!We Are Not Jazz¡ Liminal Jazz in the Music of La Distritofónica, Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

Abstract The present article examines the problem that arises in the relationship between jazz, experimental music, and sense of place. Considering the music of La Distritofónica, a musical collective from Bogotá, Colombia, I discuss hegemonic definitions of jazz that conceive the problem of music ontology from an aural perspective. These definitions, which relate La Distritofónica to the sphere of free jazz, become insufficient to define the complexity of the phenomena, translating the question to the relations between jazz and place. From this point of view, the case of La Distritofónica exemplifies an intrinsic link between a particular ontology of jazz and Latin American experimental music, which leads me to see La Distritofónica as a metaphor of the soundscape of the city of Bogotá that critiques the political and sonic circumstances of this particular place but still situates the phenomena as a liminal and abject one in the jazz-experimental binary. I argue that it is in the intersubjective communicative condition of free improvisation that an ontology can be located that explains the music of La Distritofónica in relation to Bogotá, allowing me to decenter the notions of a “work of art” or “standard” as the dominant conceptualization of jazz music. Instead, La Distritofónica allows us to rethink the ancillary circumstance of improvisation in jazz. I bring into discussion the nonprescriptive aesthetic of La Distritofónica; the way its music dialogues with other music, bringing them into its artistic discourse; and its liminal status as an “undefinable” object that manifests an aural aspect of the city of Bogota. I discuss the matter in question from the voices of the members of the community and mediatic information that exemplifies the nexus between the music of La Distritofónica and Bogotá to explain the metaphor and the breakpoint between ontologies of jazz and experimental music.