Reading Ian Carr's Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (good mix of personal and music bio, albeit it a little too gushing at times) last night I was struck by his notion that jazz, representative of the American Lincolnesque ideal of freedom and individual liberty and equality within a unified, cooperative society and republic, became big in many parts of Europe, in part, as a form of resistance against oppressive governments, first the Nazis and then the Soviets, that tended to ban the music.
He has it most readily adopted by republican France and then, for example, by the Scandinavian countries (Nazi occupied in World War II) and Eastern block nations like Poland. After the war, he posits that the way people in Germany and Japan latched onto the music was symbolic of the post-war change in their societies. Meanwhile, Britain, stratified socially, was slower to appreciate it (and still lags in the extent and quality of its jazz offerings in my experience).
Personally, I think factors such as European traditions in avant-garde music, and art, have a lot to do with it as well. But I want to see if I can find more writing along the lines of Carr's thesis.
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