Remixing Jazz Culture: Hybridity and Collectivity in the New European City

In the twenty-first century, cosmopolitan musical collectivities reinvigorate the architectural spaces of urban neighbourhoods to forge new engagements with culture and technology. Within the New European city, hybrid economic forums (Lessig) generate musical activities involving both shared practices such as musical bartering and proprietary resources such as state-of-the-art commercial recordings. In this article, I examine the growing phenomena of mixed-mediated musical collectivism by examining the socio-cultural, musical and performative activities of two Dutch groups and their surrounding collectives, Kyteman’s Hiphop Orkest (and collectivity Kytopia) and C-mon & Kypski. By offering an ethnographic and socio-cultural analysis of these two Dutch groups, I illuminate the embeddedness of late-capitalist musical collectivities to European hybrid processes. Contemporary forms of musical collectivism are distinguished from earlier varieties by highlighting participants’ engagement with hybrid practices including mixed-genre creativity; sharing of resources and professional skills, and finally collaborative networks among music and non-arts participants through a combination of local and transnational circuits.