Settler colonization and Austrological improvisative musicality since the late nineteenth century

In this chapter, the authors pursue the following questions: What characterizes particularly Australian “logics” of improvisative musicality? From the music performed in the early dancehalls to the performative assimilation of an American jazz sensibility, and from the pre-jazz reception of minstrelsy to the modern experimentalists, what distinguishes Australian sociomusical systems of improvisation in the context of the global jazz diaspora? This chapter expands the framework of improvisational practices documented by George Lewis as Afrological and Eurological sociomusical systems. It does so by proposing an Austrological system of musicality that both draws on elements of Afrological and Eurological systems and extends beyond them, exploring how Australian improvisation can be described as contingent on and emergent from these and other sociomusical systems, constituting a rhizomatic configuration of musicalities that goes beyond those systems.