Who We Are, What We Stand For  

Full text of the keynote speech by Alexander Hawkins at the European Jazz Conference 2026. Published with the permission of the author.

Recent years have shown worrying gains for authoritarians and  nationalists across the globe. In some places they are in power (Trump, Milei, Erdogan, Vučić, Putin), whilst in others, they are ominously close (Weidel, LePen, Farage). By virtue of the threat they pose, they are causing ostensibly more moderate political  leaders to lurch towards the extremes. Some refer to a concept  known as the ‘Overton window’: that range of policies which a  politician may espouse without being regarded as ‘too’ extreme. This window is moving. Daily, we see the normalisation of ideas  previously only discussed cautiously, and in select company. 

Racism and division can nowadays unproblematically and  advantageously be overt. We are no longer not dealing with an old school of politician who at least seeks to conceal his motivations  (and let me use the masculine pronoun here, because even though  it fails to capture the threat of a Weidl, a Meloni, or a Le Pen, nationalism does seem to be heavily gendered as a general  pattern). 

Right-wing authoritarians are weaponising culture: leaders seek to  caricature culture as the preserve of educated elites - and of  course, mass education is one of the right’s greatest fears. Ignore  these politicians’ own vast wealth and ties to big business: why  should the ‘woke’ few enjoy culture, when we can reallocate the  resources it consumes instead to white elephants like ‘keeping  borders secure’, the prison-industrial complex, or any number of  private-sector ventures? 

The arts can also trouble authoritarians for their capacity to  galvanize and give voice to minorities. Look, for instance, at how  Franco targeted Catalan and Basque self-expression; look at how  the Conservative government in the UK targeted rave culture in the  early 1990s; and look at the complex battleground hip-hop has  often been throughout its existence. Furthermore, the arts are like  birds: they have an inconvenient habit of ignoring borders. Add this nationalist headache to the mix: arts from different backgrounds  love to mix and play together. 

All of us in this room will probably be experiencing the effects of  this political climate in subtly different ways: but some of the  common themes are likely to be dramatic cuts in funding (if we’re  an organisation fortunate enough to receive funding in the first  place), and perhaps also in staffing (if we’re an organisation  fortunate enough to have staff: and it’s important to say the  volunteer ecology of our music is almost certainly sadly still under acknowledged and under-discussed). Problems with audience  attendance may well also often be related to financial hardship. In  short, for many - even most - here, it’s probably getting harder to  keep the lights on, literally and figuratively. 

Perhaps, then, some of this is what we want to take a stand  against, both for reasons of (completely justified) moral indignation,  and for more basic instrumental reasons of self-preservation. So  let’s consider our audience. In our most frank analysis, if we are to  take a stand, who is going to notice?

In this room, we will have many differing viewpoints; but let’s  assume that there may be some broad issues on which we can  reach a consensus. Within Cologne, on this weekend, we might  even be able to make our voices heard loud and clear. But how  about within the jazz community in Europe more broadly? How  confidently can we imagine those within our musical sphere who  are either not here this weekend, or who prefer not to align with  organisations, accurately articulating what ‘we’ decide ‘we’ stand  for? Do they, and should they, even care? Let’s broaden it out.  Beyond the arts, do we really think there are significant audiences -  public or political - which have any detailed idea whatsoever of the  political stances of this, or indeed any other, cultural organisation? 

Let me change tack for a moment, and introduce a new idea. For  any job, it’s helpful to find the right tool. Sometimes, for example, it  can be useful to think of music as language. So: we can  meaningfully say that music ‘speaks to us’, or that it’s ‘lyrical’.  Music as language is also absolutely central to understanding  traditions such as the Yoruba talking drum. I could go on. However, if I want to ask for a coffee, music is for sure a very clumsy way to  do so. Or, to put it another way, music is not that sort of language.  So the potentially uncomfortable question should now be occurring  to all of us: is the EJN really a useful tool for standing up to political  trends, and trying to bring about change? And much as the answer  is awkward, and might be dispiriting, I would argue very strongly  that no, it is a very blunt, inefficient tool for bringing about the  desired result - at least, at first glance. We risk either preaching to  the choir, or trying to address people who can’t hear us, and who  probably don’t care in any case. Coming up with a policy  statement wouldn’t necessarily hurt, but I think we would be naïve  to think it would cause anything other than the tiniest ripples at  best, even if it might massage our consciences temporarily. 

Sure, we can maybe get organized to lobby for improved funding,  although as we know, this is easier said than done. But things such  as poor funding are best understood as symptoms, rather than the  problem itself. Better funding is a short term fix. If I have a wasp  sting from a nest in my house, I will want to treat it to relieve the  pain, even if more fundamentally what I really need to do is either remove the nest from my house, or, unlikely as it may sound, move  my house away from the vicinity of the wasp’s nest. But if I’m  honest, better resourcing for the arts as such isn’t really what I  want to stand for. What I mean by that is this: if we could create a  social context in which all our concerts and related activities paid  for themselves without external injections of cash, this would be  great, and there would be nothing morally problematic about the  fact that funding wasn’t involved. Arts funding isn’t intrinsically good in the same way in which authoritarianism, nationalism and racism are intrinsically bad. 

So how can we move against the prevailing geopolitical climate? If  we adopt the skepticism of my analysis, what then is the place of a  cultural organisation in the struggle? To address this, I want first to  turn to look at the ‘we’ in the conference title: who we are, what we stand for. 

As an artist, there are many contexts in which I’m suspicious of the  ‘we’. ‘We’ can suggest assumption, generalisation, and categorisation. If somebody talked to me about ‘bandleaders like us’ or ‘pianists like me’, my immediate reaction would likely be a  certain sort of defensiveness. I would be anxious, for example,  about the possibility that I wasn’t working hard enough to be  completely personal in my music, or equally, that they simply  weren’t working hard enough to hear its distinguishing features.  Furthermore, ‘we’ almost always implies a ‘they’. A club, for  example, implies people outside the club: and this is one of the  critical tools we should use, for example, to scrutinize  organizations such as the European Union, or indeed, even the  EJN itself. To put it another way, ‘we’ can be empowering and  inclusive, but it can also be ‘othering’. 

When this conference tries to identify a ‘we’, it will be a complex  thing. There is a foundational paper in legal theory called  ‘Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach’ by Felix  Cohen - a piece which was very important in the birth of legal  realism, which was one of the main intellectual precursors to the  critical studies movements which are so important today, as well as  so despised by the political right. In this piece, Cohen essentially  suggests that entities such as a ‘corporation’ - and he would happily include a ‘Jazz Network’ within this, I’ve no doubt - form  part of an unhelpful ‘heaven of legal concepts’: if we truly want to  understand such entities, he argues, we need instead to look at  their constituent members. And we, here, as I have said, will have  many differing outlooks, some compatible, some less so. 

But the complexity of ‘we’ is also key to understanding that by  acknowledging our potential impotence as an organisation is not  somehow to abdicate political responsibility, and that we needn’t  feel helpless having adopted a certain realism about our place.  Mingus intriguingly titled one composition ‘Myself When I Am Real’.  But who, for example, am I? I am a musician, and within that, a  pianist, a composer, a bandleader, and so on. I am also a teacher. I  am also a sucker for Italian food, and a completist of both Eduardo  Galeano and Charles M. Schulz. I am someone who is slowly trying  to teach himself some Japanese; I’m an uncle; and, for my sins, a  fan of Chelsea football club. And I could continue.

By understanding that as humans we wear multiple hats, we come  to understand that we do not necessarily have to make our stand  in our particular rôle as members of this community. It is absolutely  OK for our activities to be confidently and unashamedly about the  art, so long as we do not abdicate responsibility in the sphere of  our life where we feel we can be most effective in fighting the  system. Let’s be realistic: surely a much, much more effective front  line for the fight is through organisation in the classroom, since  education is key to understanding, tolerance, and compassion. A  much, much more effective front line for the fight is through the  unions, since the unions have the ability, for example, to disrupt  wealth production. A much, much more effective front line is on the  streets, since civil disobedience is an unequivocal warning to  power. A much, much more effective front line is through product  boycotts and similar; and - in general - a much more effective front  line is at the ballot box, if we are lucky enough to have access to it.  I am not naively putting my faith in any one of these mechanisms,  but for sure in combination, they have promise.

Simply because we are passionate and concerned about  geopolitics, and because we are passionate and concerned about  music, it does not follow that we must attempt to open a  geopolitical front by linking the two. The global situation is so  urgent that we have to be ruthlessly targeted with our (necessarily limited) energies. 

And yet intuitively we might still feel that what we do has political  relevance. Correctly so, in my opinion: and I’m glad, because for all  I’ve argued above that ‘we’ is a tricky concept, and even a  dangerous one in some versions, of course I am a committed  believer in incarnations of the ‘we’ such as solidarity, collective  action and community. 

What we need to do is to adjust our focus. The sleight of hand of  the authoritarian with his cult of personality is to make himself the  centre of attention; to lure us into the trap of a top-down  conception of politics. The misdirection also means that we risk  naively focussing on ‘the politician’, when, as we know, power is  also brokered by plutocrats and technocrats such as the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of the world, as well as various organs of the media. 

Well, as I’ve argued, we’re probably delusional to imagine the ‘top  of the tree’ as a useful target for our attentions. To put it another  way, we’re wasting our time trying to tell these people what we  stand for: they most likely won’t even hear our message, and even  if they do, almost certainly won’t care. Even at the best of times,  politicians aren’t exactly known for having ‘eureka moments’ in  response to principled arguments. Taking a stand against the top of  the tree might even trick us into feeling better about things in the  short term, but will be not unlike rearranging the deck chairs on the  Titanic. Instead, we should take notice of what happens when we  concentrate on political action as a process of building from the  ground upwards. What happens when we show our own  communities what we stand for? And how can we do this? 

For a start, what we can do is to model a certain way of being. In  all our actions: programming, logistical, in how we communicate  with each other, we can model an instance of a coherent, fair community. We can model equality of opportunity. We can model fairness in questions of access. We can model innovation. We can  model daring. We can model environmental best practice. We can model financial even-handedness. We can model independent,  critical thought, personal responsibility, and a healthy skepticism of  the machineries of engineered ‘taste-making’. We can, through our  activities, create spaces for freedom of expression, and at the  same time spaces where we - as musicians no less than as  presenters, writers and so on - can learn or re-learn what freedom  of expression actually is, removed from fashion, cliché, and market  powers. 

Our ecosystem can model that people from vastly different  backgrounds - cultural, linguistic, geographical, and so on - can  come together and create beauty. We can model the antithesis of  the classic right-wing caricature of more communitarian  conceptions: we can show - just as Duke Ellington was already  doing in his ensembles more than 100 years ago - that radical  individualism can exist in complete harmony within radical  community. Where nationalism seeks to ‘other’, we can show difference as cause for celebration, and a catalyst for discovery.  And we must also model constructive and radical self-criticism,  because lip-service and public pronouncement can trick us into  thinking we’ve done something useful, when in reality, it is not even close to enough: action is the thing. (I would also urge the same  levels of self-criticism to my fellow musicians: I’m sure all of us in  this room can think of examples where a lazy veneer of quasi-edgy  or radical rhetoric has been applied to something essentially very conservative). 

The crucial thing is that these values which we can nurture will  seep through into, and galvanize, our attitudes in other areas of life,  as well as the attitudes of our community more broadly  understood. And it is perhaps in these areas of life in which we can more meaningfully take on geopolitical trends in a direct sense.  What I am saying, therefore, is this: arts organisations might be  relatively impotent and inefficient for taking the fight direct to  politicians. But perhaps counterintuitively, by turning the gaze more  inward, and creating the best conditions possible for the art itself,  we can then begin to be more relevant to the world at large. And this has interesting parallels with how protest music itself largely  operates: by galvanizing, educating, and provoking its audience.  Let’s be real: who in general is listening to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On - the people in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Frankfurt and so  on? Or a demographic looking a little more like the one in the room  today?

If the tide of authoritarianism can be stemmed, we will not only be  appeasing our most obvious symptoms - for example, through  funding coming back online - but we will also be addressing some  causes of other aspects of our discomfort. Healthier education  systems will fundamentally shift understanding and interest across  the arts, and a more just society should provide potential concert goers with more disposable income (if a lack of this is indeed a  contributing factor to attendance issues) - though I fully understand  that this latter point is far, far down the road.

Throughout this talk, there have been several directions which I  haven’t taken for reasons of time, but which the academic in me is  very uncomfortable not addressing. For example, it is an omission not to address questions of AI and what taking a stand against this might look like - even though the issues certainly intersect with  issues of plutocracy and so on. I have avoided the questions so as  to avoid a superficial treatment of a complex set of issues in the  short time available. I have also - and this is partially perhaps in the  nature of speeches as opposed to various forms of the written  word - made statements which certainly would require proof and nuance in a lengthier treatment.

I am also very uneasy with assumptions about the centrality of funding. I talked earlier about the possibility of moving my house  away from the wasp’s nest, rather than vice-versa, and this is an  example of the type of thinking I was signposting: can we please at  some point discuss how we might think about recasting ourselves  outside the economic frame? What models, for instance, can we  find from within our music for self-determination, outside the  orthodox modes of production? Community organisations such as  the AACM, UGMAA, and the Black Artists’ Group have been  documented in considerable depth at this point, and I don’t think  we engage enough with questions not only of how we might be able to subsist outside economic norms and structures, but of  what we actively might stand to gain creatively from doing so. Let’s remember that not engaging with these orthodox models is another  way to dilute existing power structures. 

I would also suggest that we should avoid some kind of what we  might call ‘hero’ syndrome in the arts. We should very seriously  consider whether we can make a virtue out of some kind of macro level political insignificance. Geopolitics is draining. It can  impoverish; it can be frightening; it can be exhausting. It is not a  weakness to acknowledge any of these things. Is one of our great  virtues that the arts can provide a refuge, even temporary, from  this? I’ve long been inspired by a wonderful quote from the great St  Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who speaks of having ‘no nation now  but the imagination’; and in fact, I was introduced to Walcott’s work  by my friend, the inspirational Iranian-American writer Azar Nafisi,  who titled her brilliant defense of the relevance of literature ‘The  Republic of Imagination’. Surely one of the virtues of what we do is  that we can create oases - sanctuaries both from the day-to-day  grind of making a living, and from macro-political issues. And to create these spaces for beauty and reflection, this in itself is part of  the struggle. It’s instructive to consider artists such as Sun Ra here.  Think of all of the tropes of escapism in his work: Space is the  Place, Rocket Number Nine Takes Off For The Planet Venus, There  Are Other Worlds They Have Not Told You Of, and so on…this is  world-building as a means of empowerment. Think too of World  Builders such as Anthony Braxton, or Cixin Liu (the author of The  Three Body-Problem). We shouldn’t underestimate relative  invisibility and outsider status as a way to enhance our ability to  provide respite. Because when we do come back to the real world  after the musical experience, we will hopefully be reinvigorated,  with an enhanced capacity to face down the political challenges  about which we need to be so concerned.

Making space for people and beauty, whatever the external forces;  modeling a just and equitable ecosystem within our domain;  understanding that rest and play are not some bourgeois luxuries  but instead universal entitlements which need to be safeguarded:  all of these ideas illustrate that making the music happen is perhaps the crucial political act to which we, here, can best turn  our attention. Maybe this is how we can take our stand. 

Alexander Hawkins, Oxford, July/September 2026

Photo by (c) Janet Sinica