Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz

by Mike Heffley

Until the 1960s American jazz, for all its improvisational and rhythmic brilliance, remained rooted in formal Western conventions originating in ancient Greece and early Christian plainchant. At the same time European jazz continued to follow the American model. When the creators of so-called free jazz―Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, and others―liberated American jazz from its Western ties, European musicians found their own distinctive voices and created a vital, innovative, and independent jazz culture.
Northern Sun, Southern Moon examines this pan-Eurasian musical revolution. Author and musician Mike Heffley charts its development in Scandinavia, Holland, England, France, Italy, and especially (former East and West) Germany. He then follows its spread to former Eastern-bloc countries. Heffley brings to life an evolving musical phenomenon, situating European jazz in its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts and adding valuable material to the still-scant scholarship on improvisation. He reveals a Eurasian genealogy worthy of jazz’s well-established African and American pedigrees and proposes startling new implications for the histories of both Western music and jazz.

Genres: Jazz, Music, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2005

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very mixed feelings about this book. The subject is one I have devoted a lot of time to researching, and I really love the music discussed. I’m also pleased to see academic rigor applied to this music. The main problem I have with the book though is how poorly it is written; it’s almost like it went through a post-modern jargonizer after the first draft.
He uses words like monautarchy that create ridiculously awkward phrasing which are disguised as hyper-accuracy. The first 60 pages in fact are practically unreadable. At these times it seems he is writing for people that don’t know the music he is discussing, and it made me want to hear descriptions of the actual music. Unfortunately, when he does talk about the music, he talks about it in a technical way re: diatonic chromaticism that does the music no favors, and likely alienates the potential audience for this music and this study.
He writes much better about individual people, especially the East Germans he focuses on: Gunter Sommer, Conrad Bauer and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky. He’s less concerned with fitting a discussion of their music into an argument, and then he tells the stories of these players and how they came to make the music they did.
His overall idea – that the movement of jazz into free improvised music is the height of, not an escape from, the history of Western music – is problematic: politically, etc.
Too much name dropping (albums, musicians, etc.) and not enough close analysis of moments in the music.
I also think the frequent references to Hardt and Negri and other upper-echelon cultural theorists is completely unnecessary. These kinds of folks seem name-dropped also, so that he can show where he aligns himself in other academic debates, yet they have way too distant a relation to the topic at hand: jazz in the 60s in Europe.
Nonetheless, I’m glad to see this music that I care about so much finally be given some academic attention.

[Peter Campbell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mike Heffley is a musician as well as a writer and dedicated researcher. He clearly is a theorist about free inprovisation and composition and in purchasing this book, I had hoped to widen my knowledge of what lay behind the book's title. However, from the outset, I struggled to get through virtually every single page. Heffley seemed determined to impress upon his readers his scholarly approach to the subject by using hundreds of words that, I would think, were outside the average reader's vocabulary, certainly mine.
Given the fact that jazz is only a hundred years or so old, it irriated me that large tracts of the book were merely selected quotations from the many other works that he had read during his research and which he used to underline a particlar point that he was trying to get across. Many of these quotes had been texts written a century or so before jazz came into being!
Yes, I concede that free improvisition is not an exclusive preserve of jazz musicians nor of the 20th and 21st centuries but I already new that and felt that he gave far too much space to the history of free improvisation in non-jazz genres.
Additionally, his excessive use of German phrases to describe a particular phenomenon or make a point, whilst obviously making sense to him as a fluent speaker of the language was for me just another barrier to my attempts to trace his line of thought and to understand what the book was all about.
Did I get anything out of the book whatsoever? I guess that I did but it was extremly limited and not really worth the effort that I put into wading through it. If you are a musicologist with an IQ of 160+ and a determination to read everything that is written about the history of music, good , bad and indifferent, you might get more out of the book than me.

[Stephen Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a mixed bag. It was worth five stars for making me aware of a lot of early FMP albums which most of the usual suspects don't ever talk about and giving insight into the European free jazz underpinnings. However the writing style throughout most of the book is very difficult to make sense of and led to me just skipping large sections.