Ubuntu Fusion Music

Nominated for the 2025 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.

In exploring heterogeneous intersections between jazz, rock, ethnic, and world music, this book answers the question as to whether fusion represents a style on its own or whether it is the base for combining diverse music sources. Social, political, and geographical divides reflected in post-communist, capitalist, and third worlds, and in democratic and dictatorial regimes have compelled substantial changes in musicians’ thinking. The book examines ethnic inspirations in American jazz, Slovak-American jazz, young French bands with diverse fusion identities, Hungarian and Czech progressive rock, Czech world music and brass bands, American psychedelic rock, Italian rock, and in a Romani-Slovak-Norwegian music project. New compositional and improvisational trends, and hybrid fusions in contemporary music embrace the African philosophy of ubuntu, which denotes feelings of mutual belonging free of prejudices against racial origins, social inequalities, or other cultural characteristics.