Going back: Constructions of authenticity through autobiographical narratives

This paper sets out to explore the authentication processes of members of a Danish jazz musician’s community and illustrates the struggle of being an authentic Western European performer of an African American art form. The analysis is grounded in Harvey Sacks’ Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) and includes an analysis of a selected corpus revealing how members orientate towards ’going back’ to childhood influences as a way of being a member and constructing authenticity in autobiographical narratives. In addressing issues of authenticity, identity and genre characterisations this paper provides an analysis of how individual members of ‘official’ jazz groups such as the trad jazz group and the mod jazz group construct their identities as authentically Danish, as well as how the boundaries of authenticity are policed and how these boundaries might be affected by mainstream discourses as to what an authentic jazz identity should constitute. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which speakers’ articulations of jazz construct an independent authentic Danish jazz identity.