From its earliest beginnings around 1900, jazz spread rapidly around the world. By the 1920s it was virtually everywhere. Although jazz is mostly associated with American, and especially African-American history and culture, more and more work is being done to understand the history of jazz around the world in the recent emergence of a ‘global jazz studies’.

Without an account of the role of colonialism and imperialism in this history, however, such an understanding of ‘the global’ remains incomplete. The IMPRODECO project aims to contribute to the development of such an account. Based in the Netherlands, we focus especially on Dutch (post)colonial history, the meanings of jazz and improvised music made by postcolonial migrant communities in the Netherlands, and the entanglement of jazz with Dutch whiteness.

The Netherlands played an important role in the emergence of free improvisation in Europe in the 1960s. In this period, European musicians began to claim their own distinct identity in jazz, and this included ideas about specifically Dutch approaches to jazz and improvisation in the Netherlands. However, this was also a period in which the former Dutch colonial empire was rapidly diminishing and many musicians from former colonies were migrating to the Netherlands in the post-WWII decades.

Although we aim to oversee the history of jazz in the Netherlands from its earliest beginnings to the present day, our focus is therefore on this postwar period. We aim to describe the largely unwritten history of jazz musicians from Suriname, the Dutch Antilles, Indonesia and other former colonies. We investigate how they negotiated their position between the idiom of jazz, their own musical traditions, and the Dutch musical context. How much room was there for musicians of colour, either in mainstream or avant-garde forms of jazz practice? What does this mean for ideas of ‘freedom’ that are so often associated with jazz improvisation?

Through archival research, oral history, and the analysis of musical practices, IMPRODECO aims to make a fundamental contribution to jazz historiography, postcolonial research on Dutch music history, and musicological theories of improvisation, and spark further debate about racial inequality in Dutch music and society.