclear on the sound of this “distinctly Australian flavour” but are adamant about asserting a unique Australian conception of jazz. However, these early jazz performances were likely somewhat hybrid in their use of musical practices from both African American musics and Western Europe. These hybrid practices could be interpreted as evidence of cosmopolitan attitudes to music-making in local jazz musicians’ approach to learning music.Two significant monographs in the discipline emerged around the turn of the century: John Whiteoak's Playing Ad Lib and Bruce Johnson's The Inaudible Music.25 Whiteoak's and Johnson's research centralize the study of jazz around the developing Australian nation-state, looking at jazz's role in developing Australian modernity and, at times, critiquing its structures. Both monographs emerged following the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, which promoted multiculturalism and aspired to greater inclusiveness of migrants and Indigenous Australians.26 This context was made possible by a more open approach to immigration that began with the Whitlam and then Fraser governments in the 1970s. In particular, Fraser instituted a policy to actively resettle refugees following the Vietnam War. For several decades, new policies overturned the assimilationist and exclusionary tactics that were the legacy of the White Australia policy of the early twentieth century, as well as fears of a “Yellow Peril.”27 This includes the effective outlawing of the White Australia policy in 1973, when race was removed as a criterion for assessing immigration applications.28 In addition, the historic court case Mabo v. Queensland in 1992 awarded a form of ownership called “native title” of the island of Mer (Murray Island) to the Meriam people. Following this, in 1993, the Keating government passed the Native Title Act, which recognized and protected native title.29Whiteoak's Playing Ad Lib establishes a foundational story of early jazz and jazz-related dance bands. Similar to Bisset's work, there is limited discussion of the actual musical features of the style beyond reference to the dance band and popular vaudeville scenes. Of course, few artifacts of these sounds exist, and therefore scrutiny of style is somewhat tricky and comes via secondary resources.30 Whiteoak and Johnson connect the early jazz and dance bands to the adoption of unique Australian musical practices and sounds in performances that could be viewed as analogous to “larrikin” culture that many see as a quintessential national characteristic.31 The term larrikin refers to a cultural archetype of Australian identity, an individual who is “sceptical and irreverent” and critical of social hierarchy, institutions, and perceived “pomposity.”32 Larrikins also engage in a practice called “taking the piss,” in which they mock or make fun of someone. They use “ocker” or slang language and have a strong Australian accent associated with figures like Steve Irwin.33 They perform an essentially class-based social function of critiquing and equalizing individuals who get above themselves. Initially, Larrikins were connected to the labor movement, but have been increasingly utilized by conservative politicians and commentators to rally dominant white demographics by appealing to them as if they were on the margins of society.34 This positioning is problematic because of the way the “Australian Legend” was set up by authors like Russel Ward.35 These constructions framed the archetypal images of larrikinism and egalitarianism as positive traits of Australian social character, though these same images were subsequently used to deny the racial inequality of Australian history by John Howard's Liberal government elected in 1996.36Larrikinism has an interesting relationship to egalitarianism in Australian identity emerging from post-World War II contexts. While both terms have a unifying function in terms of national identity, as a by-product, they are often used to exclude non-Anglo-Australian identities. Argy describes how Australia's egalitarianism was no “paragon of virtue and social justice” but was rather made possible by “industry protection, wage regulation, immigration controls . . . and ‘state paternalism.’”37 The postwar society that this egalitarianism emerged from was, in fact, one in which “disadvantaged workers” from Western European backgrounds were supported by the government while Indigenous Australians and migrants were excluded.38 Therefore, such archetypes are problematic because they can be simultaneously associated with the irreverence of a jazz performance and the exclusionary practices that prevented African American culture from being more widely received in Australia. The more recent social and political context of larrikinism and egalitarianism in public discourse is evidenced in the Howard government rhetoric of the early 2000s.39 Howard preferred to keep the focus on Australia's achievements and attempted to focus on the collective “us,” denying the inequities of Australian social structures that continue to exclude Indigenous Australians and migrants from non-Western European backgrounds.40The idealized nature of larrikinism and egalitarianism in mythologies of Australian identity often serve to obscure the issue of inequality that truly characterizes Australian history and social experience.41 These historical conceptions continue to impact how young people are taught and understand Australian history.42 It is important to note that a climate of historical revisionism and an emphasis on truth-telling that mitigate popular perspectives like Howard's have been taking place for some time.43 Nevertheless, conservative voices in public discourse have often whitewashed the nation's history—despite evidence of Indigenocide and discrimination—in favor of economic success narratives designed to keep mainstream Australia “relaxed and comfortable.”44 The implications of political rhetoric around Australian identity are far from Whiteoak's intention. However, they show that the larrikin is a concept that carries both positive and negative conceptions of national identity that are quite different from the perspectives of many local jazz musicians.45The deployment of notions of larrikinism and egalitarianism alongside jazz practice can obscure significant historical factors, which Whiteoak makes visible. These include the way that music from the Black Atlantic was received in Australia through the mediation of written texts rather than direct exposure to jazz sounds prior to World War II.46 As a result, musicians learned through experimentation and hybridized the music by combining it with their Western European musical knowledge. However, the extent to which this process was distinctive and has shaped the idiosyncrasies of jazz performance in the country remains untested. We might also note that the adoption of African American musical practice can serve as a mode of critiquing the homogenizing and whitewashing practices of Australian social discourse throughout the twentieth century. Whiteoak and Johnson both provide evidence of hybridity in local musical practice that suggests these musicians had empathy with African American experience and embraced the cultural difference of jazz, qualities associated with cosmopolitanism.Another significant theme of Australian jazz historiography has been claims surrounding the “tyranny of distance,” a concept that suggests that a sense of isolation affected musical sound by promoting innovation.47 The term was initially put forward by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey.48 Blainey argued “that distance was a central and unifying factor in Australia's history” and advanced an image of a continent that presented substantial barriers that were overcome by white settlers’ ingenuity, use of technology, and “material prosperity.”49 In the context of jazz research, the term refers to a country's geographic isolation as well as the perceived need this isolation placed on locals to be creative and develop their own musical approach.50 The use of this trope concerns how music and other cultural forms are decontextualized from the original culture and given their own meaning in a new context. Of course, Blainey's concept here is problematic, not least because of his ardent position that the isolationist and exclusionary practices of the White Australia policy performed a positive function and that multiculturalism threatened national unity.51However, a narrative of creativity in isolation is challenged, given that after World War II, African American music increasingly came to Australia via recording, radio, and travel and was simultaneously influenced by jazz-related cultural imports to Australia via Britain.52 Nevertheless, these influences were sometimes intermittent and were interpreted locally but through a primarily Anglo-Celtic socio-musical context. The extent to which the resulting sounds of local jazz musicians can be considered uniquely Australian comes down to how the artifacts are remembered and interpreted. The desire to see these through the prism of local Australian inventiveness and uniqueness was strong in writing musical histories of the young nation, and this thread continues into contemporary scholarship.53Johnson's The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity makes perhaps the most strident position for the relationship between the formation of Australian identity and local jazz's role in it.54 In Johnson's view, African American jazz was a significant force in the development of modern Australian society and contributed to the formation of the nation. Johnson's work is significant because it critiques and revises much of what was accepted in Australian music history, much of which focused on art music as essential to Australian cultural identity formation at the expense of popular music.55 The vignettes of musicians from Australia's musical past such as Abe Romain and John Sangster point to creative individuals’ interpretation of the music, much in the way that Berliner and others have discussed how individual voice is a hallmark of jazz practice in the United States.56 Johnson's arguments for the individuality of Australian-based jazz practitioners make sense in that the music Romain and others made was based on a notation-like strip of instructions, rather than on recordings.57 However, the loop scores underpinning this music-making process did not continue, and most subsequent jazz made in Australia has occurred in the context of listening to recorded jazz from America and learning directly from American musicians.58Johnson integrates the development of local jazz's musical and cultural practices with the developing Australian nation-state and its sociality. Hooper's analysis of Johnson's work argues that it complicates conceptions of Australian nationalism in the study of “Australian music,” adding an element of cultural alterity.59 Hooper makes these claims in specific reference to Australian art music, which suffers from similar problems in regard to the overwhelming dominance of white perspectives.60 Conversely, Johnson's work is also significant because its conception of jazz music as “Australian” is only ever part of the story. Despite being performed by Australians in Australia, the sound of local jazz and its cultural signifiers are connected to jazz's origins in America. The social and political potency of jazz, which articulates African American and pan-African identities in a context of white dominant culture, is certainly at odds with other concepts of Australian culture that are overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric.61The history of jazz in Australia carries different politics from the United States, and while the music caused outrage because of its associations with African American identity, its performance in Australia was and has continued to be overwhelmingly practiced by people from white and middle-class backgrounds. Jazz was often perceived by commentators as a modern, cosmopolitan challenge to nuclear family values, which were central to the conception of an emerging Australian society throughout the 1950s and 1960s.62 Filmed representations also show how jazz was something that liberated women on the dance floor and challenged gender norms through what was sometimes seen as illicit behavior.63 However, the access of marginalized groups to recordings of jazz was limited by the relative costs of recordings, which were the principal way the music circulated.64It would be easy to criticize Whiteoak and Johnson for how their narratives present the practice of jazz in Australia as connected to national identity.65 The connections to imagined Australian traits like larrikinism and egalitarianism seem questionable given Australia's history of Indigenous genocide, white settlement policies, and the suppression of Indigenous voices. Nevertheless, Whiteoak's and Johnson's analyses do portray a form of anxiety that has plagued much of the discussion of Australian culture and art: cultural cringe. This anxiety over defining Australian identity ranges over most artistic endeavors and has been the subject of much literary criticism.66 Johnson's recent interview with Adam Havas highlights the degree to which assumptions about a lack of local development have marginalized jazz in Australia from broader jazz scholarship.67 At its core is a concern of cultural cringe over what is uniquely Australian and whether the nation has a culture it can call its own, given that it is a population that primarily migrated. Cultural cringe highlights the tension between the multiple subject positions advocated by cosmopolitanism and the perceived need for coherent national identities.In this regard, Australian scholars are often at pains, sometimes consciously, to distinguish themselves from larger Western nations’ cultural production, given the pervasive influence of British and American culture. Whiteoak's work has increasingly sought to represent the relationship of different types of music-making to the way racial and ethnic identities of immigrant communities have been perceived in Australia.68 Such work suggests a broader reassessment of what Australian jazz represents. Because of the critical racial politics surrounding jazz and the history of genocide and racism in Australia, the amalgamation of Australian and jazz is problematic. With the increasing nationalistic sentiment globally and in Australia, Johnson's scholarship has shifted to emphasize his study of jazz in Australia as part of the global diaspora of jazz. This suggests that the relationship of local jazz to the nation-state concept is somewhat ephemeral and based on the degree to which the perceived values of the state and the cultural practice of jazz align.69 The ephemeral relationship between these elements calls into question the degree to which national categories are appropriate for the study of jazz and why, despite his questioning of them, Johnson continues to use the nation to group his research methodologically.Previously, Johnson utilized the term Australian jazz because of its efficiency in communicating the location and group of people thought to be performing jazz in Australia. Despite arguing that the nation is an unsuitable category that has been relied on by scholars for the study of local jazz practice, Johnson relies heavily on it as the sociological category that structures his research across the decades. Johnson has raised concerns that jazz outside the United States and Europe has often been relegated from view in “great men” narratives of jazz history and textbooks.70 Similarly, Johnson experienced significant skepticism about the significance of jazz scholarship in Australia despite its capacity to contribute significantly to debates about jazz's development as a music.71However, his recent claims of the “anti-white” tendency of the jazz canon are questionable and seem to confuse the critical articulation of African Americans’ role in the new jazz studies with the canon itself.72 A significant example is the different perception of Miles Davis and Chet Baker discussed by Howard Brofsky. Brofsky argues that Davis recorded multiple versions of “My Funny Valentine” against the backdrop of Baker's popular version in an attempt to make his voice heard in the commercially white-dominated print media.73 Here we can see that scholarship and the historical narratives of the role of African Americans in jazz's history have not always been the dominant perspective in commercial media and public discourse. Johnson himself acknowledges the significance of this popular discourse in shaping understandings of musical styles.74 As such, the problematic politics of asserting or claiming aspects of jazz development for white identities reflects the concerns raised by Ingrid Monson about “white hipness.”75Johnson's perspective reflects the absence of certain formations in his theorization of jazz. He often avoids discussion of the music's inherent hybridity and diverse subject positions—such as the hybridity of Latin jazz—downplaying the inherent cultural diversity of the Americas.76 For instance, Christopher Washburne's work Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz shows that interpretation of jazz took place both inside and outside of the United States. Latin jazz created many global forms precisely at the time in which Johnson argues jazz's hybridity had fully solidified.77 Hybrid narratives of jazz such as Washburne's show that jazz has constantly crossed cultural and national borders; this is the norm of jazz, rather than there being a singularly identifiable U.S. style. A more considerable cross section of styles provided by Whiteoak suggests that hybridity has been a central aspect of local jazz practice since jazz arrived on Australian shores.78 Such a context suggests that while Australian society may not be seen as cosmopolitan, local jazz musicians’ practices might be.The nation as an overarching concept has had a pervasive impact on the emerging field of creative practice scholarship. A small boom in creative practice scholarship of jazz and improvisation occurred after 2010, with tertiary institutions producing an increasing number of PhDs in the area of study. Many of these projects have focused on hybrid music-making, including intercultural and cross-cultural collaborations that can be observed globally and their impact on how musicians locally define their musical and social identity. It has led to a dynamic in which authors reflect on the impacts of global musical circulation and yet grapple with articulating coherent local musical practice and identity. The dominant narrative of this practice-based literature argues that local musical practice is innovative and unique to how Australians play jazz and improvise.79 Creative practice scholarship has relied on arguments inspired by Whiteoak as well as Johnson's assertion of larrikinism, egalitarianism, and innovation due to isolation. However, the interpretation of these identities based on isolation does not characterize the contemporary practice of jazz creative practice scholars, which often utilizes access to music from across the globe both digitally and physically.Creative practice scholars have sought to ascribe locality and uniqueness by appropriating some of jazz historiography's rhetoric. In practice-based research, the sociopolitical aims of Johnson's and Whiteoak's work are often adapted to an argument that considers the context of jazz performance in Australia and traces histories of local performers and their influences to assert a unique performance practice. Rose and Robson assert that the Australian cultural landscape is increasingly plural, arguing that a historical vernacular has been established via hybridity in local jazz performance.80 But this social and musical practice has little to do with the conceptions of Australianess that Bisset, Clunies Ross, Johnson, and Whiteoak had suggested.81Scholars such as Robson have updated Johnson's and Whiteoak's discussions by exploring hybridity in local jazz practice.82 Other global musical traditions from outside of Australia, such as Korean Pansori and Hindustani classical music, are used as evidence of a distincti