As Dutch colonial power waned in the 19th century, centralization efforts by the government and "intellectuals" in civil society pushed a nation-building narrative that crafted the myths of a "Golden Age". State-sanctioned crimes such slavery and genocide in the colonies were sanitized through socio-discursive schemes that represented it as a time of great human flourishing on the one hand, while further entrenching age-old notions of white supremacy on the other. In this paper I argue that popular music provided a particularly salient avenue for the dissemination of such ideologies through a musical exoticism that sprang from what Paul Gilroy calls "postcolonial melancholia". I examine ways in which Dutch ethnomusicologists such as Wil Gilbert and Jaap Kunst racialized jazz by labeling it "primitive music". They expressly mourned the loss of colonial power and staged musical propaganda events with the attempt of instilling the white public with a sense of superiority and pride regarding the overseas territories and its peoples. Ethnomusicologists partnered with colonial interest groups to organize exhibitions with "human zoos" where people from the colonies were forced to perform music for white audiences. Members of the public were invited to ridicule them, or conduct ethnographic studies at such events, and it was here that we witness some of the first jazz performances in the country by Surinamese musicians who were billed as African American artists, later made to perform at vaudevillian cabarets that gave white society a new means for self-actualization at the expense of dehumanizing a perceived colonial "Other".

During the 1960s, European musicians and critics began to differentiate so-called ‘free’ or ‘non-idiomatic’ (Bailey 1992) improvisation from improvisation based on jazz or other musical traditions. As Banerji (2021) has shown, this supposedly neutral ‘free’ musical space is often understood as implicitly white amongst contemporary musicians, in contrast to the more ‘conventional’ idioms of non-white musical traditions. Earlier, Lewis (2004) already signalled that such a conception of improvisation could work to erase African-American leadership in service of a white supremacist understanding of innovation and modernity, in ways that ‘would have astonished first-generation European free musicians’. In this paper I argue that this erasure was in fact already at work in the discourse of Dutch musicians and critics of the first generation. I describe how they distinguished free improvisation from American free jazz around 1970, especially from the more spiritually oriented and pan-Africanist later work of John Coltrane. This distinction was predicated on the idea that European improvisers represented a logical next step in the autonomous development of music history, whereas African-American musicians supposedly only reproduced existing musical forms, and their concern with religion and spirituality was deemed ridiculous by white Dutch intellectuals. When the Union for Improvising Musicians (BIM) was founded in 1971, which would enable government funding that allowed Dutch improvised music to bloom, these ideas were institutionalised in its conditions for membership, leading to the exclusion of migrated African-American as well as Dutch musicians of colour, who successfully protested these policies in the course of the 1970s.

This paper explores how institutionalized discourses of knowledge as an exclusionary and exclusive Eurocentric privilege have impacted and shaped the development of jazz and improvised music in the Netherlands. Through an exploration of the institutionalization of jazz education in the Netherlands, it explores how the Western Eurocentric modernity has colonized knowledge systems and fields, imposing a classed, raced and gendered lens on the circuits of cultural production, while dismissing other practices as immoral, barbaric, and primitivist. As such, it critically engages with decolonial and critical race theory to interrogate how jazz education has been shaped by Eurocentric epistemologies. The paper draws on archival research (conservatory archives, National Jazz Archive, personal documentation) to investigate institutional policies, curricula, and selection and assessment criteria in Dutch jazz education. Additionally, interviews with musicians and educators provide insights into the lived experiences of those navigating these structures. By synthesizing historical documents, policy analysis, and personal narratives, this paper uncovers the ways in which institutionalized jazz education in the Netherlands has upheld exclusionary knowledge systems while marginalizing alternative cultural and artistic traditions. As such, it aims to shed light on the institutionalization of improvised music education in the Netherlands and its complex relationships to questions of race, diaspora, national identity and cultural politics.

The Indonesian term merantau means to go away from your homeplace and create a living somewhere else; perantau are those who do so. Although these terms are nowadays often used within Maluku-Dutch communities, merantau has a particular significance to our postcolonial situation. Since the Maluku-Dutch communities were promised a new, independent nation by the Dutch government in return for fighting against Indonesian independence, merantau only became necessary for these communities after the realization that the Dutch promise could not be fulfilled. This paper explores the idea of Maluku-Dutch communities as delayed diasporic communities and how improvised music became an important aspect in the creation of their new diasporic identities. Following Maluku-Dutch historians Wim Manuhutu and Ron Habiboe I argue that Maluku-Dutch communities seek the foundation of these new diasporic identities in the Indigenous knowledges and traditions of the Moluccan islands from which they hail. Nevertheless, as a result of Dutch colonization, the actual knowledge of these traditions is scarce; this is best seen in the inability of speaking and understanding Maluku languages, resulting in further loss of knowledge about Indigenous musics and traditions. This paper argues for the notion of improvised music as an alternative foundation of Indigenous knowledges. Maluku-Dutch musicians Monica Akihary and Gino-Cochise actively incorporate Indigenous languages and traditions specific to their origin island in their music, yet their indigeneity is celebrated and understood by several Maluku-Dutch communities. Music such as theirs thus create the possibility for Maluku-Dutch people to form new identities and become diasporic merantau communities.