The IMPRODECO project aims to understand the politics embedded in free improvisation in a European postcolonial context, investigating the musical practice of improvising musicians from former Dutch colonies in the Netherlands from 1945 to 2000, analysing how they negotiated their position between the idiom of jazz and their musical traditions.

From a radical artistic and political vision, musicians in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s imagined a completely open and free music. To distinguish themselves from jazz, they called that music “non-idiomatic”: not connected to pre-existing musical styles. But to what extent was this supposedly neutral musical space implicitly white? And how much room was there for musicians of colour to draw inspiration from their own musical traditions – and thus inevitably a musical idiom – at the time of decolonisation?

Although the genre of free improvisation has formed a unique space of transnational and intercultural collaboration, such a utopian understanding risks an erasure of actual forms of inequality and exclusion. Our aim is to investigate the musical practice of improvising musicians from former Dutch colonies active in the Netherlands after World War II (ca. 1945-2000) and analyse how they negotiated their position between the idiom of jazz, a supposedly ‘universal’ non-idiomatic form of improvisation, and their own musical traditions. Through archival research, oral history, and the analysis of musical practices, IMPRODECO will make a fundamental contribution to jazz historiography, postcolonial perspective on Dutch music history, and musicological theories of improvisation, and spark further debate about racial inequality in Dutch music and society.