Jazz Research PDF

[JRJ 11.
1 (2017) 5-6] (print) ISSN 1753-8637

https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.34371 (online) ISSN 1753-8645
Editorial
Catherine Tackley and Tony Whyton
Welcome to the latest issue of Jazz Research Journal.

As usual, we are delighted to feature wide-ranging scholarship on jazz
in this issue, with authors employing diverse methodologies and exploring
the subject from different perspectives.
Promotion is a particular focus in this issue. Jazz has always been
reliant on a dedicated workforce of promoters to fulfil a central function
of bringing live music to audiences. Some, like Norman Granz and John
Hammond, practically achieved the status of ‘household names’; but
many more were and are active within particular local scenes, across the
world, and working on a voluntary basis. The activities of these promoters
provides an important infrastructure for the emergence of local musicians
as well as creating the opportunity for audiences to encounter artists from
further afield.
The perspectives of jazz promoters within a particular city in the UK are
explored by Haftor Medbøe and Zack Moir, who use ethnography to pro-
vide an excellent illustration of how the tensions surrounding the staging of
jazz continue to surface in the twenty-first century. One hundred years ago,
and on the other side of the Atlantic, presentation was also a concern of
emerging jazz bands in New Orleans. Alan Ainsworth presents close read-
ings of historic band photographs, identifying key visual conventions which
evidence the complex negotiations between the expression of individual
identity and adhering to the demands of the market.
Taking a different slant on the contemporary jazz world, again using
ethnography and focusing on the UK, Elina Hytönen-Ng explores the
oft-mentioned notion of the ‘jazz community’. She identifies the constant
mobility of musicians as a key characteristic, indicating that the fragmen-
tary nature of the jazz community could thereby be considered ‘imagined’,
but also points out the concretizing function of fixedness of venues and
musicians’ migration between them.
We are delighted that our ‘Extended Play’ section continues to develop
with a contribution from jazz promotor Tony Dudley-Evans. Tony provides a
personal perspective on the relationship between Andy Hamilton and David
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX.
6 Jazz Research Journal
Murray which exemplifies Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic, but also
speaks to Hytönen-Ng’s characterization of mobility as a central feature
to the nature of the jazz community. As ever, we welcome submissions for
‘Extended Play’—as well as more conventional articles and reviews.
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

[JRJ 11.1 (2017) 7-27] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
Promotion anxieties:
Jazz promoters within the UK scene
Haftor Medbøe1
Associate Professor of Music, Edinburgh Napier University
h.medboe@napier.ac.uk
Zack Moir2
Lecturer in Music, Edinburgh Napier University, and The University of the Highlands and Islands
z.moir@napier.ac.uk
Abstract
Definitions and roles of the promoter within the ecology of the music industries have
over recent years become the subject of attention by academics working within the field
of popular music studies. It has become accepted that precise definitions are difficult
to apply, due to both the varied understanding of the term ‘promoter’, and the diverse
nature of their activities. Where the promoter is the conduit between artist and audience,
the ways and means by which this is manifested vary greatly between individuals, and
the professional and personal circumstances in which they operate. Rather than further
attempting to provide distinct definitions as applied to the promoter, this article aims to
offer a nuanced examination of the motivations, professional networks and occupational
challenges that contribute to the self-perceptions of five promoters working in the context
of a local jazz scene within an undisclosed city in the United Kingdom.
Keywords: ecology; jazz; promoters; scene
Introduction
There is a growing body of academic and industry-commissioned litera-
ture concerning the ecology of the live music sector in the United Kingdom.
1. Haftor Medbøe is Associate Professor of Music and Jazz Musician in Residence

at Edinburgh Napier University where he lectures in composition and improvisation. In
tandem with pursuing an active career as a composer and musician, his research inter-
ests fall broadly within the fields of New Jazz Studies with numerous outputs on themes
and topics including jazz dissemination, pedagogy, identities, and ecologies.
2. Zack Moir is a Lecturer in Music at Edinburgh Napier University and the Univer-
sity of the Highlands and Islands, UK. His primary research interests are in popular music
in higher education, popular music composition pedagogy, jazz, and the teaching and
learning of improvisation. He is an active composer and performer, and has published on
a range of topics including popular music pedagogy, popular music making and leisure,
and popular music songwriting/composition.
Frith (2007), Riley and Laing (2006), Frith (2010), Burland and Pitts (2010),
Brennan and Webster (2011), Wall and Barber (2015) and others have, over
the past decade, given attention to the delineation and inner-workings of
the music industries and, in the process, identified the roles of the interme-
diaries that enable artists and audiences to interact in the live performance
sphere, including that of the promoter. However, this is a term that is some-
what nebulous, can have different meanings depending on the context
in which it is used (and by whom), and can be used to represent a range
of people who perform a number of different, and often unrelated tasks.
As Brennan and Webster (2011: 2) identify: ‘a promoter’s role is simple to
define but complicated to describe’. With this in mind, our aim is not to try
to further ‘define’ the role of producer, but rather to investigate the roles and
actions of promoters at a local level in a jazz scene in a UK city.
In the music industries ecology which includes, but is by no means lim-
ited to, artists, managers, agents, music press, record labels and record
producers (Frith 2010: 3), the promoter acts as intermediary in the process
of cultural production, placing the artist in front of a live audience. In this
role, the promoter ascribes a value to individual artists or bands based on
combinations of known or projected financial and cultural ‘worth’, in match-
ing anticipated demand with ticket pricing and venue audience capacities.
Within this commercial arena, the artist variously represents a quick return
on a promoter’s financial risk, or an investment to be nurtured over time. It
is common practice, for example in music festival programming, to include
high-grossing big names to serve as ‘loss leaders’ for lesser known or
‘fledgling’ acts. Conversely, it is not unusual for a promoter to champion
an emerging act before it has become commercially viable, with the tacit
understanding of future promoter/artist loyalties as and when the relation-
ship becomes profitable.
The promoter is typically cast as ‘middle-man’ by those whose interac-
tions they enable; a mediator often viewed with mistrust by musicians com-
peting for attention (EKOS 2014: 23), and remaining largely anonymous
to the majority of concertgoers. The promoter thereby occupies a space
between the competing, and often conflicting, desires and expectations of
artists and audiences, within the complex economic and social structures
of the cultural industries. Frith (2012: 517) states that the successful real-
ization of the promoter’s role may be measured through ‘organizing musi-
cal events that enable audiences to listen to music in an appropriate way’.
Such ‘appropriateness’ is achieved through the measured consideration
of venue size, location and type, and ticket pricing, with the objective of

Promotion anxieties 9
generating a positive audience experience from that which is promoted.

Running in tandem with Frith’s audience-focused perspective is the pro-
moter’s stewardship and gatekeeping of the local music scene. It is in
this capacity that the promoter adopts decision-making roles that impact
directly on who is booked to play, how often, and for what fee. This level
of control can even extend to the promoter acting as producer and fixer in
assembling personnel lineups for specific musical projects, be it a local
pick-up band for a visiting artist, a band or orchestra to play specific reper-
toire, or in the bringing together of specific artists—any of which can argu-
ably have a palpable effect on the performance artefact.
As is the case for musicians, other agents within the live music sector,
including venue owners, front-of-house staff, sound and lighting engineers,
and ticketing agencies, are all co-dependent on the activities of the pro-
moter (Brennan and Webster 2011). Promoters may therefore also be
viewed as the ‘lifeblood’ (Lawes et al. 2016: 35) without which the health
and functionality of the live music sector would be significantly compro-
mised. In an environment where many musicians have come to accept live
performance and related merchandising of recorded work as the primary
income generator in the straitened age of digital streaming and free down-
loads (Frith 2007; Montoro-Pons and Cuadrado-García 2011), the promot-
er’s role as the sector’s gatekeeper has become increasingly focal to the
financial, aesthetic and social underpinning of individual scenes.
This responsibility is not always easily managed nor, for that matter,
handsomely remunerated. Where in recent times the press has made much
of artists’ increased financial reliance on, and returns from, the live sector,
such claims typically refer to established, mainstream acts on international
and festival touring circuits. As such, they do not apply readily to the major-
ity of jazz musicians for whom, with the exception of the very few, oppor-
tunities to present their music and develop a fan-base, or even to make a
living wage, are typically more elusive. The difficulties involved in squaring
the financial circle for jazz musicians have, unsurprisingly, a direct impact
on the earning potential of those who promote their music. Many promoters
work for free or relatively modest remuneration. Some do so with the fiscal
safety net of public or corporate funding, and others through promoting
jazz as part of a bigger offering, in which more significant financial returns
are achieved through presenting more universally popular genres of music
to subsidize their jazz programming. For others, commercial viability plays
little part in their promotional objectives, their motivation being closer to
that of an ‘activist’ within the subculture of jazz.

Promotion and creation of scene

The promotion of jazz in the UK takes place across a broad spectrum of
performance spaces (Lawes et al. 2016: 35), influencing and responding to
the zeitgeist of public taste and cultural appetite. Venues playing host to live
jazz performances are observed in live music censuses such as The Value
of Jazz in Britain II (Riley and Laing 2010) and Music Sector Review (EKOS
2014), ranging in capacity and status from the civic concert hall to the back
room of a pub, the dedicated music venue to the private sitting room. Over its
century-long evolution, the performance and reception of jazz have become
entrenched in formality and ritual (Pinheiro 2014). Manifestations and expec-
tations of these normative constructs vary, not only dependent on the sty-
listic variety of jazz being presented, but also on the nature of the space in
which it is being performed, and the audience demographic sought. At one
end of this spectrum of expectation is the ‘listening gig’—one in which per-
former and audience are formally separated, each with clear active and pas-
sive functions, respectively. At the other is the ‘participatory gig’—in which
there is a less marked divide between ‘performers’ and ‘audience’, with the
latter engaging in a more socially active role, whether by contributing to the
musical content (as in the case of jam sessions), by dancing, calling for spe-
cific requests or applauding and vocally acknowledging individual soloists.
Returning to Frith’s idea of ‘appropriateness’, it is the promoter’s responsibil-
ity to fulfil or, in some cases, creatively confound these expectations (Lawes
et al. 2016: 10) by demonstrating an understanding of performance norms.
Central to the social construction of the jazz scene is the live interac-
tion between musician and audience (Burland and Pitts 2010). The degree
of intimacy in this interaction is arguably unique in the presentation of jazz.
The majority of UK jazz venues are small, attracting audiences of less than
100 (Riley and Laing 2010). This setting affords the audience proximity with
participation, including verbal affirmation and the applauding of featured
solos, both expected and encouraged. Performers’ inclusion of musical ref-
erences to the music’s recorded history, whether by way of stylistic mimicry
or literal musical ‘quotes’, encourage a sense of shared listening experi-
ences between musician and listener, and a codified means of membership
to the scene. Verbal communication, on stage and off, is similarly infused
with terms borrowed from a different era steeped in the constructed narra-
tive of jazz (McRae 2001; Leonard 1986), a ‘secret’ language that serves to
identify the fellow jazz fan.
The comforts of incorporation into the jazz scene, however, belie fric-
tions amongst its subscribers. Jazz as a genre has over its century-long

development given rise to a canon of rich stylistic variety and a diversity

of philosophical underpinnings. Jazz fans typically profess an affinity with
one or more historically located stylistic variants leading to abundant,
scene-wide discourse concerning delineation and authenticity. Within such
a complex discourse one might, for the sake of convenience, present a
binary observation that jazz fans can be typified as those committed to the
preservation of some or more aspects of the music’s cultural heritage, and
those of a less prescriptive, culturally inclusive outlook. Where understand-
ings of histories might be shared to a degree, the future of jazz (how it is
played, where, and to whom) is a subject of consistent contention amongst
its fans. Younger jazz musicians increasingly look to their counterparts in
the field of popular music for inspiration, whether through the integration of
emerging technologies, web-based audience development and communi-
cation tools, or through less traditionally defined live presentation of their
music. In the promotion of jazz, the fault lines between tradition and innova-
tion within the broadly defined jazz scene are difficult to navigate, and the
needs and desires of both hard to satisfy. Jazz continues to lag in relation
to the more ‘web 2.0-versed’ popular music industries (Medbøe and Dias
2014) in the promotion of its musical culture to prospective audiences. In
this period of self-examination and outward-looking re-invention, the live
promoter’s roles, and understandings of the scene that they operate within,
are critical to the continued survival of jazz as it embarks on its second cen-
tury of evolution.
Jazz can therefore, on one hand, be seen as a culturally transformative
art form and, on the other, one that is tradition based—or, indeed, combi-
nations thereof. Proponents of both ideological standpoints are to a large
extent dependent on those who steward it through change or, indeed, safe-
guard its heritage. Promoters therefore significantly define the live scenes in
which they present. Understanding their motivations helps to make sense
not only of current and historical circumstances in the staging of live jazz,
but also provides a starting point for coming generations of jazz promot-
ers. This article seeks to probe these issues and contribute to knowledge
in this area by reporting on a qualitative study that explores the motiva-
tions, self-identities, areas of activity, and economic pressures affecting our
participants of five active jazz promoters in an undisclosed city within the
United Kingdom.3 Participant interviews include discussion of the tensions
between the economic sustainability of their activities, fiscal accountability,
3. The city is undisclosed in order to preserve the anonymity of the participants.

regulatory governance (Brennan and Webster 2011: 15–17), the state of

the industry, stewardship of the local talent pool, cultural gatekeeping, and
responding to audience demand.
Method
Five promoters were invited to take part in this research. This purposive
homogeneous sampling was deemed appropriate by the authors as our
focus on a specific group demanded that we speak to specific individ-
uals working in this area. The areas of activity in which the promoters
are primarily engaged are: the programming of a city-wide international
jazz festival [Promoter A]; individual jazz concerts within a wider, non-jazz
offering [Promoter B]; a dedicated jazz venue [Promoter C]; a weekly jazz
night and jam session [Promoter D]; ad-hoc performances of marginal
music (i.e. outside of the mainstream jazz offering, such as free improvi-
sation) [Promoter E].
Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted, and each was
recorded (with the consent of the interviewee) and fully transcribed. Inter-
view topics pertained to the roles and responsibilities of the promoter, the
nature of the scene they operate in and their perceived position within it,
financial issues (including funding, revenue streams and commercial pres-
sures) and cultural/artistic pressures. Each author conducted an individual
thematic analysis, analysing the data for emergent themes. These were
distilled into a single list of themes to ensure a consistent interpretation of
the data.
All names and locations/venues have been anonymized in order to pre-
serve the anonymity of the interviewees.
Findings
Motivation and impetus
In our attempt to understand the ecology of jazz promotion in the UK city in
which this research took place, we were keen to probe interviewees about
their motivations for working in this field. Although the individual circum-
stances of the promoters differ, a number of commonalities were observed.
When reflecting on why they were drawn to promote jazz, three of the inter-
viewees reported that they did so, at least in part, because they identified
themselves as musicians (whether of professional or amateur standing)
who wanted to be involved in the creation and organization of gigs.

Promoter C: I started [promoting] because I am a musician, so I’ve

always played and I’ve always wanted to create gigs.
Promoter D: I play piano. Not well, but I am enthusiastic at home with

the headphones on basically, that’s about the best way to describe it.
Promoter E: To work, to actually play myself…
Whether as a means of taking charge of their own musical aspirations (Wall

and Barber 2015: 125) or simply in order to create opportunities for fellow
musicians, there was a clear relationship between playing an instrument
and perceiving themselves as musicians, and promoting gigs. However,
other factors beyond a wish to perform and be involved musically, such as
a drive or sense of responsibility to make things happen, played an equally
important part in interviewees’ motivations to promote:
Promoter C: I’ve always been an organizer which is unlike a lot of

musicians who sort of wait for the phone to ring. I am more proactive,
so I go out there and get gigs for myself and then thinking, if I can do
that, I can get gigs for others and do some things.
Promoter D: I was unaware of what went on in the [local] jazz scene

until, six, seven years ago … I just thought: ‘I listen to these masters
and it can’t be as good as that’ and I was ignorant of the quality of jazz
that was taking place that was home-grown … My personal motivation
for promoting at [a named venue] had everything to do with serving
people of a certain age like me who just didn’t know what was going
on out there, and bringing them in.
The personal circumstances of individual promoters interviewed had clear

bearing on philosophy and impetus. Operating at the less commercially
rewarding end of the spectrum, one respondent clearly valued process
over material gain:
Promoter E: … we’re egocentric, we need an audience and also

sometimes you play really well with that stimulus, also we have a
social duty, you know, we’re musicians, why do we exist but to inspire
people and give them a good time? To go out and play is like a won-
derfully virtuous circle where a musician gains from it, the audience
gains from it and we all starve together [laughs].
Similarly, the promoters’ passion for the music as a motivating force for
their activities also came to the fore:
Promoter A1: I think the natural way for most jazz promoters, includ-
ing myself, is that you’re a jazz fan, and you think to yourself ‘how can
I promote this music so I can hear more of it myself?’ … And, why do

I promote it now? Because, I think that jazz is an extraordinarily fulfill-

ing music for people to listen to, to engage with.
One promoter whose incentive to promote jazz was not related to personal
musical practice, or indeed any exclusive passion for jazz, took a more uni-
versal, if equally zealous, perspective in describing the bringing together of
performers and audience under one roof—albeit with the caveat of doing
so for financial gain.
Promoter B: My motivation, the thing that gives me quite a buzz

about it, is when a show goes well, it sells well, the artist is happy, the
audience … you know there is a busy room or it’s sold-out, the audi-
ence get this great feedback and it starts bouncing back and forward
between the artist and the audience and you get this kind of euphoric
experience … you know, the artist enjoying it, the audience enjoying
it and you are witness to it and facilitated it and without your input that
experience for all these people wouldn’t have happened … so that’s
one of the rewards … I get paid.
The idea of promoter as a key figure in the creation of cultural and social
capital emerged. The majority of interviewees seemed to consider them-
selves as standard-bearers for jazz, and some saw their role as contributing
to audience education, for example by providing context to programming
in mail-outs and on social media:
Promoter C: I see [education] as an important function, definitely

yeah, I try and work in some kind of story or angle or snippet or news
snippet or YouTube clip or something that kind of interesting that will
catch people’s eyes or ears [in the promoter’s use of promotional
social media].
One promoter found the term ‘educator’ too self-aggrandizing, interpreting

their role more as a champion of the music, through creating opportunities
for the discovery of live jazz on a local level driven by a sense of moral obli-
gation. Promoter D felt that their role was more akin to being:
Sort of ‘herder of the ignorant’, maybe? … An evangelist, rather than

educator. I’m not teaching anybody anything so I wouldn’t apply a
haughty phrase, as it were, but certainly I see reaching out and find-
ing new people, more to the point actually reaching out to existing
jazz fans who, like me, just didn’t know what was there live, and tell-
ing them that this is something that is important. It’s here and it’s con-
tributing to the world output of jazz in a very, very meaningful way and
if you like that music and you get pleasure from it, you have a duty to
support that in some sort of way, morally.

The imperative to bring the music and its broader philosophy to the attention
of new audiences and new generations of listeners, and to counterbalance
perceived lack of attention by cultural commentators of the mainstream,
provided a common theme:
Promoter E: I do see myself as carrying the flame. Jazz is such a

marginalized music, somebody has got to bring the next generation
through … It’s enlightened self-interest, I want to live in a world where
jazz is valued and because our music is marginalized by the media
and by all those people who control things. Because they won’t invite
us to their party we have to invite other people to ours, you know … I
want to sell a philosophy that jazz is great and all these other people
can be part of it as well … because jazz is evidently the most important
music on the planet. We all know that but we have to prove it, and the
way I prove it is by having that platform by showing jazz in the context
itself and in the context of other musics and showing what we can do.
In addition to expressing feelings of obligation to the furthering of jazz and

the development of new audiences, some interviewees saw themselves as
gatekeepers, as curators and enablers, and even as co-instigators of the
creative act:
Promoter A: You’ve got to think that we’re, you know, ‘editors’ and
‘publishers’. So, you know, there’s a lot of material out there. What do
we want in our edition? What are our audience looking for? What are
they going to buy?
Such proactive activity also included the nurturing of young, or as yet inex-
perienced, talent:
Promoter C: But I also challenged local … I went to [musician’s

name] … and said: ‘Look, you’ve got a gig in three months’ time in
[city A] and [city B], I want a programme of two hours all original
music, go!’ ‘Oh … who can I use?’ ‘You choose’.
Promoter D: whilst we are very open to people who perhaps aren’t as

capable, they get the opportunity here, but in return they are loyal to
us, so that’s good … there are at least two or three examples of indi-
viduals who came in here, could hardly get through a song, cut their
teeth and are now gigging.
The process of nurturing emerging talent was also seen to be perceived as

beneficial to the aspirations of the individual promoter:
Promoter E: for example I played with a young chap called [musi-

cian’s name] who’s like a teenager, I actually saw him in [another
venue], great player, so I got him to play. That’s typical of how I see

people that I like and think: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if they played?’ And
also here’s a chance to expose this young impressionable person to
maybe a different way of playing jazz than they’re used to, because
they get taught certain things in college and the kind of collective
improv I do, the kind of free-form fusion thing I do … I can kind of
sell this to these young players, and, you know, promote my music
as well … well my musical philosophy as much as the jazz thing
generally.
As noted earlier, jazz promoters are often connected to the music through
being, or having been, musicians themselves. Where such a direct con-
nection might be viewed in terms of ‘a conflict of interests’, it nonethe-
less affords a degree of shared understanding with the musicians that
they present. Conversely, where promoters do not themselves play an
instrument, their relationship could be described as being more closely
aligned with the audience. Regardless, it becomes clear through the anal-
ysis of interview data that the promoters’ sense of duty to the health of
jazz, its audience and its scene, form a common aspect in terms of their
self-identity. In the fulfilment of this duty, the promoter seeks to grow the
audience for jazz, raise knowledge and awareness of the music and its
heritage, and provide support for established and emerging musicians
through putting on gigs. These activities are often perceived as running
against the grain of mainstream media and culture, forces that are typi-
cally seen as obstructive.
Artists, audiences and communities

The place of the promoter within the social fabric of the local jazz scene
emerged as important to the self-identity of the interviewees. A sense of
shared values with the musicians and audiences was expressed:
Promoter A: The communality of it, the friendship, the fun, the humour,
you know, all of that. I think it creates a kind of family sense … And the
other thing that I think is really important to mention about jazz, is that
it’s the most social music, so … any musician can go anywhere in the
world and immediately find a bond with a fellow jazz musician. And,
equally, jazz audiences can fit into that family. There is a family feel to
jazz that doesn’t exist in pop and rock music … And, so, why do you
promote jazz? Because you also like jazz musicians. I mean, despite
the fact that they can be ‘tricksy’ … and despite all the other issues,
you like jazz musicians.
In foregrounding the commonalities amongst those within the jazz com-

munity (while hinting at frictions), the need to keep abreast of change was
acknowledged:

Promoter C: Knowledge of the scene, I try and stay as knowledge-

able as possible … it’s important to meet people on the scene and
invariably names come and it’s like ‘oh, who’s this, new guy on the
scene, I will check him out’.
As well as to provide a nurturing environment for musicians:
Promoter D: we wanted the audience here, we wanted the musicians

here meeting because it was where ‘everyone went’ on a Sunday
night and you’d know that you would bump into your pals. It’s some-
where that over a pint, you know, perhaps you would have a little play
in the jam or if you were listening to a particular host artist you would
have a backdrop that you could, you know … that you knew was there
every week and that you could then use to provide you with an oppor-
tunity to get together and to potentially … We always hoped that this
would be the place that ideas would be seeded.
The desire to provide creative incubation spaces was not necessarily con-
fined to the inclusion of musicians from the jazz discipline:
Promoter E: I‘m really keen about bringing other musicians into our
space and also musicians from other disciplines, because what we do
is we have musicians from the classical world, the folk world, we have
poets, we have dancers. So I am trying to open a space up where jazz
is the main thing but other musicians and other cultures are coming
in to that space and we can share it, you know, so I am trying to open
things up and create a kind of umbrella thing.
An appetite for inclusivity was thereby indicated by those interviewed, both

in terms of providing a space for those within the scene, and in inviting
those from beyond its perceived borders of genre and discipline. There are
obvious tensions present in the spirit of inclusivity alluded to, however, in
that programming decisions ultimately rest with the promoter, meaning that
not all musicians are necessarily created equal in the promoter’s selection
of who gets to play.
Programming decisions
A variety of factors govern the programming decisions of promoters inter-
viewed. The issue of building an audience from the basis of known quanti-
ties and encouraging wider participation in events was raised:
Promoter B: You have people that already know the artist, so they’re
your soft target and you want them to know about it and they are nor-
mally the easier ones to communicate with. Then you have a bunch
of people that might be curious, so they’re kind of next down on the
list, they might be curious or not entirely convinced but might go if

a friend is going or if something changes in their perception of the

artist, so you’re trying to say: ‘listen to this artist again, they are good
aren’t they? You should buy tickets to come to the show.’ So you are
trying to persuade them into saying this is going to be a good expe-
rience and worth them investing in. Then you have the near impossi-
ble people … to get through to, [who are] not paying attention to any
cultural outlets whatsoever, not aware of who the artist is, so you’re
going to have a really hard time persuading them to come to the show.
So you always concentrate on the easiest target first and then you
expand into the harder and harder groups …
The understanding of the marketplace specific to a venue was also high-

lighted. Matching a venue’s offering in terms of genre and style with the
expectations of specific audience demographics played a key part in pro-
gramming decisions, although cross-fertilization between distinct audi-
ences was seen a positive aspect of multi-genre programming.
Promoter C: I program according to what I think is going to go down

in this particular environment on certain nights of the week … of music
we put on in the [venue], one third is jazz, one third is kind of roots,
blues, acoustic singer/songwriter kind of stuff and the other third is
funk/soul/electric which is mostly the late night. Each of those one-
third sectors brings in a different audience and there are crossovers
all over the place … The common denominator is it’s all good qual-
ity music, so if someone comes in for an acoustic gig that finishes at
8:30, they’re like: ‘What’s on next? Jazz? I don’t like jazz, oh I’ll stay for
another pint … God these guys are good, who’s that trumpet player?’
Inter-scene tensions became apparent when promoters expressed frus-

tration at musicians’ reticence in engaging with live music as audience
members:
Promoter C: One thing that constantly disappoints me is the musi-

cians. They don’t come to the gigs. For God’s sake get in there! There
is so much good stuff happening, especially on the [funded pro-
motion] side of things, which is stuff you can’t hear anywhere else.
There’s not enough actual musicians coming out, on a Wednesday
night, Thursday night. I don’t believe they are all working, but there
should be a lot more interest in that.
Further frictions were highlighted in the discussion of perceived inequalities

and lack of structure amongst promoters themselves:
Promoter E: I don’t talk to those other people [jazz promoters], I don’t

share ideas with them, I’ve never been invited to share ideas with
them. There seems to be no real structure, no overall structure pro-
vided by anybody, especially once you are funded which I suppose I

ought to be, networking … which is strange because [the scene under

discussion] is a very small place, you would think that we would get
together but we don’t. So I am very much operating in a slight vacuum
in a way. Having said that, you know, almost all of the musicians I play
with play in these other places as well, most of them, apart from the
ones who aren’t jazz players. So we are connected maybe socially but
not musically, in a weird kind of way.
In summarizing interview data on programming, it becomes apparent that

audience development is central to decision making. Whether through
multi-genre programming in order to encourage cross-fertilization between
fans of different musics, or promoting word-of-mouth hype around an artist,
attracting an audience is, unsurprisingly, the primary objective amongst the
majority of promoters. The activities of the various promoters interviewed,
and by extension perhaps typical throughout the wider jazz scene, do not
appear however to be particularly interconnected, with each adopting a
point of difference, or degree of exclusivity, in their operations. It is interest-
ing to note that the only section of the potential concert audience that was
subject to direct criticism by those interviewed was musicians themselves.
This suggests that promoters feel to some extent aggrieved that their efforts
in presenting new music, with the intention of invigorating and developing
the scene, go unappreciated by those that on another day they might also
promote. A sense of alienation experienced by one promoter (also a musi-
cian) was expressed, indicating that those who steward the presentation
of live jazz on the local scene are not necessarily of a single mind when
it comes to who and what to present, and how and where to present it—
again in spite of the shared values alluded to earlier in this article.
Economies
The economies in which each of the interviewees operates varied widely,
from government and local authority funded festivals, to ticketed and non-
ticketed (i.e. free) events, and reliance on bar sales and/or corporate spon-
sorship and goodwill, for example. Sponsorship of the arts was broadly
agreed to be necessary to the financial and cultural health of the jazz scene,
either generally or in specific instances. The difficulties in attracting corpo-
rate sponsorship in the promotion of jazz were alluded to:
Promoter A: Well let’s put it this way, if there was no public funding
for jazz musicians, of any type, the musicians wouldn’t be there for
those [promoters] to be able to book. Because, all of those musicians
are, in one way or another, earning a part of their living out of a public
funded economy.

The same interviewee pointed to increased difficulties in attracting corpo-

rate sponsorship, rather than placing responsibility solely with local or cen-
tral government funding strategies:
Promoter A: I don’t think there’s been a shift, though [from corporate

to public sponsorship], you know, there’s been public funding in jazz
for 40 years … So I don’t think there’s been a shift from one to another.
What I think is that there’s much less value in corporate sponsorship
of live music for the reasons that we’ve already discussed, which are
that there’s much less media attention. So, it’s much more difficult for
us to give a corporate sponsor the kind of financial benefits that we
could give them 10/15 years ago.
The role of public sponsorship could nonetheless be observed, in inter-

viewees reporting that some projects were only made possible through the
underwriting of public funding bodies:
Promoter B: I can see why it [public funding] is useful, I can see

why there are certain projects that couldn’t be done commercially.
The [venue] just did the [band name] orchestral thing, which I went to,
and that wouldn’t have worked financially. There were over 30 people
in the touring party and there’s not a chance I would have even con-
sidered putting that on, if that group were not subsidized and I wasn’t
being subsidized for doing it … So those kind of projects really do
work in a subsidized venue.
But for this interviewee, a ‘capitalist’ model was at the core of the majority
of promotional activities, albeit somewhat at odds with political beliefs typi-
cally shared with others in the music industries:
Promoter B: We do something like 200 shows a year at [named music

promotion company]. Every one of those shows is like a new capital-
ist project that you’re investing in and you hope to see a return on. So
there is kind of that entrepreneurial thing going and I would say most
of the people in the music industry were left-leaning, so you’ve got this
odd contradiction at the heart of it that we are all quite liberal or ‘lefty’
and … [pauses] … rampant capitalists.
One promoter identified a reliance on mixed income of ticket and bar sales.
Specifically, the bar revenue sustained the running of the venue, and ticket
revenue supported musicians on the venue’s programme:
Promoter C: Its [the venue’s] only income is bar sales. Every gig that
is put on in the [venue] has a door charge but that money all goes to
musicians who are playing on that particular time slot, none of it goes
to the venue.

The same promoter conceded, however, that lines were often blurred
between bar and musician income:
Promoter C: On the late night gigs, we will top up the money. If it’s
absolutely minimal, we will top it up with some bar money, and we do
that on most late night gigs, the 12:00–3:00 slot, 7 nights a week, the
bands are getting a bar percentage as well as the door money, which
is a reasonable rate for a Sunday night at 2am or a Monday night or
Tuesday night at 2am … So these guys are getting … we are con-
tributing a lot of money to the [local] music economy on both those
fronts.
The difficulties in achieving a financial return through presenting non-

ticketed (free) music to a venue’s customers was observed by one inter-
viewee:
Promoter D: the important thing is that it doesn’t pay. It doesn’t pay a

venue to do it unless you can ticket it … In fact for it not to cost them a
lot of money, and even when you have musicians paid modestly, as is
the case here, and you have a good regular audience, and the place is
buzzing and kicking, the venue’s income from doing it is minuscule. It
wouldn’t, generally speaking, cover their wages bill for the night, so
it’s really very, very difficult to make the economics work.
To further make the point about the lack of financial return to the host venue
for unticketed gigs, Promoter D provided this example:
Promoter D: Broadly speaking, if you take a common bar model—

let’s suppose you were going to employ five people [musicians] at
a hundred quid—I’m not giving you a direct example of the finan-
cials here, but supposing that was you know, broadly speaking, what
people regard to be an MU rate, to pay five musicians a hundred quid.
So a five hundred quid bill, in the till in a bar or a bar/restaurant like
this, everything that goes in has VAT on it, so you knock 20% off and
if you modestly say everything is costing half what you’re selling it for,
the simple maths is that you have to take twelve hundred quid into a till
to simply cover that five hundred pounds—three or four hundred pints
of beer. It doesn’t take much to figure out what the reality is of that
when you look at a venue like this on a Sunday night with people not
looking to buy three or four hundred pints of beer, wanting [instead]
to have a cup of tea and a glass of water … so the mechanics of it are
very, very difficult to achieve.
Despite the difficulties in making music pay in the short term, Promoter D
maintained that there were nonetheless potential benefits to the venue:
Promoter D: The income from the music on a Sunday night equates to

probably something like fifty to seventy per cent of what the musicians

are physically paid, so they ain’t getting rich on this and it hasn’t paid
the rent, the rates and their staff bill. But it’s turnover, and turnover
adds value to the business if you were going to sell the business, so
to a corporate financier it has a value.
In relation to public funding, the same interviewee implied that it could be

seen as a ‘financial bailout’ of the ‘jazz economy’, chiming with Brennan
and Webster’s assertion that much of the financial risk in concert promotion
is ‘distributed and borne, in part, by the public sector’ (2011: 17):
Promoter D: I found myself in a jazz forum once talking about the jazz
economy, and everyone steamed up about bank bailouts and sitting
there listening to comments people made around the table and talk-
ing about the jazz economy, a subject so close to my heart, I couldn’t
help but think: ‘What economy?’ … and the lack of people spending
money on it [jazz], means that it exists in a state of permanent bail-
out—and that permanent bailout is [the national arts funding body].
In the absence of public funding or corporate sponsorship, the desire to

keep ticket prices competitive and affordable in order to attract an audi-
ence was seen to have a direct, and typically negative, consequence on
the earnings of musicians.
Promoter E: We charge five pounds, three pounds for students. So

admissions, given we have three bands on every gig, five pounds for
three bands, I think is pretty good value … Yes, the musicians come
knowing that they are going to get very little money. They might get
their travel expenses if they are lucky, depending on how many people
come, so it is clear that the money isn’t the reason for doing it. It really
is music-centric.
Promoter E is careful to point out that, despite meagre wages available to

the musicians promoted, nobody within their specific chain of production
was making any significant financial returns from their activities:
Promoter E: I am not exploiting people. I’m not making money from

it. In fact I lose money every gig. I lose at least twenty quid every gig
because I am paying people out of my pocket. So it’s an investment in
the music. I don’t really have any serious hope about it being a viable
proposition money-wise.
Through the analysis of interview data, a picture emerges of a complex and

fractured economy that relies variously on public funding, ticket sales, com-
mercial sponsorship, and the goodwill of promoters and musicians. For
some, activities are only practicable through the receipt of external funding
and/or ticket sales. Other are subject to interdependencies with the venue

at which promotions take place. And others still, promote music in which
they believe at any cost (or in the absence of any financial return).
Discussion
Those interviewed for this study clearly exhibit a range of attitudes and
approaches to jazz promotion, and motivations for becoming involved in
this area of activity. A number of ‘types’ of promoter emerged from the
data, and these can be categorized as follows: the dedicated professional,
for whom the promotion of jazz represents full-time employment; the occa-
sional, for whom jazz is an adjunct to a broader promotion portfolio; the
amateur, who supplements their income through ad hoc promotion of jazz,
and the altruistic hobbyist, for whom profitability is not a motivating factor.
Where it might be expedient to discuss motivations within the delinea-
tions of these characterizations, it became clear that there were consider-
able overlaps between them. Only one interviewee claimed to care little
about financial remuneration for their efforts and those of the musicians
they presented, focusing instead on the cultural capital in providing a cre-
ative space for collaboration and experimentation. The remaining promot-
ers interviewed trod a rather more complex path between promoting the
music that they deemed important while attempting to ensure the financial
viability of their activities. This balance was achieved either by promoting
jazz as an addition to their core offering, by seeking external subsidy, or
relying on the goodwill of venues and musicians. In examining the types of
jazz promoted by the interviewees, it is (perhaps unsurprisingly) typical that
more progressive, experimental jazz is presented where financial viability
or gain is not the primary instigator and, conversely, that more established
forms are promoted by those with a more commercially framed outlook.
As supported by Riley and Laing’s 2006 study, The Value of Jazz in Brit-
ain (updated 2008), the majority of promoted live jazz continues to take
place within a framework that encompasses residencies in local clubs
and pubs, one-off events in civic halls and private or corporately owned
venues, and in multi-performance festivals. All of these environments are
governed, to varying degrees and in different ways, by the need to attract
revenue through ticket sales or through partial commercial or public sub-
sidy. The sustainability of activity of those working within a wholly com-
mercial setting, that is to say without financial input from the public purse,
is subject to ticket-income (if applicable) or third-party benefits (bar tak-
ings, an increased footfall to the host venue), or combinations thereof. One
promoter was clear in the assertion that un-ticketed live music does not

provide significant, if any, direct financial income to a venue on the outlay

of paying for musicians. Instead, any financial return is achieved by live
music serving to add ‘value’ to the venue through increased footfall, diver-
sification of clientele, or in establishing an identity beyond simply its loca-
tion and furnishings, for example. Another promoter similarly decried the
notion that bar-takings alone had the potential to pay the bill for live music,
offering instead a model that combined ticket income with top-up from bar-
sales as and when required. The same promoter, however, conceded that
this model was not practicable for bigger name or international musicians
or bands whose expectations in terms of pay and subsistence are higher
than those on the local scene, and pointed to the need for subsidy in order
to make such gigs happen at all. These heightened expectations of remu-
nerations are typically tied to the costs involved in touring (travel, accom-
modation, subsistence, loss of other earnings) rather than necessarily any
perceptions of greater value to an audience.
The festival promoter interviewed went as far as to say that their activi-
ties would be impossible without public funding. With the diminishing of
corporate sponsorship, for reasons pointed to earlier in the article, cou-
pled with waning press interest in the genre (Riley and Laing 2006), some
international jazz festivals have become simply unviable without funding
from central and/or local government, or significant corporate sponsor-
ship. The argument for such investment can undoubtedly be made for the
cultural capital fostered through the support for preservation of heritage
and creative innovation, and third-party benefits from tourism. However,
the frictions between promoters (and thereby musicians and other actors
in this network) who benefit from the support of public finances, and those
who do not were evident in the interviews conducted, with one respon-
dent likening arts council subsidy to ‘bailout’. Anecdotally, the authors are
aware of a degree of ‘sour grapes’ voiced amongst some musicians on the
local scene who subscribe to widely held perceptions that subsidy favours
the international over the local in programming decisions. It must also be
conceded that the international aspect provides a bigger audience draw
through its exclusivity and ‘exoticism’. Local musicians, after all, can often
be heard locally at any time—and often for a more modest ticket price or,
indeed, for free.
Through examining the various platforms on which live jazz is presented
in the city in which this research took place and the underpinning economic
models that govern them, it is clear that the promotion and performance
of jazz can therefore not be easily conflated into a single understanding.

Rather, the associated activities should be viewed through a variety of

lenses. From the promoter’s perspective: impetus and economic model;
and from the musician’s perspective: stylistic offering and potential audi-
ence draw. Taken together, the operations (governed as they are in part by
external factors of economics and public zeitgeist) of local promoters have
a significant impact on the shaping of the scene.
This study provides a snapshot of activity at a time in which jazz has
become firmly established in the higher education curriculum and increas-
ingly professionalized. There are increasing numbers of highly trained
musicians vying for shrinking opportunities in which to ply their craft and
earn a living. This coincides with a downturn in public appetite for jazz, cer-
tainly when compared to its heyday in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury and its brief revival in the 1980s. The jazz audience demographic is
aging (Lawes et al. 2016: 13) and the challenge during financially straitened
times is to rebuild a younger audience in order to survive the future. Since
the 1970s (and traditionalists would argue even earlier), jazz has become
increasingly difficult to define within the terms of genre, having borrowed
from and added to surrounding high- and lowbrow culture. Non-jazz audi-
ences, unsurprisingly, tend to readily identify jazz from earlier eras—those
in which jazz had a more definable identity. Promoters, and in particular
festival promoters, are thereby put in the challenging position of present-
ing what the audience perceives as authentically jazz while providing a
stage for emerging, acculturated or less familiar stylistic branches of the
genre. At the same time, promoters tread a tightrope between satisfying
the demands and expectations of an aging audience while trying to lure
younger concertgoers through repackaging classic repertoire or present-
ing content that has more perceived youth relevance.
Herein lies a tension that should be approached with caution for the
health of both the local and global jazz scene. In the promoters’ self-
identified roles as curator and gatekeeper, for example, decisions around
programming and presentation do not necessarily chime with value struc-
tures associated with the playing of jazz as perceived by musicians and,
indeed, some sections of their audience. Festival programmers frequently
face accusations of being ‘safe’ or unimaginative in their programming
of higher grossing, ‘big’ acts (often not considered authentically ‘jazz’)
in favour of higher risk, progressive alternatives. Most musicians in the
authors’ circle of experience view authenticity (whether in terms of artis-
tic intent or technical prowess) as the litmus test for what ‘ought’ to be
presented to audiences, feeling aggrieved that promoters often appear

ignorant or turn a ‘deaf ear’ to these perceived qualities. In the promot-

er’s pursuit of making ‘financial sense’ in presenting a music of specialized
audience, their decisions are often seen as reactionary, and the power they
wield as gatekeepers as counterproductive to the development of both the
genre’s musical language and its audience.
Where the reasons given by the interviewees for promoting jazz could
overwhelmingly be interpreted as ‘wholesome’ and laudable, the eco-
nomic and cultural ecologies into which their activities fit cause frictions
between their own motives and those of the musicians they present (or
consider themselves unable to present). Further work on building bridges
of understanding between creators and promoters in jazz, and their sup-
porting industries, is therefore central to fostering mutual understanding
towards combined strategies. Promoters and musicians are inextricably
co-dependent players within the same industry and contributors to the
same scene. Indeed, promoters themselves appear somewhat discon-
nected from one another within their metier even in spite of the 2016 estab-
lishment of the UK-wide Jazz Promoters Network. Therefore, a deeper
multilateral understanding with input from academia, creative practice and
industry would undoubtedly provide nourishment for the health and lon-
gevity of the music and those that are involved in its performance, indus-
tries and reception.
References
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Music Review 2/1: 1–25.
Burland, Karen, and Stephanie E. Pitts (2010) ‘Understanding Jazz Audiences: Lis-
tening and Learning at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival’. Journal of New
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duced in collaboration with Judith Ackrill Associates & Nod Knowles Produc-
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——(2010) ‘Analysing Live Music in the UK: Findings One Year into a Three-Year
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330.2012.731894
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[JRJ 11.1 (2017) 28-61] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
Early New Orleans band

photography
Alan John Ainsworth1
Freelance photographer and writer
alan@alanainsworth.com
Abstract
Band photographs are important records of early New Orleans jazz. The cultural, racial
and economic environment in New Orleans shaped band photography and gave rise to a
series of distinctive visual conventions—the formal, instrumental array, posed action and
novelty poses. New Orleans bands were integral to New Orleans’ musical and social
culture, mediating musicians’ relationship with the market and providing space for the
negotiation of racial, personal and musical identities. The ensemble tradition elevated
accomplishment and presentational style, but economic uncertainty, competition between
musicians for work and exposure to a capricious labour market were ever-present; racial
factors were also critically important. The visual conventions were consciously deployed
to meet these challenges, allowing musicians to publicize individual and ensemble skills
and create musical and racial identities. Set in context, New Orleans band photographs
point to the complex and shifting affinity between musicians and ensemble.
Keywords: bands; identity; jazz; New Orleans; photography
Introduction
A 1924 photograph of the Original Tuxedo Orchestra (Figure 1) shows the
leader, Oscar Philip ‘Papa’ Celestin (seated, second right), surrounded by
the members of the band with which he was associated for nearly fifty years
(Newhart 2013; Feather and Gitler 1999: 119). Immaculately turned out,
the players emphasize their identity as band members with identical suits
and symmetrical display of instruments; their status as an ‘orchestra’ is
asserted by the studied formality of the band’s presentation whilst the style
and quality of its music is indicated by the range of instruments prominently
displayed in front of the players.
Band photographs are among the more revealing records of New Orleans
jazz in the years between 1900 and the mid-1920s. In this article I show how
1. The author would like to thank Paul Archibald, Professor Simon Frith, Alaina
Hébert, Dr Robert Lawson-Peebles, Dr Tom Perchard, Dr Michael Pritchard, Dr Bruce
Boyd Raeburn, Alyn Shipton and Peter Vacher for advice in the preparation of this article.
Early New Orleans band photography 29
Figure 1: The Original Tuxedo Orchestra (1924). Courtesy of Al Rose’s New Orleans
Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
the cultural, racial and economic environment of early twentieth-century

New Orleans shaped the development of band photography and gave rise
to a series of distinctive visual conventions. These conventions demonstrate
how band leaders and sidemen confronted the economic pressures of the
music business, negotiated racial and social boundaries and confirmed the
evolving identity of the jazz musician. Although elements of these conven-
tions were found in other parts of the country, uniquely in New Orleans we
find musicians drawing on and creatively blending all these conventions as
they faced personal and professional challenges and strived to carve out a
distinctive identity in what was frequently an unforgiving occupation.
The character of early photography in New

Orleans
After Samuel French Morse introduced the daguerrotype to America in
1839, entrepreneurs such as Mathew B. Brady, John Draper and Albert
Sands Southworth rushed to meet ‘the American obsession with individual
identity’ (Hales 2005: 126) by opening lavish photographic ‘galleries’, ele-
gantly designed and furnished parlours in which photographers and their
‘posers’ offered affordable, yet artistically composed and staged, portraits.

Jules Lion, a portrait painter and lithographer, was also quick off the mark,
introducing the daguerreotype to New Orleans in the same year. Here, as
elsewhere in the United States, the response to this new form of image-
making was enthusiastic (Willis 2002: 4). For the first time in human history,
people found themselves able to influence the ways in which others saw
them through the adoption of poses which reflected personal identity and
social position.
The way sitters posed and their ability to influence the identity pro-
jected by photographs slowly changed over time. As the nineteenth cen-
tury progressed, portrait photography became increasingly routinized. In
New Orleans, the impact of the Civil War and its aftermath was particularly
marked, causing
a shift from an emphasis on leisurely portrait making to a fast turnout

of inexpensive images…which recorded the faces of the young sol-
diers and their families as well as the generals of opposing armies…
photography in New Orleans evolved from a one-man artistic endeav-
our to a business-oriented profession intent on the rapid production of
inexpensive prints (Smith and Tucker 1982: 6–7).
The introduction of factory-made dry plate technology in the late-1880s,

together with faster shutter speeds and the reduction in the size of cam-
eras which came with the improved sensitivity of plates, intensified this
trend. George Eastman’s first Kodak camera, a small box costing $25 and
which came preloaded with a roll of one hundred circular negatives, was
launched in 1889 initiating the democratization of photography and the age
of the ‘instantaneous’ image. Words such as ‘Kodaking’ and ‘snapshot’
passed into general usage (Pritchard 2014: 36–37, 60–66).
No longer tied to the darkroom or complex chemical processes,
changes in the site and, in due course, the aesthetics, of portraiture prac-
tice occurred. Writing in 1885, the New York photographer George Rock-
wood observed that:
instead of coming to the photographer, the photographer goes to [the

client]. He takes with him a supply of instantaneous plates, poses his
subject in his or her own particular armchair, and with good taste and
judgement in the arrangement of the light and pose he is likely to
secure a result far removed from the conventionalities of the ‘gallery’
picture (quoted in Carlebach 1992: 155).
Rockwood is here describing a certain shift in the locus of control towards

the sitter. Photographers increasingly found that clients preferred to project
a more personal sense of identity in their own homes, surrounded by their

own possessions, than had been possible with the contrived poses and
studio props of the early ‘galleries’. Moreover, a sunlit view now required
an exposure time of only a few seconds with rapid dry plates; sitters could
choose outdoor settings when circumstances dictated and, equipped with
more portable cameras, photographers were able to oblige.
These developments help explain the character of the considerable
body of early jazz photographs which has come down to us and is available
for inspection both in archives and published form.2 Many are individual
portraits or performance shots, routine photographs by local commercial
photographers or vernacular photographs which conform to the ‘snapshot’
aesthetic rapidly gaining in popularity at the time. Only a small proportion of
these portraits were made in studios. The largest single category of images
are band photographs, several of which can be reliably attributed to New
Orleans photographers Arthur Bedou and Villard Paddio. We also know
that studios in Chicago, New York and other cities made photographs of
New Orleans bands, sometimes taken locally by itinerant photographers
in outdoor or well-lighted interior settings. Attribution in this latter case can
be difficult as some studios (Apeda in particular) often acquired negatives
from local photographers and presented them as their own. Other band
photographs are likely to have been the work of commercial photographers
in the city including the (unknown) photographers in Walter Abadie’s Mag-
nolia Studios. Some may have been the work of amateurs, taken by friends
and family of the musicians.
As jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Sidney Bechet,
Benny Goodman and other pioneering instrumentalists emerged in the
mid- to late-1920s as accomplished soloists, they moved closer to the
mainstream entertainment industry. Increasingly professional management
of these artists led to a demand for stylized publicity photographs and
this was met by society and theatrical studio photographers like Murray
Korman, James J. Kriegsman, Maurice Seymour, Gordon Conner, Bruno
of Hollywood and studio photographers in Chicago, Kansas City and New
2. Original photographs for this article were inspected at the Hogan Jazz Archive,
Tulane University. Many have been reproduced in anthologies, and for convenience these
locations have been identified. The main source is Al Rose and Edmond Souchon, New
Orleans Jazz: A Family Album (Baton Rouge and London: Louisianna State University
Press, 1978) [identified in the text as R&S]. Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer, Jr, A Picto-
rial History of Jazz: People and Places from New Orleans to Modern Jazz (London: Spring
Books, n.d.) [K&G] and Frank Driggs and Harris Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: A
Pictorial History of Modern Jazz 1920–1950 (New York: William Morrow, 1982) [D&L] are
also important collections.

York. Deploying a directorial gaze, these photographers brought the com-

mercial portrait into the jazz world, an aestheticized style that drew on the
tradition of vaudeville and theatrical portraiture.
In seeking to understand the dynamics involved in New Orleans band
photographs, it is significant that jazz images in the two decades follow-
ing the turn of the century were made at a point in time after the artifi-
ciality of the early gallery portraits had given way to the more balanced
relationship between photographers and sitters identified by Rockwood,
but before the full force of the commercial studio aesthetic began to be
felt in the jazz world. It is precisely this absence of strong authorial pho-
tography which makes the jazz archive between 1900 to the mid-1920s so
significant. Before the age of what A. D. Coleman (1981) termed ‘the direc-
torial mode’ in photographic practice, early jazz musicians could influence
their own representations to a greater degree than would soon be possible
as these new trends took shape. Thus, musicians from the early period of
jazz perhaps ‘speak back’ to us with a degree of directness unusual for the
medium.
A critical interrogation of the poses adopted by band leaders and side-
men might then direct attention towards forms of what James C. Scott has
termed ‘hidden transcripts’ (1990). Scott deploys this term in analysing the
‘critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant’ (xii) by sub-
ordinate groups, but he recognizes that ‘the hidden transcript is a social
product and hence a result of power relations among subordinates’ (119).
In what follows I will interpret the different poses adopted by New Orleans
bands as nuanced interactions between the photographer and the musi-
cians, between the photographic apparatus and the body, to highlight the
signs beneath the surface mythology of early jazz images. It is the pose as
a dynamic interaction which transforms human into photographic expres-
sion, ‘a development of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and
cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance’ (McLuhan
1964: 197). To pose involves showing oneself gesturally as one would wish
to be perceived, to reveal something significant about one’s self-perception
and social, professional or occupational position. We must keep in mind
that the pose is always deictic, a product of what Gottfried Boehm has
called the ‘play of gestures’ (Spiel der Gestes) between the act and photo-
graphic representation; and, equally significantly, the impression conveyed
by the pose can be influenced as much by the conditions under which the
photograph is made, embodying signs of agreement as well as resistance,
as by individual choice and intent (Boehm 2012: 22).

Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, jazz studies have revealed

much in recent years about the ways in which early New Orleans jazz musi-
cians conceptualized themselves and the cultural, social and racial con-
texts within which they did so. Yet, as Eric Porter has pointed out, much of
this relies on the testimony of white critics and writers. One response to his
plea that greater attention should be given to ‘the ways that African Ameri-
can musicians have participated in the discourse’ (2002: xviii) might be by
critically scrutinizing the photographs through which they speak back to us.
New Orleans cultural, racial and economic

environment
Musical culture
New Orleans’ long and vigorous musical traditions embraced opera, con-
certs, dances, river boat excursions, with bands playing on street corners
and at the Lake Ponchartrain resorts; brass bands accompanied parades,
picnics, political rallies, prize fights, racing days, house parties, festivals,
railway excursions, Saturday night fish fries and funerals; and more than
30 black social clubs, white business bosses, dance halls and a myriad of
low-life dives, brothels and bars regularly featured music (Kmen 1966 and
1968: 211–12, 229–30; Gioia 1997: 31–32).
These traditions have been well-documented but certain key aspects
bearing on the evolution of photographic conventions should be high-
lighted. Music was integrated into the life of the city and its patterns of
social relationships in a way that was unique in the United States (Blesh
1954: 154), a form of communal expression which, as the musician Danny
Barker recalled, ‘could come on you at any time… The city was full of the
sounds of music’ (quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff 1966: 3). Alongside its
ubiquity was a deeply-rooted concern for musical training and skills. Brass
bands were especially significant in helping to foster skills. Leading bands
emphasized the Creole traditions of musicality, discipline and organization
and provided aspiring musicians with a structured environment in which
to learn their trade. Black musicians had the hardest job establishing their
musical credentials but as bands slowly integrated, the higher standards
of Creole artistry was gradually passed to black musicians (Peretti 1997:
20; Schafer 1977: 7). Pride in instrumentation was fostered within these
bands and many operated loan schemes to allow their members to acquire
good quality instruments and uniforms. Matt Sakakeeny may be correct
when he asserts that playing in a brass band was not seen as a particularly

distinguished career choice (2013: 17) but this should not detract from the
significance and approbation of this form of music-making and its place
within the cultural system of New Orleans.
The uniquely public nature of much New Orleans music-making made
players sharply aware of the importance of style, presentation and deport-
ment. Society members took great care in the way they dressed for funerals
or other parades with colourful and expensive clothing, badges, umbrellas,
fans, baskets full of flowers, and silk- and satin-ribboned streamers much
in evidence (Barker 1986: 23). What Stanley Crouch (1980: n.p.) described
as the traditional ‘aristocratic modes of dress’ of black musicians can be
traced to this period; adopting black tuxedos, derby hats and white shirts
costing $15 apiece on the advice of a white friend proved to be the making
of the Original Tuxedo Orchestra, opening the door to high-class white
venues such as the New Orleans Country Club, the Southern Yacht Club
and the St. Charles Hotel (Raeburn 2012: 223).
Early New Orleans jazz musicians lived and worked in a musical culture
that placed a premium on skills, musical accomplishments and a devel-
oped consciousness of style and presentation. That so much music took
place in the public realm underpinned an acute sense of the relationship
between the sound and visuality of their music. It should not be surprising
to find that musicians turned to the representational capabilities of photog-
raphy to convey messages about their music and identity as players.
The ensemble tradition

As is well-known the tradition of ensemble polyphony was central to early
New Orleans jazz. Less observed have been the photographic interpreta-
tion of polyphony as the artistic expression of long-standing social relation-
ships and response to material conditions. As Bruce Boyd Raeburn (2012:
213) has observed:
New Orleans-style collective improvisation…was a way of living…

and the cooperative approach to performance that evolved there
reflected not only the distinctive characteristics of the environment
and its people but also, more importantly, the coping mechanisms
that allowed such diversity to unify, survive, and flourish in a hazard-
ous location.
As we shall see, much early New Orleans band photography fore-

grounded signs of identification between individual musicians and their
band in visual signs which express the social and racial foundations of col-
lective music-making.

The relationship between the individual player and the ensemble in early
New Orleans jazz is a recurring theme in the memoirs of many early New
Orleans jazz musicians. It was the marching bands that first sparked the
imagination of many young New Orleans musicians; walking in the ‘second
line’ was their first experience of instrumentation, ‘the greatest thrill to a kid
to get to hold the instrument of a musician whom he idolised’ (Barker 1986:
51). The loose apprenticeships of band membership provided musical
tuition, imbued many young men with a sense of discipline and the impor-
tance of self-presentation, provided an income and created what in many
cases turned out to be lifelong friendships. Emphasizing their collectivity,
bands adopted generic rather than the leader’s name and all had emblems
or other symbols of belonging which members proudly displayed.
New Orleans bands could be clannish and rivalries were common, but
band membership was indisputably a matter of real significance. The drum-
mer Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds spoke warmly in his autobiography of the ‘har-
mony and brotherly love’ of New Orleans bands, while for Joe Oliver being
a good ‘band man’ was paramount. The status accorded to band mem-
bers by the community reinforced the value of band membership and the
cohesiveness and longevity of the New Orleans brass bands was a conse-
quence of this outlook (Dodds 1992: 15, 39–40; Ramsey 1958: 68). Even
after leaving New Orleans musicians clung to the reassurance of band affili-
ation. In later years, Barney Bigard found Duke Ellington’s continued refer-
ence to ‘we’ and ‘our’ band refreshing in invoking the spirit of New Orleans
mutuality and was one of the reasons persuading him to forsake Luis Rus-
sell: ‘I noticed he kept talking in the plural: “Our Band”… He thought of the
band as a unit and I dug him’ (Bigard 1985: 36, 45).
Racial, ethnic and communal identity

In a city in which race was key to securing better-paying and more regu-
lar engagements, band leaders were acutely aware of the need to manage
photographic representation. Before the widespread availability of recorded
music and radio broadcasts (in which questions of colour could be elided),
photography made race manifest and consequently became one of the
most important sites for the negotiation of racial identities.
New Orleans’ ‘French, Canadian, German, Spanish, Acadian, American,
Irish, Italian, Negro and other ethnic traditions keep it from ever being a typ-
ical Southern city’ (Dufour 1968: 41). With vigorous African American reten-
tions, the complex gradations of Creoles proud of their European linguistic,
cultural and musical traditions and a diverse white European population, no

other city exhibited quite such variety or tolerance towards a mulatto con-
ception of race. This is not to suggest that racial prejudice and discrimina-
tion in the city was not widespread; virtually all memoirs and biographies
of early New Orleans musicians stress how racial discrimination—proba-
bly worse in the early decades of the twentieth century than at any time
since the Civil War—impinged on daily life. Yet the very complexities of New
Orleans’ racial and ethnic patterning created a communal musical culture
which overarched racial differences, a form of ‘transculturation which fuses
diverse traditions into a distinctively regional blend’ (Raeburn 1991: 3).
While jazz historians have variously stressed the predominance of the
African American roots of jazz (Floyd 2000; Sagar 2002), the importance
of European antecedents (Youngren 2000) or the pivotal role of Creole
musicians (Fiehrer 1991; Collins 1969), most scholars are even-handed
in acknowledging the contribution to the creation of jazz of black, Creole
and white musicians (not to mention that of other European immigrants)
in the unique ‘seething ethnic melting pot’ of Louisiana (Gioia 1997: 7).
Charles Hersch’s book Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in
New Orleans advanced the debate considerably in documenting the spe-
cific processes through which this ‘hybridization’ was worked out. These
included the opportunities afforded, and restrictions imposed, by the rel-
ative fluidity of New Orleans’ complex caste gradations based on family
background, personal status and, above all, skin colour; the relationships
between race, musical styles, types of audience, performance spaces
and performance opportunities; the subtle transgressions employed by
musicians to secure work, particularly that of ‘passing’ as another colour;
and the shifting identity of different races, especially that of the Creole
musicians.
We shall see below that band photography was one of the most impor-
tant media through which racial messages of this nature came to be trans-
mitted—indeed, it could not be otherwise given the critical importance of
these forces and the indexical character of the photographic image. Con-
sciously and actively managing these messages was a responsibility that
band leaders and sidemen were unable to avoid but keen to take on.
The labour market

Economic circumstances also shaped New Orleans band photography.
While the slave system had suffocated the commercial development of
the American south generally, New Orleans had been further isolated by
an alliance between merchants and traditional plantation networks which

‘institutionalised racism and fostered new forms of labour exploitation, all

of which demonstrably suppressed southern economic development for
nearly a century after the Civil War’ (Marler 2015: 10, 206–230). Living con-
ditions for most were harsh. Corruption among politicians was endemic
and the civic authorities had failed to improve most public amenities. Fresh
water supplies fell well below the requirements of the city’s inhabitants.
The city’s population tripled between 1850 and 1910 and many remained
vulnerable to diseases which flourished in the semi-tropical climate. Life
expectancy for African Americans in New Orleans in the late nineteenth
century was less than forty years and the city’s death rate overall was 50
per cent higher than the average American city (Huber 1971: 10–12; Good-
win et al. 1980–1985: 464; Duffy 1968: 92, 113). Against this background,
Ted Gioia’s description (1997: 29–30) of New Orleans’ exuberant festivals
and music as a means of transcending ‘the sufferings and pestilence of the
here and now’ seems well-founded.
According to one elderly musician there were only three options for a
coloured man in New Orleans—become ‘a musician, a pimp or a dock-
worker’ (Williams 1967: 44). The labour market for musicians was informal,
capricious and unpredictable. The management of artists was undevel-
oped, and there were few professional intermediaries and booking agen-
cies as the local economy were non-existent. Hiring of musicians usually
went through band leaders. Kid Ory is known to have been particularly
entrepreneurial in promoting his concerts, while the white bandleader
‘Jack’ Laine would recruit musicians along ‘Exchange Alley’ between Canal
and Bienville Streets, through the white-only musicians’ union or at Wer-
leins music store, a clearing-house for engagements and instruments.
Whether white or coloured, transactions were usually concluded directly
between musicians and venue management and were generally unenforce-
able. Club owners were often exploitative and prone to violent feuds. Barri-
ers to entry were low, scale rates were for many years non-existent or only
poorly enforced and the business was unregulated and unprotected. Musi-
cians were required to play so long as customers remained and a single
session might stretch over twelve hours. Job security was non-existent; a
letter under the door stating ‘You are fired’ was the usual method of dis-
patching a band member (Stoddard 1971: 28, 30, 32). Coloured musicians,
for many years ignored by the American Federation of Musicians, were
particularly prone to exploitation. The white union Local No. 174 had been
established in 1902 but it was not until 1926 that Oscar Celestin pressed
for the creation of the black Local 496. Up to this point, musicians in New

Orleans who required a union card had no option but to travel 150 miles to
Mobile, Alabama (Newhart 2013: 71–72).
The band with which a musician might be affiliated was for much of this
period the only collectivity standing between him and the labour market.
Bands offered the primary route to employment and, within limits, mutual
assistance, and leaders negotiated compensation and secured timely pay-
ment. Effectively forming a bulwark between players and a harsh labour
market, it is little wonder that New Orleans musicians valued band mem-
bership and why many opted to spread their risks by becoming associated
with several bands. Most were keen to ensure that their band identifica-
tion was recognized and foregrounded in any representations, including
photography.
Competition between musicians

New Orleans offered both aspiring and established musicians more perfor-
mance opportunities than any other American city but the market was over-
supplied. Competition was intense, particularly between black and Creole
bands (Buerkle and Barker 1973: 15–16). Few venues employed musicians
on a regular basis and even well-established ‘society’ bands might only
find employment at the weekends (Shipton 2011: 85). One result was that
bands had to differentiate their offerings to secure regular work and there
was a constant struggle to outdo one another, sometimes by introducing
a new combination of lead instruments or comic diversions (Bigard 1985:
25). Danny Barker (1968: 28, 33, 43) even spoke of the ‘lying and conniv-
ing’ employed by some musicians to get work and the fear of competition
among older musicians from up-and-coming youngsters. The precarious
economic position of musicians is confirmed by accounts of players lining
up outside Jake Itzkovitch’s pawn shop on South Rampart Street to redeem
(instrument) pledges in order to play that evening (Rose 1988: 12).
An additional consideration was securing employment at better venues,
which were generally stratified by the racial composition of the audience.
Lee Collins remembered that he was not considered good enough to play
at the Bulls’ Club where a musician had to be recognized as being among
the best available. When Collins discussed joining John Robichaux’s soci-
ety orchestra the leader told him that ‘you play such barrelhouse cornet
that I don’t think you would fit in very well at the places where I work’ (Gillis
and Miner 1989: 25, 33). Versatility was key to securing this better paid
work (Hersch 2007: 117–22): Freddie Keppard’s Olympia Orchestra ‘could
play “legitimate” enough to get society jobs and “hot” enough to play
uptown dance halls’ and Armand J. Piron’s Orchestra could play jazz when

required but was versatile enough to work fine hotels, country clubs and
society dances (Williams 1967: 20, 109). Racial differences added to the
competition faced by musicians. Where they did not join forces, schooled
Creole musicians were forced to compete with ‘hotter’ black bands and
both black and Creole musicians faced competition from the white ‘Dix-
ieland’ bands whose subsequent success limited employment opportuni-
ties for coloured players (Newhart 2013: 72–73; Collins 1996: 227; Raeburn
1991: 4).
In an intensely competitive market, building a local following was cru-
cial. Musicians could not overlook an opportunity to impress a crowd and
a range of raucous public marketing strategies evolved. One of these was
the storied New Orleans custom of advertising events by touring the streets
in trucks or wagons, standing on balconies or at street corners playing
popular songs (Armstrong 1954: 23; Williams 1967: 142; Ramsey 1958:
62). These ‘ballyhoos’ served to burnish the reputation of individual play-
ers but musicians knew that their employment prospects also depended on
how their band was viewed. Band battles were an equally famous feature of
the New Orleans scene. Black and white bands would play within earshot
of each other on Sunday afternoons on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain,
each hoping to draw people away from their rivals. Above all, musical bat-
tles would occur on the street when two rival bands met at the corner. As
Lee Collins recalled, ‘the band that had the King was the best and got all
the work’ (Gillis and Miner 1989: 50). Musicians were also very conscious
of the need to demonstrate that their band could provide music for danc-
ing and ensure paying guests had a good time (Russell 1958: 130; Rae-
burn 2012: 227).
The band was therefore the foundation stone of musicians’ marketing
strategies, and photographs became one of the most important tools at
their disposal. With the aim of differentiating the band in a crowded field,
photographs were employed to convey messages about the quality and
versatility of the band, the special character of its instrumentation, the musi-
cal styles under its command, its racial composition and to impart a sense
of excitement. They served to tie individual players back to the ensemble
and became an extension of the band’s public realm marketing.
Photographic conventions
Interrogating New Orleans jazz band photography within the cultural, racial
and economic context of their production as described above reveals, and
helps explain, four broad photographic conventions.

The formal pose

Virtually all early New Orleans band photography came to adopt one varia-
tion or another of the formally-posed composition. In these images musi-
cians are posed symmetrically: a (normally) seated front row of strings or
reeds in front of brass players standing upright while the rhythm instruments
were positioned as during performance—drums to the left and rhythm
instruments such as the string bass, guitar or banjo to the right. The instru-
ments figure prominently, held by musicians who stand stiffly upright, chins
projecting forward. Musicians wore the band uniform or formal clothes, and
care was taken by the more fastidious leaders to make sure that individual
items of clothing were as symmetrically arranged as possible. In the most
carefully-posed compositions players are ranged in height order with the
tallest player in the middle of the group and the angle at which instruments
were held was managed so that all appeared to be parallel or upright.
The extent to which these different aspects of the formally-posed band
photograph were adopted varied from case to case, the intended use of the
image and the anticipated audience. Captured in 1896, John Robichaux’s
musicians present the stiff formality of a ‘society’ orchestra [R&S: 180] and
is one of the earliest examples. A c. 1900 photograph of the Jimmy Palao
Band [R&S: 147] conforms to the basic seating/standing arrangement but
in other respects is a jumble of elements: instruments are held at different
angles, the players are inconsistently dressed, facial expressions and body
positions are mixed and the background is distracting. The photograph of
Bab Frank and Charles McCurdy’s Peerless Orchestra from 1906 (Figure 2)
shows how bands had started to assume a more disciplined formal pose.
The Peerless musicians are without uniform but smartly turned out and look
straight ahead while the clarinets, trombones and trumpet are arranged to
form pleasing lines.
Four years later the Superior Orchestra, featuring Bunk Johnson,
donned band uniforms in a formally-posed photograph [R&S: 135] which
immediately imparts a greater sense of collective identity than the mixed
dress of the Peerless, although drummer Walter Brundy’s casual left arm
position shows that there was still some way to go in creating a consis-
tent ensemble presentation. The original Creole Orchestra were pho-
tographed in 1914 (Figure 3) in a careful execution of the formal pose.
Organized in that year by bassist Bill Johnson, the group travelled exten-
sively, playing prestigious theatres around the country and he probably
opted for a studio portrait as a means of stressing the band’s suitability for
venues of this nature.

Figure 2: Frank and McCurdy’s Peerless Orchestra (1906). Courtesy of Hogan Jazz
Archive, Tulane University. Photographer unknown
Figure 3: The Original Creole Orchestra (c. 1914). Courtesy of Al Rose’s New Orleans
Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University

By the 1920s the formal pose convention had evolved to the point at which
the musicians of the Original Tuxedo Orchestra (Figure 1) were arranged in
height order, dress is consistent and instruments held at approximately the
same angle. An interesting later example is found in the c. 1924 photograph
of Armand J. Piron’s Society Orchestra (Figure 4). Although the absence of
instruments and a measure of informality suggests a loosening of the stric-
tures of the formal convention, the accomplishments of the players as ‘read-
ing’ musicians is asserted by the presence of a score—a charged symbol in
New Orleans which immediately sets this well-established leader apart from
the ‘faking’ or even ‘spelling’ bands.
White band leaders understood just as much that the formal pose was
a necessity. A 1918 photograph [K&G: 18] shows Nick LaRocca’s Original
Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) musicians—Eddie Edwards, Tony Sbarbaro,
Larry Shields and Henry Ragas—looking directly towards the camera. In
the light of their recent successes, the band abandon the serious demean-
our of the formal portrait; it might not be reading too much into the image
to suggest that the band’s back-story and relationship to African American
music might account for the hint of a sly smile on the players’ faces.
Figure 4: Armand J. Piron’s Society Orchestra (c. 1924), Strand, New York. Courtesy of
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
Generally though, the formal pose provided an opportunity to project the

seriousness of the musicians and elevate the viewer’s assessment of their

occupation through appropriate representations of musicianship, training

and presentation—a necessary complement to the raucous street-corner
band battles and public displays which New Orleans musicians used to
compete for business. These public marketing displays generated excite-
ment and provided individual musicians an opportunity to display their own
skill and techniques while formal band photography reunited the players,
overlaying the patina of ensemble onto individual techniques. The formal
band photograph presented another face of the band, that of strict organi-
zation, discipline and reliability and visual justification of ‘orchestra’ status.
The formal band pose addressed the question of ‘respectability’ on
several levels. In overtly asserting discipline and control, white or Creole
‘society’ bands strived to separate themselves from what Hersch called
the ‘impurities’ of African American music styles or—to the extent that the
players incorporated the black idiom in their concerts—their distance from
the uptown social milieu. On the other hand, coloured bands needed to
stress that their musical proposition was not limited to ‘ratty’ venues and
audiences. Confounding the ‘low down’ reputation of black performance
spaces with its blues-dominated repertoire, the formal portrait aimed to
place these bands on the same level as the ‘respectable’ ensembles. These
images underline how social class, race and musical style were inextricably
linked in the early New Orleans period.
They were also marketing tools. By the mid-1920s, Vocalion, Brunswick
and other labels had started commissioning photographs to use in ‘race’
record advertisements (Allen and Rust 1987: 350–51, 354, 358–60) but prior
to this many band photographs were used informally as a relatively cheap
supplement to business cards. Big Eye Louis Nelson’s business card used
a photograph taken from a portrait of the Superior Orchestra taken in 1910.
A version of the photograph of the Creole Orchestra (Figure 3) attached to
a business card gives an indication of this style (Kunstadt 1963: 3) as does
the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s photo postcard for their engagement
at Reisenweber’s restaurant in New York in 1917 (Figure 12). Occasion-
ally photographs were accompanied by publicity text; many years after it
was taken, Paul Barbarin added wording to the photograph of Joe Oliver’s
Dixie Syncopators taken in 1926 (Figure 16). Alongside using photographs
in this way, it has been suggested that bands would often simply give away
photographs on the street, at venues and to friends and fans and it will be
noticed that several carry handwritten greetings (Figure 16).
As a context for the creation or reinforcement of racial identities, the
formal pose was particularly appropriate with its connotations of serious-
ness and discipline providing a counter to prevailing racial stereotypes.

Piron, a business-conscious leader who was more than usually aware of

the commercial implications of race, refused to hire any coloured player
unless he could pass for white, which allowed him to secure engagements
in prestigious venues such as the New Orleans Country Club and Tranchi-
na’s restaurant. The photograph above (Figure 4) and one taken the previ-
ous year at Spanish Fort [D&L: 24] include several light-skinned coloured
players. The all-white dress of Nat Towles’s Creole Harmony Kings of New
Orleans taken in 1926 [D&L: 26] may well have been an attempt to reassure
audiences; a similar 1920 image of the Manuel Perez Onward Brass Band
was taken when we know that the band included a mix of Creole, Latino
and African American musicians [R&S: 193]. On the other hand, striving
to widen the audience for his orchestra by attracting black followers, the
Creole trumpeter Sidney Desvignes made sure he hired darker-skinned
players such as trumpeter Eugene Ware and alto player Ted Purnell, both
of whom are prominent in a ‘hands in pockets’ formal line-up of 1928 [D&L:
28]. Creole clarinettist Achille Baquet’s ability to blend into a white envi-
ronment is illustrated in a 1919 formally-posed head-and-shoulders photo-
graph of him with Jimmy Durante’s Original New Orleans Jazz Band, with
whom he had worked and recorded in New York City from 1915 (Figure 5).
Born in 1885, Baquet was one of the great early New Orleans musicians
and had previously ‘passed’ with the white Reliance Brass Band and mem-
bers of the ODJB before they travelled north (Wood n.d: 65).
Figure 5: Jimmy Durante’s Original New Orleans Jazz Band (c. 1915–18), Apeda, New
York. Courtesy of the Al Rose Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University

The formal pose gave individual musicians the opportunity to emphasize

their musical identity as an integral part of the ensemble and it is here that
this pose was most effective. On one hand, promoting individual skills and
personality was crucial if a musician wanted to build a following; on the
other, identification with the band and contribution to the ensemble sound
was a prerequisite to securing employment. It is at this point that social and
racial factors intersected, creating in the formal band pose a visual docu-
ment with both economic and cultural significance.
The instrumental array

If the formal band pose was intended to convey organization and discipline,
a second convention broadened the representation of the band through
an ostentatious demonstration of instrumentation. The instrumental array
moved band photography in the direction of foregrounding individual and
collective musical accomplishment and versatility. This convention was
copied widely by bands outside New Orleans—not least because musi-
cians like King Oliver took the aesthetic over when he posed for photo-
graphs after he left the city.
The concern to represent sound visually has a long history. Represen-
tations of sound are often found in the visual arts where artists have devel-
oped a range of techniques to ‘translate [sounds] out of the acoustic realm
into that of vision’ (Halliday 2013: 97–101). The instrumental array moved
in this direction by adopting the nineteenth-century tradition of the photo-
graph as a signifier of occupation skill and expertise. Appearing as early
as the 1840s, these portraits captured subjects with the tools and objects
of their work—actors in costume, carpenters with saws, watch- and clock-
makers with their timepieces and tools and, occasionally, musicians with
their instruments—and were produced as cartes de visites or tintypes
(Orvell 2003: 27; Carlebach 1992: 50; 2002). The instruments shown in
these portraits were deployed to signify ‘goals, make skills manifest and
shape the identities of their users… [the musicians’] self is to a large extent
a reflection of things with which [they] interact. Thus objects also make and
use their makers and users’ (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981:
1, 20–54). In other words, instruments in band portraits were intended to
convey not only the status, talent or occupation of the user; they signalled
a relationship between the user and the social context, aiming for an evoca-
tion of pleasing music from the hands of skilled operatives.
The instrumental array achieved this by connoting the finer qualities of
New Orleans music-making and accomplishment and reflected the pride
which musicians took in the instruments they owned and used. The wider

the range of instruments on display the more versatile the band might
appear to be and more suited to the better venues. The careful alignment
of the instruments signified musical co-ordination and discipline. Before
widespread availability of recorded music, the combination of instruments
provided pointers to the style of music and degree of sophistication an
audience might enjoy—a message which, as we have seen, was not with-
out racial significance.
Figure 6: Arthur Bedou, The Louisianna Shakers (mid-1920s). Courtesy of Al Rose’s

New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
The foundation of this convention was the arrangement of instruments in

front of the band members in a symmetrical pattern or, in the more devel-
oped cases, an elaborate tableau. Bands employing this convention put on
show a much wider range of equipment than was possible had musicians
been required to hold their instruments—all varieties of reed instruments,
mutes, the full range of percussion instruments and even devices such
as voice trumpets. In some photographs the array hardly moves beyond
the basic formal pose with a small display of clarinets standing upright in
front of the players. When Arthur Bedou came to photograph the Louisi-
ana Shakers around 1920 (Figure 6), the array had grown considerably.

The arrangement of the instruments is a little haphazard and contrasts

with those bands that created a meticulously-crafted symmetrical display.
A photograph of the Young Tuxedo Orchestra taken around 1925 [R&S:
319], involving an elaborate patterning of cornets, trombones, clarinets,
saxophones and string instruments, illustrates this point while Dejan’s
Black Diamond Orchestra [R&S: 173] was captured in a 1928 image which
combined elements of the basic formal pose with a less elaborate but still
noticeable instrumental array.
Figure 7: Arthur P. Bedou, Manuel Perez’s Garden of Joy Orchestra, Knights of Pythian
Temple Roof Garden (1925). Courtesy of the Al Rose Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive,
Tulane University
A precise arrangement of band instruments was achieved by Arthur

Bedou when he photographed Manuel Perez’s Garden of Joy Orchestra
inside the Knights of Pythians Temple Roof Garden in New Orleans in 1925
(Figure 7)—one of three photographs using different pose conventions
taken during the same session. Two photographs from the early 1930s rep-
resent the apogee of the instrumental array: Sidney Desvigne’s S.S. Capitol
Orchestra in c. 1931 (Figure 8) and Don Albert’s Orchestra (c. 1933) [R&S:
149] both display over fifty instruments and other equipment, meticulously
arranged and even mirroring the height line of the players. White band

Figure 8: Villard Paddio, Sidney Desvigne’s S.S. Capitol Orchestra (c. 1931). Courtesy
of Al Rose’s New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University
leaders were just as keen to display their band’s instrumentation as can

be seen from photographs of Tony Parenti’s Symphonic Dance Orchestras
(1922–23) [R&S: 154]—an image which contains violins in the array sign-
ing the ‘symphonic’ nature of the music on offer—Louis Prima’s first band
(1922) [R&S: 291], Happy Schilling’s Orchestra (c. 1924) [R&S: 153], the
New Orleans Owls (1928) [R&S: 152] and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings
(c. 1922) [R&S: 161].
Posed action
Formal pose and instrumental array conventions signified primarily the qual-
ity of the band and served to give audiences an idea of the style of music
in store. The posed action and novelty conventions were aimed more at
conveying a sense of the experience of the band in live performance. Few
of these photographs seem convincing to us today but it is in context that
their meanings emerge. The various ways in which both these poses were
adopted and employed by bandsmen were far from accidental and pro-
vide a corrective to those historians who have dismissed them as frivolous,
vaudeville retentions or even, as Peter Townsend has suggested, ‘freakish’
(Townsend 2000: 163).

Figure 9: Arthur P. Bedou, Fate Marable’s Orchestra, S.S. Capitol riverboat (early 1920s).
Courtesy of Al Rose’s New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive,
Tulane University
The posed action convention attempted to recreate the experience of seeing

and hearing the band in performance by having the musicians feign per-
formance. This convention, which might owe allegiance to the tradition of
tableau vivant favoured by mid- to late-nineteenth-century portrait photogra-
phers (Marien 2010: 39), provides an example of what Ricard Leppert (1993)
has called the ‘sonoric landscape’. Leppert’s meticulous study of the way
music from the seventeenth century has been represented in the visual arts
leads him to conclude that ‘the sound is the sight, and the sight is the sound’
(xx): ‘When people hear a musical performance, they see it as an embod-
ied activity. While they hear, they also witness; how the performers look and
gesture, how they are costumed, how they interact with their instruments
and with one another, how they regard the audience, how other listeners
heed the performers’ (xxii). Precisely because the musical sound is ethe-
real, abstract and intangible the visual experience of its production ‘is crucial
to both musicians and audience alike for locating and communicating the
place of music and musical sound within society and culture’ (xx–xxi). Rec-
ognizing that all sounds can be read and interpreted, the sonoric landscape
inevitably carries a semantic and discursive charge (15).

An early example of the Eagle Band (1916) [R&S: 134] shows the play-
ers with the instruments held stiffly and with virtually no other pretence at the
effort involved in actual performance. The musicians make greater effort in
Arthur Bedou’s photograph of Fate Marable’s Orchestra taken on board the
S.S. Capitol (Figure 9) although Louis Armstrong’s one-handed cornet play-
ing, George Brahear’s kneeling trombone style and ‘Baby’ Dodds’ drum-
ming stance mean that this image shades into the novelty pose described
in a moment.
Figure 10: Frank Christian’s New Orleans Jazz Band (1921–22), De Haven, Chicago.
Courtesy of Al Rose’s New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz
Archive, Tulane University
Posed action was used extensively by the white New Orleans band lead-
ers. A photograph of Albert ‘Baby’ Laine’s band taken around 1917 [K&G:
21] shows the band energetically feigning performance—complete
with Laine’s tin can mute. The players in Frank Christian’s New Orleans
Jazz Band, photographed somewhere between 1921 and 1922 (Figure
10), are stiffly arranged whilst ‘playing’ their instruments. Taken in Chi-
cago, this photograph demonstrates how photographic aesthetics trav-
elled with musicians as they migrated around the country. The Princeton
Revellers (c. 1922) [R&S: 157] seem static and the contrived symmetry
of the ODJB in 1916–17 [R&S: 152] could not be further from that of live

performance. A 1917 photograph of the Original New Orleans Jazz Band

taken in New York offers an almost perfect blend of the formal and posed
action conventions with instruments held at perfectly aligned angles while
being ‘played’ (Figure 11). The Princetown Revellers main rivals, the New
Orleans Owls, manged to break into the exclusive territory of Creole Soci-
ety Orchestras and their photograph of 1923 [D&L: 33] is clearly striving
to present a more refined image than the ‘knocked-out barrelhouse jazz’
that cornetist Richard Mackie considered their core style.
Figure 11: Original New Orleans Jazz Band, The Alamo Café, 125th. St., New York
(c. 1915–18). Courtesy of the Al Rose Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
The Halfway House Orchestra [R&S: 160/D&L: 31] was captured in a pho-
tograph which combines elements of the formal pose with posed action,
instruments carefully aligned in a fashion that would have been impossi-
ble to achieve in a real performance. The Orchestra was the last band in
which Leon Roppolo’s played and so the photograph—in which his white
socks had not, as was the usual custom, been blacked out by the pho-
tographer—can be dated at around 1924. Alcide ‘Yellow’ Nunez’s Louisi-
anna 5 were captured feigning performance in what is shading into the
comic pose [K&G: 22]. The ODJB were keen on this kind of photograph
and several photographs show them making as if playing in performance.
A photograph of the band taken before Henry Ragas died in 1919 [K&G:
23] shows the five musicians carefully arranged yet with instruments held
as if in live performance; the band was photographed in the same year,
this time with British pianist Billie Jones, in a seated composition which

spanned the formal and posed action conventions [R&S: 164]. A classic
posed action shot of the band, visually foregrounding their ‘Peppery Mel-
odies’, was used on a postcard publicizing the Reisenweber’s restaurant
engagement in 1917 (Figure 12).
Figure 12: Original Dixieland Jazz Band postcard (1917). Courtesy of the Nick LaRocca
Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
The intended effect of the posed action convention was to convey through
sonoric landscapes the excitement and dynamism of ‘hot’ music as it

might be experienced in live performance. Bandsmen knew that to be

hired they had to provide audiences with a good time and photographs
conveying this message were a critical element in their marketing mix. The
response of modern viewers to photographs of this kind is probably to
regard them as contrived but the context is crucial. Bandsmen were reluc-
tant to dispense with the key elements of the formal pose convention even
when attempting to pass themselves off as playing their instruments. This
combination of ‘formality–informality’ underlines the extent to which musi-
cians were making conscious efforts to exploit photography to convey as
many of the messages embodied in the different conventions as possible.
Novelty pose
Jazz in these years was a good-time music and the primary function of New
Orleans bands was to entertain and provide music for dancing. A fourth
convention—the novelty pose—added a comic element which drew on the
traditions of tent shows, circus and vaudeville theatre and emphasized the
entertainment component of early jazz. Yet, when New Orleans bandsmen
adopted comic stances, they took care not to discard key elements of other
conventions—formal dress codes, symmetrical compositions and instru-
mental displays in particular—and we misunderstand these images if their
serious intentions are disregarded.
There were differences between white and coloured bands in the ways
in which the novelty pose was executed, with white Dixielanders favour-
ing it and sometimes taking it to extremes. A mid-1920s photograph [R&S:
151/D&L: 32] of Johnny Bayersdorffer’s Band manages to combine the
instrumental array with a series of comic poses appropriate for their ‘Booster
Nights’ at the Tokyo Garden. It is important to understand the meaning of
the novelty pose for musicians at the time. In a photograph taken around
1915, in which a fifteen-year-old Tony Parenti was captured with the Johnny
DeDroit band, the leader is making extravagant gestures as if conducting
the players whose instruments are perfectly aligned in a parallel formation
[K&G: 24]. There could hardly be a less realistic portrayal of musicians
at work and one might be tempted on the strength of this image to dis-
miss the players as a vaudevillian troupe. This would be a serious misread-
ing: Parenti was one of the best musicians to emerge from the early New
Orleans jazz scene and his subsequent sixty-year career involved engage-
ments with many leading musicians and bands. Photographs of this nature
illustrate how musicians saw novelty as an important complement to the
musical abilities that they clearly possessed.

Figure 13: The Dominoes (c. 1929). Courtesy of Al Rose’s New Orleans Jazz: A Family
Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.Unknown photographer
The Dixola Novelty Orchestra takes this pose almost to its extreme (and
even incorporates an instrumental array) in a 1924 photograph [R&S: 141]
taken inside the Tip-Top room at the Grunewald (later the Rooseveldt)
hotel, a high-quality venue coveted by musicians. With their instruments
held aloft and dramatic body gestures, a scene of frantic activity shows
the musicians adopting comic poses which they believed to be appro-
priate for an upmarket dance venue. The Carlisle Evans Band [D&L:
32] and Dejan’s Original Moonlight Serenaders [R&S: 142] captured
around 1921 are only slightly more restrained. Photographed in 1929,
Tony Fougerat, a popular Dixieland bandleader from the 1920s through
to the 1960s, is down on one knee while playing his trumpet (Figure
13) with The Dominoes, a group which played mostly one-nighters in
and around New Orleans. Of course, the most obviously comic photo-
graphs were those taken in vaudeville shows: Richard M. Jones’s Jazz
Wizzards featuring the storied banjo player Johnny St. Cyr combined
juggling tricks whilst playing their instruments in a photograph taken in
the 1920s [R&S: 265].

Figure 14: New Orleans Rhythm Kings (1923). Courtesy of the Joe Mares Collection,
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University. Unknown photographer
There is possibly no more exaggerated example of the novelty pose by a

white band than that adopted by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (NORK)
when they were photographed in Chicago in 1923 (Figure 14). Here the
musicians are presented as playing their instruments but their contortions
are wholly unrealistic, with Arnold Loyacano even mounting his string bass!
Once again these comedy elements should be seen as part of the pack-
age offered by otherwise skilled musicians: Bud Freeman famously named
the NORK as one of the influences for members of the Austin High School
Gang, who were turned on to jazz by hearing the band’s Gennett record-
ings of 1922–23 (Freeman 1989: 5–6), and the band was widely influential
(inspiring, among other, a young Benny Goodman) in the Chicago area in
the early 1920s (Collier 1989: 21–22). NORK were almost certainly one of
the more accomplished white Dixieland bands and their antics in front of
the camera should not be allowed to distract from the fact.
Costumes sometimes featured in pictures of African American bands.
A well-known photograph of King Oliver’s band, almost certainly taken
between late May and early June, when the band arrived in San Francisco
from Chicago, and the departure in August 1921 of drummer Minor Hall,
celebrated an engagement at the Pergola Dancing Pavilion at 949 Market
Street, San Francisco, where they opened on 12 June 1921. Dressed in a

mixture of styles—part-plantation, part-workmen overalls—the photograph

displays the by now common trope of exuberant poses and enthusiastic
instrumental techniques [R&S: 264]. The most remarkable example though
must surely be that taken by Arthur Bedou of an unnamed ‘rube’ band
(actually the Piron-Williams Orchestra featuring among others Clarence Wil-
liams, John Lindsay, Jimmie Noone, Bebé Ridgley, Oscar Celestin, Johnny
St. Cyr and Armond J. Piron) in rehearsal for an Orpheum Circuit vaudeville
tour [R&S: 263]. The ‘rube’—the rural hick out of his depth in the city—was
an established trope in vaudeville and early recorded music and had been
popularized by artists like Cal Stewart, the ‘emperor of rural comedians’
and Leonard (‘Len’) Spencer, the ‘Bowery Boy’ (Kenney 2003: 33).
Figure 15: King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (c. 1922–23), Daguerre, Chicago. Courtesy
of Al Rose’s New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University
Coloured bands adopting the novelty pose were however usually more
restrained, an indication perhaps of disdain among African American musi-
cians towards the vaudeville tradition. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, cap-
tured in a well-known photograph from the early 1920s (Figure 15), adopted
some of the novelty pose tropes in a tableau in which the players adopt
carefully-arranged but exaggerated positions while feigning performance.
In this image, Louis Armstrong kneels in the foreground playing slide trum-
pet in front of a small instrument array while Johnny Dodds sits on the

piano, legs akimbo, playing the clarinet. In photographs such as these it is

tempting to seek signs of the musicians ‘signifying on’ a white vaudeville
or theatrical tradition. However, a signature identifies the photograph as
having been taken by the Daguerre Studio, the south-side firm operating
from 1910 until the 1930s. This photograph may have been taken by Emily
Gallagher, a leading photographer of actors, dancers and other performers
whose reputation at the time rivalled that of Rudolf Valentino’s favourite por-
traitist, Mabel Sykes. Gallagher was favoured by female performers and her
choice as photographer for this image might have reflected Lil Armstrong’s
influence at the time over her husband’s publicity efforts. In this case it is
likely that an authorial photographer had adopted an established theatrical
aesthetic and the result bears the traces of its origins.
Conclusion
Band photography in the early years of New Orleans jazz was culturally and
economically conditioned while serving as a vehicle for the construction
of personal and collective identity. Drawing on conventions whose visual
codes were sufficiently adaptable to suit varying requirements, photogra-
phy combined marketing and advertising functions with an opportunity for
leaders and musicians to present themselves in a variety of creative ways.
Through the adoption and blending of conventions which they believed
best represented their skills and accomplishments as musicians, the qual-
ity of their instrumentation and the nature and/or excitement of their perfor-
mances, early New Orleans jazz band photography was a contribution to
the creation and sustaining of personal and professional identity.
The formal pose and instrumental array were adopted to establish an
appropriately serious and elevated musical identity. Reinforcing the values
of organization and discipline, instrumental arrays complemented these
messages with connotations of musical accomplishment and versatility.
Racial and ethnic identities were crucial elements of photographic rep-
resentation, often with direct economic consequences. Alongside formal
and instrumental poses, posed action compositions attempted to convey
a sense of a ‘hot’ performance for dance-oriented audiences and comic
poses played into audience expectations of a good time.
By the mid-1920s orchestras started to assume larger forces and solo-
ists were increasingly thrust into the limelight heralding a move away from
the older New Orleans ensemble style. This shift was mirrored in the grad-
ual decline from the mid-1920s onwards of the photographic conventions
described above.

Figure 16: King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators (1925; text added c. 1956). Daguerre, Chi-
cago. Photo courtesy of the Al Rose Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
Barbarin text courtesy of Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
The publicity shots arranged by King Oliver at the Daguerre Studios in Chi-
cago just prior to his tour of the mid-west in 1925 with the Dixie (some-
times Savannah) Syncopators (Figure 16) illustrate this transition. On the
one hand we see the leader responding to changing musical tastes with
a Chicago-style enlarged reed section. Yet the players he brought in were
almost all New Orleans ‘band men’—George Fihle, Bud Scott, Paul Bar-
barin, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, Luis Russell and (not pictured here)

Johnny Dodds, Omer Simeon and Kid Ory. Confirmation that Oliver’s heart
remained with New Orleans-style bands is the way in which the photograph
replicated the formality and instrumental array of the New Orleans conven-
tions. In an age when more solos and individuality had become the norm
the photograph speaks to Oliver’s need for the reassurance of tried and
tested band men with their intuitive sense of group discipline and collec-
tive identity.
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[JRJ 11.1 (2017) 62-79] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
Place and imagined

community in jazz
Elina Hytönen-Ng1
University Researcher, School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland
elina.hytonen@uef.fi
Abstract
This article investigates the concept of imagined community amongst professional jazz
musicians; more closely the way that this imagined community functions within the
scene. Through the focusing on the imagined community, the article extends the exami-
nation into the performance venues, the movement between venues and the meanings
attached to them, revealing the reasons why an imagined community is beneficial for the
musician. The research data are composed of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in jazz
circles in the United Kingdom between 2006 and 2012. Through the exploration of the
places occupied by the musicians, the article reveals how the community becomes con-
crete through the musicians’ movements. The article examines what added value it might
hold for them. All in all, the investigation makes sense of the social conditions that create
the need for such a community.
Keywords: community; jazz; mobility; musicians; venue
Introduction
Jazz musicians represent a professional group moving between venues.
Their profession is defined by instability, similar to individual entrepreneurs
where the work community is largely lacking. The musicians nonetheless
have a wide network created within the venues while they themselves move
between them. As these encounters between individual musicians can be
random, in this article it is my aim to demonstrate that the musicians over-
come this instability by creating an ‘imagined community’, a group where
they feel they belong while the closer ties with the community are loose.
In this article, I propose that instead of talking about work community it
is clearer to talk about imagined community as the connection between
1. Elina Hytönen-Ng is an ethnomusicologist and a cultural researcher working as

a university researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. Her PhD, finished in 2010,
focused on jazz musicians’ peak experiences and the study was published by Ashgate in
2013. Her recent studies have focused on contemporary British jazz musicians and their
working environment and mobility.
Place and imagined community in jazz 63
individual members are not very tight or regular. My argument is that the
word community does not always work very well when viewing the jazz
musicians’ working environment. Therefore, I propose that certain aspects
of the jazz world are better understood if viewed through the concept of
‘imagined community’.
The term community was developed in social theory already at the
turn of the twentieth century and was largely influenced by Durkheim’s
thoughts. Since then the term has been widely used and community has
also been adopted into jazz research. However, the community’s relation-
ship to the places it occupies, or the disconnection from them, has received
little attention within jazz studies. It is nonetheless the jazz musicians’ rela-
tionship with a place and their movement from one place to another that
distinguishes them from other occupations and thus defines the musicians’
profession.
This article investigates the concept of imagined community amongst
professional jazz musicians; more closely the way that this imagined com-
munity functions within the scene and within the venues where the musi-
cians perform. Through the focusing on the imagined community, the
article extends the examination into the performance venues, the move-
ment between venues and the meanings attached to them, revealing how
the imagined community appears and the reasons why it is useful or ben-
eficial for the musician.
Through the exploration of the places occupied by the musicians, the
article reveals how the community becomes concrete through the musi-
cians’ movements. The aim is also to examine the reasons why the musi-
cians need the imagined community and what added value it might hold for
them. All in all, the investigation makes sense of the social conditions that
create the need for such a community.
Research methods and analysis of the data

The research data are composed of ethnographic fieldwork conducted
in jazz circles in the United Kingdom—mainly around London—between
2006 and 2012. As the jazz musicians’ relationship with places is visible
in the way that they talk about the venues, the primary data in this article
have been gathered through interviews. Altogether eleven professional
jazz musicians were interviewed. The interviews were semi-structured
themed interviews with a specific focus on the way that the musicians
perceive venues. During the fieldwork 36 performance venues were also
observed.

The interviews were analysed using discursive psychology, a form of

discourse analysis, which pays attention to the interaction and the way that
experiences are being reproduced in speech. When using discursive psy-
chology, the focus is on the action orientation of talk and writing. The key
point of the analysis method can be found from Edwards and Potter’s state-
ment that both for the participants and analysts ‘the primary issue is the
social actions, or interactional work, being done in the discourse’ (Edwards
and Potter 1992: 2).
The discursive model suggests that discourse motivation and causa-
tion are bound together (Edwards and Potter 1992; Potter and Wetherell
1987). Discursive psychology, like other discourse analysis approaches,
is interested in the role that language has in constructing our social reality.
Researchers using discursive psychology look at what people are doing
with their speech. At the same time the speaker is seen as an active agent,
who utilizes discourse as tools (Willig 2003: 159–64, 172, 182).
The article focuses on the musicians. Lack of data on the audience is
a limiting factor, and criticism can be presented by pointing out that musi-
cians’ work cannot be discussed without the audience. As the gathered
data focused on the musicians, and their way of talking, the audience is
present here only through the musicians’ stories. Wider conclusions on
the audience’s part cannot therefore be made. It must also be noted that
the aim of this article is not to make claims that are valid for all jazz scenes
around the world. The data are limited mainly to the scene in London so
these limitations must also be taken into account when considering the
generalizability of the results.
The article will begin with the presentation of the concepts of imagined
community and place, and the way that these concepts are used in this
article. Once these central concepts are clear the article moves on to look-
ing at the jazz club as the musicians’ work environment and the musicians’
relationship with the venues. This section is followed by another that high-
lights the musicians’ social networks within the venues. The conclusions
draw together the threads represented in the previous sections represent-
ing the musicians’ imagined community as well as providing some reasons
why such a construction might be necessary for the musicians.
Imagined community and place as concepts

Community has been used extensively in jazz research from the 1960s and
in Alan Merriam and Raymond Mack’s (1960) work onwards. Paul Berliner
notes that the jazz community is created by ‘professional musicians and

aspirants for whom jazz is the central focus of their career’ while it sur-
passes boundaries created by age, class and ethnicity (Berliner 1994: 36).
It is a community created by mutual passion.
Ken Prouty (2012) has criticized jazz scholars for using the term com-
munity often without genuine understanding of the term or a clear definition
of what it means. Even Ingrid Monson (1996) uses the idea of community
in her investigation of the jazz ensemble and improvisation, but does not
really explain in her work how she defines it. Most of the scholarly work
does not focus much on the larger community which is at the heart of this
article. As Prouty has extensively listed the authors studying jazz commu-
nity, I will not go into too many details about these studies. Instead, I will
focus on the concept of imagined community, while some definitions about
the use of the community are nonetheless needed.
In this article, I will use the word community in a limited fashion and in
reference only to professional jazz musicians. In a comparable way to other
professional groups, the musicians have a work community. This commu-
nity nonetheless differentiates from other such communities, due to the
absence of stable work space.
The term communality also raises the question of how one becomes a
member. For the musicians, the membership is based on the demonstra-
tion of the individual’s competence. The same procedure has been in prac-
tice ever since the early years of jazz and the birth of jam sessions, where
the upcoming and rising musicians’ skills were tested.2 These events were
and still are an important way to make necessary contacts and to ensure
future gigs. For example, the Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London still hosts
late-night jam sessions.
The musician’s status and value within the community of musicians is
not primarily created by the level of education that the individual musician
has had. A completely self-educated musician can also be accepted as
part of the community if his or her skills correspond with the expectations.
After the initial entrance to the scene has been made the professional com-
munity becomes, as this article demonstrates, largely imaginary. That is,
some aspects of the community can be better understood as an imagina-
tive community, a point that I will return to later.
But how does the imagined community differentiate from the normal
community? Benedict Anderson launched the concept of imagined commu-
nity in the early 1980s when studying nationalism and nations. He pointed
2. For more in-depth discussion on jam sessions see Berliner 1994.

out that nations were socially constructed communities and imagined as

the members of a nation could never know or meet most of the other mem-
bers of this community. The members, nonetheless, felt that they were part
of the same community. Membership with the community was constructed
through mediation, such as print-media (Anderson 2006).
Finlayson, following Anderson, defines imagined community as a ‘group
of people who not only draw on the same set of symbolic resources when
articulating their sense of identity but, additionally, recognize and value that
commonality which they regard not as an outcome of certain social facts
but as their cause’ (Finlayson 2012: 273). Since Anderson’s initiative and
the work around nationalism, the term has also been used widely outside
the context of nation and nationalism.
In the twenty-first century the term ‘imagined community’ has been
used, for example, when studying bilingual students within the Japanese
educational system (Kanno 2003), the American Jews’ diaspora tourism
to Israel (Powers 2011) and lifestyle magazines aimed to create imagined
communities of readers (Jenkins 2016). Kanno has studied language learn-
ers and the way that these learners have images of the communities in
which they want to take part in the future. These imagined communities
have an impact on the learning process (Kanno 2003).
Kanno’s studies highlight the way that the term can be used in another
context than the nation state. In the later definitions imagined community
has been used to refer to groups of people that are not concrete or attain-
able, but whose members are linked to each other through the power
of imagination in such a way that surpasses time and place (Kanno and
Norton 2012). In a similar way to Kanno’s findings, the musicians become
part of the community through a learning process. Music students, whether
academic learners or self-taught, have images of the communities in which
they want to participate in the future. They attend performances and listen
to recordings by professional musicians to learn the music, the appropriate
behaviour and to envision themselves as part of the community.
Within popular music studies or musicology studies the term imag-
ined communities has rarely been used. Within popular music studies the
concept has been used, for example, to describe the feeling of belonging
(McGrath 2010). Prouty uses it in a critical sense. While Anderson’s idea
of imagined community was based on the idea of print-capitalism making
a distinction between oral and literate cultures, Prouty has proposed that
within music scenes print-capitalism should perhaps be replaced with
‘record-capitalism’ (Prouty 2012), referring to the way that the imagined

community is created by listening to records and purchasing them. But

as the last decade has demonstrated, with the drop in record sales and
the growing number of free music distributed online, this is perhaps not
the case anymore. Music scenes have become more and more frag-
mented while musicians can produce high-quality music in home stu-
dios and music is distributed for free online. However, when we focus on
jazz, where the emphasis has always been on the live performance, it
could be stated that the live performance has long since replaced record-
capitalism. It could also be noted that within jazz the imagined community
takes place within the venues and therefore is based on venue-capitalism.
Even though the concept of imagined community has not been widely
used in popular music studies or jazz studies, in recent years some pass-
ing references to the concept have been made (Johnson 2017). None-
theless, no further developments of the concept within the cultural field of
popular music or jazz studies have come to my attention. It is perhaps the
overtly general definitions and contexts of the term that have limited its use.
It could be argued that a concept developed to be used for larger units,
such as nations, is not usable for smaller scales created within nations and
small scenes. Within this article my aim is to nonetheless demonstrate that
the use of the term ‘imagined community’ highlights the added value that
the idea of community has in jazz circles, and it allows us to understand
the musicians’ community better, to see its multi-layered structure as well
as multiple meanings.
The article has also another central concept, the ‘place’. Within place
studies the main problem has often been that the place is taken for granted.
Even though in our day-to-day life we situate ourselves into the world and
then make sense of the world through the places that we are based in, we
rarely stop to think about the importance of the experience of place. Ques-
tions about the factors in the construction of these experiences and how
they are created often remain unanswered (Casey 2013; Relph 2008).
The construction of place is influenced by the way that experiences
and intentions are framed within a place. This means that we experience
and do things in a place that has set limits, which then also influence our
experience. Places can also be considered as meaningful sites which are
essential for the identities of individuals and communities (Relph 2008).
Places mould us at the same time as we are physically in them. It can
therefore be stated that the experience of the place is also an embod-
ied experience (Casey 2013). We define ourselves and our relationship to
the world when we are within a place. It has been said that the feeling that

one belongs somewhere is important for the construction of the individual’s

identity (Ashworth and Graham 2005). Whether we are outsiders or part of
the inner circle, it is indeed our relationship to a certain place that makes
us what we are.
Jazz club as a work environment

Jazz musicians work primarily within jazz clubs or other venues. Berliner
has noted that musicians form their relationships ‘through a complex net-
work of interrelated music centres that form the institutional infrastructure
of the jazz community’ (Berliner 1994: 36–37). The infrastructure is created
by record shops, social clubs, performance venues and other such places.
I nonetheless argue that it is the performance venues that are of primary
importance for the community particularly when we take into account that
the live performance is often preferred over the recorded.
Within these venues, the musicians make their living by performing to
an audience and occasionally selling their records. Within these places
the musicians encounter the audience, construct their identity and dem-
onstrate their skills to other musicians. Based on these tasks the musician
constructs his or her reputation, strengthens the membership with the
community and ensures future work. Public performances are therefore
loaded with expectations about the quality of the performance as well as
expectations about how things are to go and encounters taking place at
the venue.
Through their acoustics, the clubs and other performance venues create
an important operational environment, within which the musicians seek and
construct a meaningful relationship to their work. Playing in a noisy place in
front of an uninterested audience makes the musician sometimes question
the meaningfulness and value of his or her work. At the same time, a work-
ing relationship with a supportive audience will motivate the musician for a
long time (Hytönen-Ng 2015; 2017).
The performances are also restricted and controlled by a set of prac-
tical issues. The organizers have their own expectations and limitations
to the performance, while they also need to fulfil their own tasks for the
event to be successful (see Becker 1984). The musician is therefore shar-
ing the place with other employees. The doorman, booking clerk, waiters,
bartender, kitchen staff, promoters, sound and light technicians, cleaners
and other professionals move within the same environment influencing the
musicians’ experiences.

It is quite often noticeable that the musicians want to create a division

between themselves as an independent group and the other professional
groups sharing the venue. The creation of separation can be detected,
for example, in the way that the musicians talk about sound technicians,
whose work quality is often criticized.
P: When I’m doing theatres with my band I do need a fair number of

microphones on the band to pick the soloist out and also if there’s
like woodwind doubling, like flute and stuff, it’s important that that’s
over carrying. What I don’t need is some fool3 on the desk who’s kind
of pulling the faders the whole time and believe me I have had prob-
lems. I have almost stopped a band falling out once or twice on the
account of… But I think that for most musicians to say that it’s a bit
of a red herring, to be honest…
Elina: And I was thinking also that in respect that it takes away some
of the control that you have over the music when there’s somebody
actually…
P: Oh, I believe so, yeah! Yep. Yeah. As I said, if you’ve got some-
one lunatic in front who’s, who’s thinking that, you know, he’s not a
sound engineer, he’s a performance artist. Then it really, really can
be, it really can be quite a negative [experience]. So yeah, that is
important (P3 2010).4
In the passage above the musician confirms that the sound technician takes
away some of the control of the performance. The sound is the most impor-
tant part of the musical performance and the musician’s work is evaluated
based on this. It is therefore understandable that the disruptions caused
by external people create tension. This particular musician had solved the
conflict by having his tour manager look over things when performing with
his band. The tour manager then acts as a buffer between the musician and
technician ensuring the quality is maintained.
It is not just the sound technicians, but the musicians are also creat-
ing an opposition between the performers on stage and the other off-stage
groups. The separation is highlighted by the fact that the musicians are a
free professional group working within a single club. They are untethered
from the daily running of the club and will be moving onto another venue
the next day unlike the other professionals within a venue. This freedom
might lead us to believe that musicians as a professional group do not
3. Emphasis in the original interview.

4. P3 refers to participant and the year of the interview. Names have been anony-
mized.

get attached to the performance venues. Closer examination nonetheless

reveals that the performance venues have multi-layered meanings for the
musicians.
When looking at the jazz scene it is obvious that jazz clubs represent
a place that demonstrates a certain level of stability whereas festivals are,
for example, marked primarily by temporality even though they might take
place every year. Temporality becomes apparent as the event venues
cannot necessarily be found a few weeks after the festival has ended.
Clubs on the other hand can be found at the same locations sometimes for
decades and the musicians working on the scene will keep on returning to
them time after time.
The interview data show that returning to a good venue can remind the
musician of returning home or ‘feeling at home’ (P2 2011), as one partici-
pant noted. Another musician described the relationship with the venues in
the following way:
The venues are our homes. We are wandering, we are gypsies. We

move from venue to venue to venue, that’s what we are doing. This
is our home. Now I am making a living being a musician. I don’t
teach for living. I would be bored with it. I’m playing music because
I love to perform. There are not many people in Britain who do what
I do. Most musicians teach. So yes, the venues are our homes, our
selves. You know, the punters are our family and there is a very close
relationship here between us and them (P1 2012).
What is essential in this is the knowledge of the place, knowing one’s place
within the venue where one is always welcome as well as the musician
being known within the place. It is within these venues that the musicians
strengthen their feeling of belonging and their identity as musician. The
performance venue, similarly to home, is marked by stability and mutual
feeling of familiarity with staff and audience as well as physical structures
allowing long-term and multi-layered meanings to be created. This famil-
iarity and stability can be threatened, for example, by the refurbishment or
relocation of the club, even though these changes might be caused by the
need to renovate an old, rundown venue.
Tuan (2006) has argued that we expect our home to stay the same
whenever we return to it and we rely on this stability. People need a place
or places that form a wholeness or that strengthen their inner experience
through their genuine nature. These places are often associated with the
feeling of time standing still, allowing us to know that the place is still the
same even though the world is changing. Changes in the home—or in an
important venue—seem to erase something of the person’s sense of self.

Tuan points out that humanity requires stability to strengthen our inner
experience. We need to freeze time so that we can reflect on who we are or
who we think we are. The feeling of wholeness can be a very healing expe-
rience (Tuan 2006: 18–20; see also Hytönen-Ng 2013: 127–28).
Tuan compares home to love that builds up slowly and notes that cer-
tain places can cause the feeling of ‘love at first sight’. Even places that
we visit only once can invoke as strong an effect on us as a home. While
home involves multiple layers of meaning, the ‘love at first sight’ places
have fewer layers and therefore the emotions that we have towards them
are easier to articulate (Tuan 2006: 19). The meanings that the musicians
associate with a particular venue can also have a long history built up along
the years of still being an outsider to the community, a student learning the
trade.
The importance of stability becomes evident when we perceive venues
that have been running in a particular location for decades. The familiarity is
partly then constructed by the knowledge that the venue is there and stays
the same even though the surroundings, the buildings around it, might
change. This might also be linked with the knowledge of performers who
have played at the club before. The musician might feel connected to the
venue through the deceased performers who used to perform at the same
venue. The imagined community therefore stretches over time, as Ander-
son (2006) and Finlayson (2012) suggest.
Sometimes the connection is even strengthened by the fact that the
same instruments played by the long-gone musician might still be circling
amongst the musicians. It could therefore be possible that the musician
performing at a certain club could be playing the same instruments as the
deceased musicians who performed there years before. During fieldwork,
I heard discussions about the saxophone that belonged to Ronnie Scott,
and what it would feel like to play that instrument at the Ronnie Scott’s
Jazz Club. The instrument could then strengthen the musician’s feeling of
belonging into the community and the scene, and even belonging into a
certain club. This is an example of how the musician’s sense of community,
operating through the power of imagination, can surpass time and place
(see Kanno and Norton 2012).
The musicians’ work also involves the spaces in between the venues.
Touring means moving from venue to venue, sometimes hundreds of miles
apart. This extends the musicians’ work to non-places, relating to the idea
of minimizing place and the idea of the installations that the transporta-
tion of humans and commodities demands. Airports, stations as well as

commercial spaces are examples of non-places (Augé 1995). Non-places

can be an important part of the musicians’ work, too, as they also are at
times shared with fellow musicians travelling to the same performance. It is
within these non-places that the community is strengthened as it demands
the shared dislocation between the musicians creating mutual memories
of travel.
Inside knowledge and social networks within

the performance venue
Within the venues, the musicians are also distributing inside knowledge
of the community that they are part of. Before the performance, during the
breaks or after it the musicians might be sharing a beer or a coffee and talk-
ing about the latest developments on the scene. Discussions about how
someone has been treated within a certain venue or what kind of audience
attends a particular club usually take place within the venues.
Good experiences and treatment are shared to colleagues at the same
time as negative experiences are verbally mediated knowledge within the
community. The decisions of where and how often the musician performs
in a venue are then partly made based on this verbally transmitted knowl-
edge as well as first-hand experiences. Musicians are therefore creating
a mental map of performance venues and ‘marking’ or reviewing these
places based on their own previous experience and stories told by other
musicians. It is unlikely that the musicians themselves would talk about
their actions as intentional reviewing, but the knowledge of the policies and
practices of individual venues is shared to other musicians through shared
stories. The community’s field of action is a mental map that functions and
is constructed at the communal as well as individual level.
The venues are also places where the musician interacts with other
musicians. Within these encounters, the musician is constructing both pro-
fessional and personal networks that are essential, for example, for future
employment (Tsioulakis 2011). Coulson has similarly pointed out that ‘net-
working is a proactive strategy commonly used for getting work in a labour
market such as music’ (Coulson 2012: 247). The musicians can be com-
pared to entrepreneurs, who in their daily life are very independent and
unattached from others. The individual musician does not necessarily col-
laborate with the same group of people every day, but can work with sev-
eral ensembles at the same time as well as substituting colleagues who
cannot make a single performance with their regular group. Some musi-
cians are working mainly by themselves, performing around the country as

visiting soloists for house bands of jazz clubs. The work of visiting soloists
is based on the standard repertoire. It is this shared language that strength-
ens the feeling of community and connection.5
The work is defined by the movement from one place and ensemble to
another, making daily life a fragmented puzzle. Daily mobility, for example
within the British jazz scene, creates a situation where the individual ses-
sion musicians do not necessarily meet each other on a regular basis. This
instability makes it hard for the musicians to maintain close friendships.
The situation is overcome by the expectation that the other musicians will
understand the temporary and hectic nature of the profession. Interactions
with other musicians are limited mainly to the encounters that take place
within the venues thus highlighting the nature and the importance of these
meetings.
The fieldwork observations and musicians’ comments suggest that the
time that has passed since the last meeting with a particular musician does
not seem to be significant. One participant explained the relationship with
fellow musicians in the following way:
And musicians also have a skill, which I think is quite unique, which
is… if you don’t see someone sometimes for years, and then you work
together, you carry on as if it was the day after the last time you saw
them. So it’s, there’s absolutely none of that [formal small talk]… So
you walk in straight away and say the first rude thing to each other,
you know, straight away. ‘Oh, you is it!’ You know. And they respond
with some and that’s it for the day, you know. And then maybe it’s
another year [before you meet them again]… But, but you have that
sort of warm memory of a great time (P2 2011).
The relationship with other musicians reminds us of a relationship with

friends. The assumption is that the interaction with a familiar musician will
carry on from where it was left during the previous meeting. The sense
of community and its meaningfulness are emphasized partly because of
the temporal and fragmented nature of the job, but also because the job
description is so distinctly different from other professions. The musician is
always working when other people are off: evenings, weekends and holi-
day seasons.
This unique community and the shared experience that it involves make
the musicians often state that a musician, or his life, can only be understood
by another musician. Within club encounters the musicians share personal
5. On the importance of standard repertoire see Berliner 1994: 63–64; see also Mon-
son 1996: 183–84.

and communal knowledge about their work as well as silent knowledge

about the profession and the experiences it involves—where everyone has
been playing at recently, what kinds of experiences they had, what new has
happened on the scene and so forth.
The places for different sub-genres

Belonging into a place—or not belonging—is largely defined by our actions
and our possibilities within this place. This is very much true in the musi-
cians’ case both in a concrete sense as well as at the level of the imagined
community. The entrance to certain places, for example the possibility to
perform at an internationally respected jazz club, raises the musicians’ rec-
ognizability and status within the community. Being left outside of these
invites pushes the musician towards a marginal status.
Performance opportunities define the musicians’ status as well as their
performance style within the scene. The club managers and bookers are
making daily decisions based on what they consider to be good jazz and
what suits the profile of the club and the audience attending. Once the audi-
ence has started to trust the quality of the venue’s programme, they can
make their decision to attend without necessarily knowing the particular
musician performing. The venue is therefore more likely to book specific
musicians based on their style while at the same time the musician can
adjust—possibly partly unconsciously—their style towards the preferred
style of the venue.
Once these preferences become clear, some subgenres not fitting in will
start to seek their own performance venues from other places. An example
of this is the Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London situated in Soho within
close proximity of the shopping districts and theatres. The club does not
book free jazz ensembles, which are at the margins of the British jazz scene.
The affluent environment and the vicinity of cultural commodities invite tour-
ists. It could therefore be expected that some people attend the venue as
tourists not knowing what band is performing. This limits the choices that
the bookers of the venue have as they need to attend to the expectations of
what kind of jazz is being played at Ronnie Scott’s. Musicians also recog-
nize that some audience members at the venue attend to be seen to spend
a lot of money and do not care so much what music is played.
Free jazz, on the other hand, can be found further outside of the city
in Hackney, where public transportation connections are not as good as
in the city centre. The audience therefore really has to make an effort to
attend the performance. As the venue is further away from other cultural

places, such as theatres, it is perhaps a place where the audience would

not be expected to show up in order to ‘spend money’. Tourists are also
not expected to find the place unless they are avid free-jazz fans. The per-
formance at this venue is a social event but not so straightforwardly a con-
sumer’s event.
Adapting Howard Becker’s thoughts, it can be said that musicians are
dependent and constrained by cooperative links, such as technical sup-
port and sound production, club organizations and venue. These coopera-
tive links influence the kind of art and music that the musician can produce.
Musicians also learn to live without suitable venues, equipment or respect,
and will surpass the deficiencies or simulate the necessary means by them-
selves. When the art forms are such that the clubs don’t want to assimilate—
for example free jazz—the music will not be performed. The musicians are
likely to adapt to the styles that are accepted by the existing institutions.
The acceptance is often dictated by conventions which also regulate the
relationship between audiences and musicians (Becker 1984: 26–29).
The minority-genre communities can become underground scenes and
produce their own performance venues. These venues are not always open
to the general public. They can become private jam sessions or events
targeted to a selected group; the larger public then misses the chance to
enjoy this art form and the overall variability of the scene is left hidden.
Historical factors and stories add into the layers of meaning of the clubs
even though the musician might not have visited the place more than once.
The meanings about what places will become central and how one should
relate to these places when entering them are defined within the internal dis-
courses of the community. The venues reserved for particular activities are
also very revealing in terms of the societal status that these activities have.
Conclusions
Within London, jazz musicians are performing a lot of one-off gigs and the
assembly of an ensemble can change from one day to the next. Regular
interactions with colleagues are therefore often a mere impossibility. The
musicians nonetheless recognize that they are part of the same scene and
treat each other as if the last meeting happened quite recently despite the
time in between. The connections are thus imagined to be more solid than
what they actually are. The individual musician’s movements within the
scene is often just the mobility of a single person, which occurs in a similar
fashion to a ping-pong ball bouncing off the walls of a glass cube. While all
the other musicians are also moving in a similar manner, the picture of the

scene becomes very fragmented. It is nonetheless the venues that tie the
fragmented movements together. The venues are the points that bring the
musicians together and create the community.
While the somewhat ‘random’ movements of the individual musician
are happening, it is the imagined community that keeps up the idea of still
being part of something, even when the musicians’ ties to the actual com-
munity—where regular meetings are a norm—are loose. It is this feeling of
belonging where the musicians’ work identity is constructed and motivation
is maintained. Despite the randomness of the meetings and their tempo-
rary nature, the imagined community keeps up the musicians’ links to the
scene and to the people he or she might not meet for years or who have
died years ago. The cultural norms and values maintained within the jazz
scene strengthen the feeling of community.
The knowledge of shared social place, shared venues, makes it possible
for the interaction to continue seamlessly. All the parties know the internal
etiquette and values of the community. The community, even if imagined,
becomes concrete within the shared performance venues. The musi-
cians realize the community in their speech. They created it with a group of
musicians who move within the same scene and use the same clubs even
though they might not meet each other within these venues. The knowl-
edge of the others’ movements within the scene creates the feeling of com-
munity. The musicians working in the same scene know each other or know
of each other even though they might not have played together, as might
be the case for example for two saxophonists. The stronger sense of com-
munality is created within speech, by sharing knowledge about venues,
genre values and aesthetics.
Clearly the clubs are essential in maintaining musicians’ sense of be-
longing and the feeling of community. The imagined community provides
the musicians with the tools to stay connected to the scene throughout,
or despite, the travelling. The meaningfulness of these places highlights
the fact that all forms of art must belong somewhere, preferably in a place
where the audience will find it (Becker 1984). Those venues where art is
being presented are important for the development of the surrounding
community.
For the musicians, the feeling that one belongs somewhere can
strengthen the musicians’ professional identity. In addition, the perfor-
mance venues and the interaction that take place there will connect the
musician into the larger community of musicians. The performance venues
therefore have a more profound meaning to the musicians than to a random

audience member. Through the musical interaction with the venue the
musicians are strengthening the feeling of continuity. The music played at
a certain club will create for both the musicians and the audience a feel-
ing that things are in place and that places will stay the same even though
a practical approach demonstrates that they are constantly changing. The
music strengthens the feeling of continuity as well as allowing the creation
of mutual belonging and connection to a place (see Holt and Wergin 2013).
The communities live in relation to the surrounding society and the
historical developments of the larger society. Musical cultures and their
development can be understood only in relation to the surrounding com-
munities, their histories and the discourses surrounding them (see Holt and
Wergin 2013). Societal and historical discourses will have an impact on
what venues are being offered to a particular genre, what places are seen
as worth saving, as well as what is the cultural heritage that is seen worth
treasuring. It is the community, not the outsiders, who determine what
venues the members of a particular genre will make their own and what
venues will become culturally significant for that genre. These decisions are
always linked to the definitions and evaluations made by the community.
The places influence our experiences and intentions, as Relph (2008)
has pointed out. For the musicians, the performance venues as places are
essential for their identities and the community of the musicians. But in a
similar way the movement between the venues—the temporary placeless-
ness—is essential for this identity. It is the experience of touring that makes
the professional musician and unites him or her with the community and its
history. It is nonetheless the movement in between venues that creates the
need for the imagined community as the more stable community cannot be
formed. The imaginary community does not replace the existing ‘real’ com-
munity that resides in a venue, but is perhaps parallel to it. It is this imag-
ined community that reminds the musicians of the ‘real’ community and it
is the imaginary aspects of the community that strengthens the musicians’
feeling of belonging even when regular meetings with other community
members are not taking place.
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1–24. New York: Routledge.
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tions.

[JRJ 11.1 (2017) 80-87] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
The friendship between Andy

Hamilton and David Murray:
A concrete example of Black Atlantic culture
Tony Dudley-Evans1
Jazzlines, Birmingham
tonydudleyevans@gmail.com
Abstract
This article describes the friendship and musical relationship between the late Andy Ham-
ilton, an Afro-Caribbean saxophonist who lived in Birmingham UK for most of his life, and
David Murray, a leading American saxophonist. The article points to various reasons why
two rather different players got on so well and suggests that the relationship supports the
notion of a common Black Atlantic culture.
Keywords: Black Atlantic culture; improvisation; jazz
Introduction
In this short article I describe a close friendship that developed between two
jazz musicians, both tenor saxophonists: Andy Hamilton, who was based
for most of his life in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and David Murray,
originally from California, but now based in Paris and Portugal. I describe
how they first met, the main events when they played or recorded together,
and go on to suggest some reasons for the strength of their friendship. I
link the discussion of these reasons to the theory of Black Atlantic culture
(Gilroy 1995).
Andy Hamilton was born in 1918 in Port Maria, Jamaica. As a child he
learnt to play various instruments, but was bought a tenor saxophone by
his father and stayed with that instrument for the rest of his life. He formed
his first band in 1928, but in the early 1940s went off to the United States,
working as a labourer particularly on farms, but playing jazz in his spare
time in the Buffalo area. He returned to Jamaica in the mid-1940s and was
1. Tony Dudley-Evans is a Programme Adviser to Jazzlines Birmingham and Chel-

tenham Jazz Festival. He is also a Visiting Teacher at Birmingham Conservatoire and a
member of the Jazz Research Group at Birmingham City University.
The friendship between Andy Hamilton and David Murray 81
discovered by the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, who booked him to play
both in his hotel on Jamaica, Hotel Titchfield, and his yacht Zaka. Hamilton
wrote the tune ‘Silvershine’ for Flynn during that period, although he didn’t
record it until the album of the same name was released in 1991.
Hamilton came to Britain in 1949, allegedly as a stowaway on a boat
to Southampton, and quickly settled in Birmingham, avoiding London,
which he felt to be quite hostile to new immigrants in that period. He effec-
tively stayed in Birmingham for the rest of his life, living in a council flat in
the suburb of Ladywood; he married, had a large family and died in June
2012. His funeral and memorial concert, the latter at Symphony Hall, were
attended by a large gathering with civic dignitaries from Birmingham pres-
ent. The then leader of the city council, Albert Bore, spoke at the memo-
rial concert, and musicians from around the country attended and played.
Murray came from Paris to attend both the funeral and play at the memo-
rial concert.
Hamilton played the tenor saxophone in a style much influenced by the
pioneers of the instrument in jazz: Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster.
He formed his first band in Birmingham in 1953—the Blue Notes—which
he put together with pianist Sam Brown (who remained with the band until
his own death in 2010). Hamilton became a popular player in Birmingham,
especially in the Caribbean community, playing regularly at clubs around
the city, but also at weddings and dances; in addition he taught a large
number of musicians from all communities in Birmingham.
At the age of 70 Hamilton was ‘discovered’ by a young sports teacher in
the West Midlands, Alan Cross, who heard Hamilton play, became an enthu-
siast for his music, and was behind the recognition that came to Hamilton in
the 1990s. The first stage was his 70th birthday concert at his regular venue,
the Bear Tavern, in Bearwood, an area in Sandwell, a borough just outside
Birmingham. Val Wilmer reviewed the concert in The Independent and, as
a result, Hamilton was invited to play at the Soho Jazz Festival, where Nick
Gold, who owned World Circuit Records, heard him perform. Gold commis-
sioned two albums from Hamilton, Silvershine, which was recorded in 1990
and 1991, and Jamaica at Night, which he recorded in 1994. David Murray
played on the first of these two albums. The recognition that came from
these albums was enormous. Hamilton was awarded an honorary degree
at the University of Birmingham, a Fellowship of Birmingham Conservatoire,
and an MBE in the 2008 Honours List. His 90th birthday was marked by a
sold-out concert in Birmingham Town Hall and he played festivals in Paris,
Milan, Madrid, St Lucia and back in Jamaica.

In his earlier years, Hamilton helped found the Ladywood School of

Music, which supported many young musicians, including early members
of the reggae band, Steel Pulse. He formed two big bands, The Blue Pearls
and more recently The Notebenders. The latter group still performs regu-
larly at Symphony Hall. I believe that one of Hamilton’s key legacies is that
the Caribbean community in Birmingham, both young and old, and musi-
cians playing different contemporary musical genres, including hip hop,
grime or soul, regard jazz as an important part of their heritage. The com-
munity see the various black musics as linked and make no significant
distinction between, say, reggae and jazz. The saxophonist was always a
warm and friendly person. He was also very modest and could be quite
self-critical. Nonetheless, he undoubtedly made a major contribution to the
cultural life of Birmingham and significantly changed the lives of a number
of people.
David Murray is one of the most prolific musicians in jazz. He was born in
Oakland, California in 1955, but was brought up in Berkeley, also in Califor-
nia. His parents were Baptist ministers and his mother played organ in the
church. Murray was involved in his teenage years with Horace Tapscott’s
Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra, but came to New York in 1975 at the age of
20, originally to do research on the saxophonists in the city. He stayed and
was initially part of the loft scene that was strong in the 1970s; his early style
brought together the sound of classic tenor saxophonists such as Cole-
man Hawkins, Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalves with the edginess of more
contemporary players such as Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp. As his style
developed and mellowed, some of the edginess disappeared and both the
solos and his compositions became more rounded and integrated. Murray
has, in fact, often denied the influence of Albert Ayler, and Wall (2007) sup-
ports this idea in a comprehensive summary of Murray’s work.
In this introduction it suffices to say that Murray has become an
extremely active musician and is recognized as a key figure in contem-
porary jazz, even though he does not fit into either the more traditional
approach favoured by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center jazz pro-
gramme, or the more radical approach of many young players in New York
(Wall 2007). In the 1970s he focused on small groups, but then in the 1980s
he toured and recorded with several large ensembles, both octets and big
bands. Since his move to France in the 1990s and his association with
the 3-D Family agency, he has often engaged with African and Caribbean
music, especially the music of Guadaloupe in his Gwo Ka Masters group.
He has also played with the Grateful Dead and recorded an album of Nat

King Cole’s Latin songs in Spanish. He returns often to New York, leads his
Infinity Quartet, and plays in the World Saxophone Quartet. I last heard him
play with soul and hip hop artist Saul Williams at Tampere Jazz Happen-
ing in Finland in 2015, where his playing was as strong as ever, and he was
clearly enjoying working with a young dynamic singer.
The friendship develops

Murray first played in Birmingham in June 1983 at the Strathallan Hotel in a
brilliant trio with bass player Johnny Dyani and drummer Steve McCall, but
on this occasion Hamilton was not in attendance. They in fact met for the
first time in October 1990 when Murray was touring the UK with his octet
on an Arts Council Contemporary Music Network (CMN) tour. The Birming-
ham concert was on Sunday 14 October and the band was staying at the
Strathallan Hotel. At that time Birmingham Jazz ran a weekly Sunday lunch-
time session in the hotel bar and Helen Macdonald was singing at that ses-
sion. Alan Cross had brought Hamilton to hear Macdonald. Murray and the
band arrived at the hotel and he and one other member, trumpeter Rasul
Saddiq, came down to the bar to hear the band. Hamilton heard American
voices talking about jazz and introduced himself. It turned out that Murray
was looking to have lunch, but had been told that they had stopped serving
in the hotel restaurant. Hamilton immediately invited Murray back to his flat
for lunch and to meet his family. They first played together while waiting for
lunch, and out of that chance encounter, a friendship was established that
had a lasting effect on both of them.
As a result of this meeting, Hamilton invited Murray to play on his debut
album Silvershine (Hamilton 1991). The recording session took place on
12 December 1990 and Murray played on two tracks, the title track ‘Silver-
shine’ and ‘Old Folks’ (on which he plays bass clarinet). Nick Gold (person-
nel communication) produced the album and he talks of how the recording
session was completed very quickly, with just two takes of each tune. The
two saxophonists established an immediate rapport in a short warm-up
session, and there was no element of joisting or competing with each other.
It is fascinating to hear the way they play off each other on the two tracks,
Hamilton with the more straightforward style, Murray with the more intri-
cate style. The way they dovetail their solos and play as equals is very
impressive, especially as they had not really played together before. Appar-
ently, Murray was very helpful during the recording, given his existing expe-
rience in the studio, in contrast with Hamilton and the Blue Notes, who
were making their first recording. After the session Murray was extremely

complimentary about Hamilton’s playing and especially his sound on the

tenor saxophone.
Silvershine was very well received. It was the biggest selling jazz album
in UK in 1991, The Times rated it album of the year, and it was one of the
50 Sony Recordings of the Year. Sadly, Hamilton and Murray did not record
together again, although Gold (personal communication) tells me that he
regrets not having set up a whole album featuring the two saxophonists
together.
Following on from the recording session, Murray played with Hamilton
on two occasions in the early 1990s at the Bear Tavern, which was then
home to Andy’s regular Monday night sessions. Interestingly, Murray men-
tioned Hamilton in a Downbeat interview in June 1995, quoting him as an
example of the type of excellent player little known outside his home city
and country (Whitehead 1995: 16–17). Then in summer 1996, Murray toured
Britain with his UK Posse, a British group, and they played at Midlands Arts
Centre in Birmingham. Hamilton attended the concert, but did not sit in with
the group. However, plans to bring the two saxophonists together were
hatched at that moment, and in October 1996 a specially formed David
Murray UK/USA Big Band was formed for an Arts Council Contemporary
Music Network tour. Birmingham Jazz commissioned Murray to write a new
piece for the tour, and he decided to dedicate it to Hamilton. At the Birming-
ham concert in the Adrian Boult Hall, Hamilton and Murray performed the
piece together. Again the warmth of the collaboration was apparent and
they played an extended duet on the commissioned piece. As on the Silver-
shine recording, there was a powerful connection between them, and Peter
Bacon in his Birmingham Post review (1996) described seeing the two play
together as a realization of a dream.
Murray continued to tour widely in Europe as he was now based in Paris.
Whenever I saw him at a festival in the UK or continental Europe, he asked
after Hamilton and vowed to phone him. On one occasion he mentioned
that he had been playing in Paris with saxophonist Hal Singer, a veteran of
the Duke Ellington band from the 1960s, and said that Singer reminded him
of Hamilton. He suggested that he would love to get them together. So Bir-
mingham Jazz set this up and they played two nights with the Blue Notes
on 28 September 2006 at Corks Club, which had become Hamilton’s main
venue, and 29 September at the CBSO Centre with the Blue Notes, along
with special guests Larry Bartley on bass and Rod Youngs on drums.
The final time the two played together came in June 2009 when they
played an impromptu short set with the hip hop group The Roots. This was

part of Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown Festival and Hamilton had played an

opening set before a main set by The Roots. Towards the end of The Roots
set Hamilton, Murray and Ornette Coleman joined the band, and played
several numbers with the whole group. The footage of part of this set fea-
tures mostly a beautiful solo from Ornette, but also see solos first from
Murray and then Hamilton too.2 Unfortunately, the sound is not very clear,
but we do see the acclaim that Hamilton receives from the audience and
from members of The Roots.
Hamilton died on 3 June 2012 at the age of 94. Murray flew in from Paris
to attend the funeral and to play at the Memorial Concert on the same day
(27 June). The final chapter of the story comes on 13 October 2013 when
Murray’s Infinity Quartet played the CBSO Centre Birmingham with the The
Notebenders playing the opening set as a tribute to Andy. Many of the large
Hamilton family attended including his wife, Mary Hamilton. Murray paid a
fulsome tribute to Hamilton saying how much he missed him.
Why was this friendship so strong?

The most obvious reason for the enduring friendship between the two
musicians is that Hamilton was always a very warm, modest and welcom-
ing person. Murray clearly felt completely at ease with Hamilton, and this
came across in their playing together. Hamilton always enjoyed meeting
American visitors and welcomed many American players to his sessions
at the Bear Tavern and Corks; these included Scott Hamilton, Art Farmer,
Teddy Edwards and Sweets Edison, but the relationship with Murray was
longer lasting and very special. I also believe it is significant that Murray
was invited to Hamilton’s flat when they first met; Murray was brought up in
the ‘housing projects’ as they are called in the US, and may well have felt
an affinity with the council flat. In an interview recorded by Mark Williams, a
close friend of Hamilton’s, Murray says that Hamilton always reminded him
of his father and that in watching Hamilton play he saw his father (personal
communication).
When Hamilton first met Murray, he spoke of the racism he had suffered
when he first arrived in Birmingham; this clearly resonated with Murray.
It was also clear that Murray had a great respect for the contribution that
Hamilton had made to the music scene in Birmingham and later in UK,
2. The Roots featuring Ornette Coleman and David Murray Pt 1 (14 July 2009) and
The Roots featuring David Murray, Andy Hamilton @Meltdown Festival 2009 (13 July
2009).

and for his efforts to bring the music to different communities in Birming-
ham. The main reason for the strength of the friendship, however, lies in the
music. Murray often spoke about how much he liked Hamilton’s tone on
the tenor saxophone and describes Hamilton’s sound as ‘pure tone’ in the
interview he recorded with Williams. He speaks of how he hears in Hamil-
ton’s playing and sound the whole history of the tenor saxophone, from the
styles of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster through to those of John Col-
trane and Sonny Rollins. In a sense, we see in Murray’s respect for Hamil-
ton’s playing something of that well-established jazz tradition, the respect
of the younger musician for established performers. This comes across
strongly in the interview referred to above when Murray talks of how happy
he felt to be playing with the two seniors, Hamilton and Singer, in the Sep-
tember 2006 collaboration. This was also clearly the case when Hamilton,
Murray and Coleman sat in with The Roots at the 2009 Meltdown Festival.
Murray also talks in the interview with Williams about certain players
who are immediately recognizable from their tone; he talks at length about
Albert Ayler, and how he could be recognized from just one note. He goes
on to suggest that the same phenomenon is true of Hamilton. The rea-
sons, however, go deeper and I believe that Paul Gilroy’s theory (1995) of
the Black Atlantic helps to understand the bond between them. Gilroy sug-
gests that the slave trade prevented people of African descent from engag-
ing with a homeland, and that therefore black culture is largely composed
of cultural exchanges between Africa, the United States and the Caribbean.
This can be seen particularly clearly in the various musics of the black dias-
pora. The relationship between Hamilton and Murray strikes me as being a
concrete example of Gilroy’s theory.
I believe that both musicians have always seen themselves as jazz play-
ers, and reject any attempt to define their identity as anything other than
as jazz players. However, both have engaged extensively with other black
musics. Hamilton always included calypso tunes in his sets and, indeed,
his signature piece, ‘Silvershine’, was a calypso tune. He also loved Cuban
music and met and jammed with members of the Buena Vista Social Club.
Murray has also engaged with Caribbean and Latin music; one of his major
projects was with the Gwo Ka group from Guadaloupe and he made an
album of Nat King Cole’s Latin songs. He has also made albums with musi-
cians from West Africa and worked with the black dance company Urban
Bush Women. So there was a feeling of a shared tradition that went beyond
just jazz, but embraced what the Art Ensemble of Chicago referred to as
‘Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future’.

Conclusion
I have suggested that the reasons for the strength of the friendship between
Hamilton and Murray are partly social, but lie much more in the musical his-
tories and traditions they shared. I suggest that this shared tradition, and
respect of the younger musician for what the older musician represents of
that tradition, along with their mutual interest in other musics of the black
diaspora, are the key musical reasons for the friendship. It is a story of
friendship that is both fascinating and heart-warming.
Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Mark Williams, Alan Cross and Nick Gold for
insights into the relationship.
References
Bacon, P. (1996) ‘Review of David Murray UK/USA Big Band’. The Birmingham Post,
21 October.
Gilroy, P. (1995) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hamilton, A. (1991) Silvershine. CD. London: World Circuit Records WCD025.
——(1994) Jamaica By Night. CD. London: World Circuit Records WCD039.
Wall, T. (2007) ‘David Murray: The Making of a Progressive Musician’. Jazz Research
Journal 1/2: 173–203.
Whitehead, K. (1995) ‘Obsessed’. Downbeat (June 1995): 16–17.
Youtube (13 July 2009) The Roots featuring David Murray, Andy Hamilton @Meltdown
Festival 2009. London. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnN90KbVINU
——(14 July 2009) The Roots featuring Ornette Coleman and David Murray Pt 1. Lon-
don. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U7b837vVs8

[JRJ 11.1 (2017) 88-96] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
Review
Edward W. Sarath, Improvisation, Creativity, and Con-

sciousness: Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Educa-
tion, and Society. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2013. xi + 488 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-4721-6
(hbk). $95.00/£73.70.
David Borgo
Department of Music, University of California, San Diego
dborgo@ucsd.edu
One can hardly think of three more daunting concepts to try to explain in
words than improvisation, creativity and consciousness. On their own, each
of these carries an air of ineffability or impenetrable subjectivity: improvisa-
tion is literally about the ‘un-fore-seen’; creativity hinges on equally chal-
lenging notions of imagination and originality; and last, but certainly not
least, consciousness has recently been elevated to—although more likely
it has always been—the ‘hard problem’ of science. Taken together, this tri-
fecta of inscrutability might scare away even the most ardent researchers
and theorists.
None of this deters Ed Sarath. Sarath, a skilled flugelhorn player and
faculty member at the University of Michigan since 1987, has in recent
years become a tireless promoter of curricular reform in music education
and of the importance of ‘contemplative studies’ to higher education more
generally. He provides some of his backstory in the introduction, focusing
primarily on the initial resistance he faced from colleagues in his depart-
ment when he proposed a program in Jazz and Contemplative Studies. ‘It
is easier to move a cemetery than change a curriculum’, he quips, describ-
ing the contentious process of establishing a program in jazz performance
with a significant meditation and consciousness studies component at a
mainstream academic institution.1 More recently, Sarath founded the Inter-
national Society for Improvised Music (isimprov.org), an emergent organi-
zation that hosts an annual festival/conference for musicians and thinkers
from around the world to convene and collaborate, and he co-authored a
widely cited and hotly debated task force document for the College Music
1. Page 6. Sarath attributes the quote to US President Woodrow Wilson.
Review 89
Society titled ‘Transforming Music Study from its Foundations: A Mani-

festo for Progressive Change in the Undergraduate Preparation for Music
Majors’.
Although not appearing in the title of the book under review, the word
‘manifesto’ applies. There is much to like about this wide-ranging work,
as there is about the aforementioned task force’s call for broad curricu-
lar change, but Sarath’s proselytizing tone can also wear thin. While one
might guess from the keywords that appear in the title that the book is
written primarily for jazz scholars, musicians and listeners, for music edu-
cators, or for those interested in contemporary research on creativity and
consciousness, it seems as if it is written more narrowly for adherents of
Integral Theory (always capitalized), an overarching meta-theory with vital-
ist and teleological underpinnings put forward by transpersonal psycholo-
gist Ken Wilber that has not gained much traction in academia (often simply
because Wilber presents it as beyond criticism; never a welcome move in
academia).
The fact that Sarath’s book is published by SUNY Press in their Series
in Integral Theory likely explains its orientation, but it does not absolve the
author from the need to engage alternative viewpoints and explore a wider
range of both supportive and contradictory research, to foster dialogue and
invite criticism, and ultimately to proceed with humility in areas that, as
mentioned at the outset, are incredibly complex, diverse and multifaceted.
For this reader, who counts himself among the already-converted advo-
cates for increasing the visibility and vibrancy of musical improvisation, the
frequent celebration of the ‘unique’ ability of jazz and Integral Theory to
catalyze change and shed light on Ultimate Reality and Meaning (or URAM,
for Integral Theory followers) began to detract from, rather than add to,
what are otherwise often quite compelling arguments. For instance, the
word ‘unique’ or ‘uniquely’ appears 100 times in the book, most often in
the context of stating unequivocally the superiority of jazz, improvisation
or Integral Theory to shed light on ultimate truths; and the word ‘unprec-
edented’ appears 22 times, again most often either describing aspects of
jazz or Integral Theory or the possibilities that they might offer to education
and society.
Summarizing such a lengthy and ambitious work in a few words is not
easy. The book is divided into three parts: Part I introduces some key ideas
in Integral Theory; Part II provides an ‘integral reading’ of jazz; and Part III
offers wide-ranging opinions on changes deemed necessary by the author
for the future of the music academy, university education more broadly, and

for a truly sustainable society. In a humble moment at the outset of the text
Sarath writes:
In many ways, this book is a commentary on the Jazz and Contem-

plative Studies curriculum and its broader ramifications since not only
would it open up new horizons in my own work and what could be
offered to our jazz students, it also provided a template, one with the
improvisation-meditation interplay at its core, for crossing the exterior-
interior divide that could be applied across fields, and which in my
view represents the future of education (11).
Moving past conventional categories and binaries is an important theme

of the book. Drawing on Wilber’s work and his own artistic and experien-
tial insights, Sarath argues for integrating first-, second- and third-person
viewpoints, for engaging both parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts processes
(with improvisation heralded as a paradigm par excellence for the former,
and meditation for the latter), for embracing musical process and struc-
ture, for ‘transcending and including’ culture- and style-specific aspects
of music, for a reconciliation between art, science and spirituality, and ulti-
mately for a ‘subjective-objective totality’ (or ‘all-quadrants integration’
for Wilberists) that, presumably, leads to a kind of ‘elevated’ or ‘higher’
consciousness.
Sarath champions other attractive albeit vaguely defined notions
throughout the text, such as inclusion and diversity, but when he actually
provides musical examples, they betray, more often than not, ideologi-
cally motivated hierarchies and binaries. Improvisation and composition
are positioned as different not only in degree of creativity, but also in kind,
but it is musical interpretation that seems to be Sarath’s primary target
of criticism. In musical interpretation, as described by Sarath, the per-
former is beholden to choices already made by a composer and can only
manipulate a few ‘nonsyntactic’ elements as a kind of ‘secondary creativ-
ity’ (Sarath is here employing rather outdated notions of musical syntax
put forward by Leonard Meyer). In doing so, Sarath essentially dismisses
a huge swathe of the world’s music, for which notions of improvisation that
are dear to Sarath may not apply at all. Perhaps we should be telling tradi-
tional shakuhachi players that they have no hope of enlightenment since
they are merely interpreting a musical tradition? Sarath does mention the
shakuhachi once in the text, celebrating its ‘delicate psychoacoustic reso-
nance’ that can elicit ‘transcendent responses’, but this is in the context of
contrasting it with the ‘problematic’ aesthetic ramifications of contempo-
rary music technologies (299–300).

Review 91
Elsewhere Sarath employs George Lewis’s notion of musical Afrologics

and Eurologics, but then maps them isomorphically with feminine and mas-
culine archetypal impulses respectively—an extremely problematic move.
Sarath goes so far as to argue that the emergence of the Afrological in con-
temporary musical practice correlates with the emergence of the ‘divine
feminine’ in contemporary spiritual discourse (34) (somehow the possibility
that musical ‘logics’ beyond the Afro- and Euro- might be important to an
‘all quadrants’ integral journey seems to escape Sarath completely).2 Ulti-
mately it is not clear what this ideologically suspect binary along the lines of
gender and maybe even race accomplishes for Sarath’s larger argument,
other than, perhaps, to celebrate an approach to music-making that conve-
niently aligns with his own. While arguing for the ‘decidedly feminine thrust’
of collective improvisation, Sarath states ‘what has not yet emerged to any
notable degree are large, stylistically open improvisatory frameworks’, an
apt description of the Creative Arts Orchestra that Sarath founded at the
University of Michigan. Sarath concludes: ‘Drawing on my own work with
this framework, I predict this musical embodiment of the divine feminine to
be a defining aspect of the integral musical era’ (34). So much for humility.
It seems we have gone from an aura of elevated consciousness and inclu-
sivity to a rather normative conclusion that what interests Sarath should
interest us all. In my opinion, Sarath is frequently guilty of deriving ‘ought’
from ‘is’. Just because certain forms of improvised music operate in a cer-
tain way, it does not follow that we ‘ought’ to do it this way.
Part of Sarath’s more academic argument is that an ‘integral jazz stud-
ies’ will (or should) soon supplant the ‘new’ or ‘critical’ jazz studies that
began to emerge around the 1980s. He defines new jazz studies, wrongly
I think, as concerning itself with the application of principles of jazz creativ-
ity to creativity across fields. Sarath seems to imply that new jazz studies
receives its highest justification when ‘fields as diverse as business, edu-
cation, law, medicine, sociology, and sports have begun to look to the idi-
om’s creative foundations as a guide to greater creativity within their own
boundaries’ (4). To my way of thinking, Sarath misses the ‘critical’ dimen-
sion of the new jazz studies, which would want to inquire if it is even ethical
to appropriate jazz in this way, if there are potential dangers in aestheticiz-
ing the market economy (since, after all, influences always run both ways),
or if the communitarian and spiritual dimensions of jazz that Sarath most
2. Modal music-making is also, for Sarath, a marker of the ‘feminine’. On occasion

Sarath does mention an ‘other’ music category, but by giving it no substantive attention
he betrays his bias.

wants to celebrate are really compatible with the aggressive capitalism of

the corporate world.
In his zeal to celebrate jazz as a new paradigm for business, spiritual-
ity and other endeavours (likely an increasingly profitable side occupation
for some jazz experts), Sarath offers no critical lens through which to view
the jazz tradition, which has had its own complex history of not always
inviting equal participation from—or of valuing equally the contributions
of—people of other ethnicities, nationalities, abilities, genders and sexu-
alities. Sarath may want to locate the ‘divine feminine’ in Afrological jazz,
and celebrate the spiritual leanings of a subset of post-1960s jazz luminar-
ies, but machismo also describes rather well the attitude that continues to
pervade many jazz ‘cutting sessions’, as well as much of the ‘extended’
virtuosity of free improvisation. Bucking the trend to analyze free improvi-
sation as a ‘warmer hearted’ ethical zone, David Toop (2016: 24) reminds
us that in musical improvisation: ‘Bullying to a threshold (to see what hap-
pens), passive-aggressive unresponsiveness and deliberate solipsism are
lifted out of highly charged contexts—the workplace, sexual relations and
authoritarian institutions—to acquire potential as laboratory experiments in
collective human behavior.’ Even at the ‘gentler extreme’, Toop insists, ‘any
group believing itself to be in a milieu (intimate or extended) that is entirely
democratic and free, an instrument of pure giving, is naively unconscious
of clandestine power and its pervasive manipulative force’ (24).
Personally I tend to agree with Krin Gabbard, one of critical jazz studies’
earliest and most significant voices:
If we can generalize about critical jazz studies, I guess the one word I
would have to use is problematize. That’s what we do. We problema-
tize the easy critical judgments, the easy distinctions among genres.
We problematize what has been believed about musicians by a lot of
people who are true believers and are not, shall we say, as skeptical
as they could be (Katz 2009).
Sarath has little patience for critical social theories or post-modern skepti-
cism, but in their place he forwards a bewildering array of ‘integral’ theo-
ries about music that include an astrologer aligning musical and cultural
developments with planetary conjunctions (249), a nuclear physicist relat-
ing electrons in the oxygen atom to notes of the major scale, and a chem-
ist correlating musical intervals with the periodic table of elements (409).
Leaving behind debates about jazz, improvisation and creativity for
the moment, it is worth exploring the third keyword in the book’s title,
consciousness, given that Sarath has established himself as a respected

Review 93
spokesperson for music and consciousness studies and he has some

provocative ideas to share (which, likely before he was influenced by Wil-
ber’s Integral Theory, were shaped by ideas from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,
who developed Transcendental Meditation and gained celebrity followers
such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Charles Lloyd, among others).
Admittedly, trying to study and explain consciousness presents a particu-
larly daunting challenge. From one perspective, being conscious is argu-
ably all we know about the world; I think therefore I am. From another
perspective, one’s own conscious mind is the part of the world that one
can never really know; our underlying intentions and motivations often
remain opaque. All of our observations of the outside world are ultimately
filtered through human consciousness, but our sense of self is also some-
thing of an illusion too. Reflecting on one’s own consciousness, quips
Allan Combs (2009: 9), is akin to trying to glance at the mirror quickly
enough to catch one’s own image still looking elsewhere.
Why are we conscious? What is its functional role? Is consciousness
something we have, or something we do? Is it the same thing as aware-
ness, or must it also involve self-awareness? When exactly do humans
develop an awareness of self? Are any other species similarly endowed?
If consciousness is ‘what it’s like to be you’ (Nagel 1974), then how much
do ordinary people’s conscious experiences differ? What is the relation-
ship between consciousness and intuition? What happens when we sleep
or dream? What are the social aspects of consciousness, and how can we
study them? Do plants experience some form of subtle consciousness, per-
haps on a very different time scale? Might consciousness extend in some
form to inorganic matter? To the universe itself?
There has been a virtual explosion of books and articles about con-
sciousness in just the past few years, which is encouraging in that it appears
to signal that science is (again) taking the subject seriously. To be clear
from the outset, no one has definitive answers to these questions, whether
one is a cosmologist or a biologist, a meditator or a musician. ‘Most sci-
entists who study consciousness’, Michael Graziano (2013: 11) remarks,
‘tend to pick and choose among intuitions’, but ‘theories of consciousness,
because they are effectively theories of the soul, tend to have far-reaching
cultural, spiritual, and personal implications’.
Is consciousness best studied through introspection, through more
empirical means, or through some combination of the two? Can we
approach consciousness study with materialism intact, or does it require
something else entirely? It is the last of these questions that most animates

Sarath’s account. For a book with consciousness in the title, however, there
is actually very little discussion about consciousness as a phenomenal pro-
cess; what it is or entails, or how it might vary from situation to situation
or from entity to entity. There is much talk of transcendence and ‘higher’
states of consciousness, and an underlying premise that consciousness is
the foundation of URAM (Ultimate Reality and Meaning, remember?), but,
as is the case with any manifesto, either one already believes this from the
outset or one is left unconvinced, since various options have not been well
presented and their various levels of credence compared. For instance,
some of the ‘integral’ ideas explored in the book, such as taking seriously
the insights of experienced meditators on consciousness, are very much at
the forefront of emerging fields such as neurophenomenology (see Varela
1996 and Thompson 2014), but these receive no attention in the book.
In a short but crucial boxed section of text titled ‘Dueling Dualisms and
Nondualisms’ (136–37), Sarath argues, incorrectly I believe, that materi-
alism creates a stark choice between reductionism and epiphenomenal-
ism when confronted with the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. In either
case, according to Sarath, consciousness is not explained; it is explained
away. Sarath does not engage seriously, however, with the possibility that
consciousness is a natural and evolved phenomenon—or a collection of
related attributes and phenomena, given its scope, diversity and multiple
realizability—that emerges through the interplay of extraordinary complex
systems. It is possible to be a materialist and also anti-reductionist. I call
this position ‘emergentist’, and it need not depart from naturalism.
Most of the ways that we talk about the physical world are really about
emergent phenomena: heat, pressure and entropy are just a few exam-
ples. It may be that consciousness, in ways not dissimilar to life, represents
a phase transition (arguably a smooth rather than a sudden one). If so, it
is perhaps the most interesting and complex one, but none of this need
force us to abandon a naturalist view. Like other emergent phenomena,
consciousness presents a model—a useful way of talking about the world
that is applicable within a given domain and offers insight into what is going
on—and therefore is just as ‘real’ as heat, pressure or life, for that matter
(see Carroll 2016).
This discussion deserves more space than I can give it here, but suf-
fice it to say that readers who are not ready to accept that conscious-
ness is ‘ontologically transcendent of the physical world’ (130) may find
themselves frustrated or disappointed. Sarath’s views align with—perhaps
even exceed—panpsychism, the view that matter and consciousness are

Review 95
interwoven at all scales (217), and he is quite sympathetic to research that

hopes to validate psi phenomena. Several prominent thinkers in philosophy
(Chalmers 2014) and cognitive and neuroscience (Tononi and Koch 2015)
have recently taken seriously the notion of consciousness as fundamental,
but their views tend to be far more measured and naturalistic than Sarath’s,
involving, in the case of Tononi and Koch, precise measurements of inte-
grated information in complex systems. Other contemporary authors (e.g.
Radin 2009; Lanza and Berman 2010) turn to quantum mechanics in order
to justify a spirit-infused ‘New Age’ view of the universe. Chalmers jokingly
calls this the ‘Law of Minimization of Mystery’: quantum mechanics is confus-
ing, and consciousness is confusing, so maybe they are somehow related.
Sarath does not go the quantum route, but he offers little else that
might support the larger ontological, epistemological and ethical claims
he wants to make.3 He does not endorse a specific meditative pathway or
traditional religious philosophy, but Wilber’s Integral Theory, filled with clut-
tered transcendent taxonomies and vague mystical archetypes, becomes
the ultimate stand-in for these. For those already committed fans, Sarath
undoubtedly adds nuance and a corrective, given that he believes that
the arts and music—and improvised jazz music in particular—have not
received sufficient attention in Integral Theory circles. But because the
superiority of Integral Theory is taken for granted, as is the superiority of
jazz and improvised music, Sarath’s reader has no choice other than to join
him on his argumentative cosmic crusade or put the book down. Those
readers interested in Sarath’s passionate ideas about how to reform under-
graduate music programs, and music theory classes in particular, would be
best served by reading the aforementioned document co-authored for the
College Music Society or Sarath’s earlier book (2009) on the subject. For
those of us looking for a measured and well-balanced treatment of contem-
porary research on improvisation, creativity and consciousness—one that
does not preclude any possibilities, but also does not presuppose them
from the outset—we will have to keep reading.
References
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entan-
glement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://
doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128
3. For a detailed account of the issues that quantum physics forces us to confront
that also integrates critical social theories, see Barad 2007.

Carroll, Sean (2016) The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Uni-
verse Itself. New York: Penguin.
Chalmers, David (2014) ‘How Do You Explain Consciousness’. TED 2014 (March).
https://tinyurl.com/nlznxe7.
Combs, Allan (2009) Consciousness Explained Better. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House
Publishing.
Graziano, Michael (2013) Consciousness and the Social Brain. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Katz, Jamie (2009) ‘The Jazzman Testifies’. Columbia College Today (May/June).
https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/archive/may_jun09/cover_story.
Lanza, Robert, and Bob Berman (2010) Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness
are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. Dallas, TX: Ben-
Bella Books.
Nagel, Thomas (1974) ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ The Philosophical Review 83/4:
435–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914
Radin, Dean (2009) Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Perception in a Quantum Reality.
New York: Pocket Books.
Sarath, Edward (2009) Music Theory through Improvisation: A New Approach to
Musicianship Training. New York and Oxford: Routledge.
Thompson, Evan (2014) Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neu-
roscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University
Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/thom13709
Tononi, Guilio, and Christof Koch (2015) ‘Consciousness: Here, There and Every-
where?’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (30 March). https://
doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0167
Toop, David (2016). Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Free-
dom: Before 1970. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Varela, Francsico (1996) ‘Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the
Hard Problem’. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3: 330–49.

[JRJ 11.1 (2017) 97-101] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
Review
Edward Green, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Duke

Ellington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
294 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-70753-4 (pbk). $29.99.
Katherine Williams
University of Plymouth
katherine.williams@plymouth.ac.uk
As editor Edward Green reminds us, Duke Ellington is often considered

America’s greatest composer. Indeed, Green goes so far as to pronounce
Ellington the ‘most influential composer of the twentieth century’ (1). The
Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington (CUP 2014) is a welcome addition
to the available Ellington literature. Contributors are a well-chosen selec-
tion of Ellington scholars, contemporary musicians, and jazz writers. Green
brings together a range of perspectives and voices, likening the array of
styles, methodologies and jazz notation used in the book to the collec-
tion of stylistically coherent yet distinct recognizable musical figures in
the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Ellington’s manner when dealing with these
often fiery musical personalities, and his relationships with those around
him, are described from the vantage point of the band tour bus by Elling-
ton’s nephew Stephen James in chapter 3. James’s first-hand experience
lends weight to his character assessments and anecdotes about famous
Ellingtonians such as Cat Anderson, Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves.
In his chapter, jazz stalwart Dan Morgenstern also draws upon his personal
experiences with Ellington to recount the triumphs and tragedies of the
1960s and 70s for the bandleader and his band. The chapter is a wealth of
stories and anecdotes about the final decades of Ellington’s life and career,
all framed by statements confirming Morgenstern’s personal presence: ‘As
I watched from the wings’, he writes (155).
The collection of essays is organized in three thematically arranged
sections. Each part contains contributions from authors whose engage-
ments with Ellington are scholarly, musical and personal. Part I, ‘Ellington
in Context’, offers a variety of critical insights into Ellington’s biography and
musical identity. Part II, ‘Duke Through the Decades: The Music and its
Reception’, again comprises a set of chapters from a variety of perspec-
tives. Each decade is given its own chapter: taken as a whole, this section
provides a thorough overview of Ellington’s life and career. This overview is

supported by a thorough and detailed chronology at the beginning of the
book, provided by associate editor Evan Spring. Spring includes both per-
sonal and career events in Ellington’s life, listed against notable recordings
made at the same time. The cross-section of authors in Part II is represen-
tative of the entire volume: in addition to Morgenstern’s position as a jazz
statesman, Jeffrey Magee, Andrew Berish and Anna Harwell Celenza all
hail from within the academy, while Anthony Brown combines his research
and performance of Duke Ellington repertoire. In Part III, ‘Ellington and the
Jazz Tradition’, writers address elements of Ellington’s musical style and
demeanour that have had an impact in jazz outside Ellington’s own band.
Unfortunately, Edward Green’s introduction is somewhat out of place.
Instead of the usual function of an introduction, where the chapter is used
to explain common themes and frameworks used in the book ahead, and
to link the contributions of the authors, Green uses the introduction as a
vessel for Aesthetic Realism, his pet critical framework (and that of his erst-
while teacher Eli Siegel). Not only is applying Aesthetic Realism to Elling-
ton’s music a poorly advised effort to overlay a retrospective framework,
the philosophy itself is poorly explained: ‘The world, art and self explain
each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites’ (1). Green’s intro-
duction does not help the reader ease into navigating the book in quite the
way it might.
Despite the underwhelming opening, there is plenty of merit in this col-
lection. Several themes emerge throughout the volume. In the opening
chapter John Howland writes about the coexistence of art and entertain-
ment in Ellington’s early years: ‘Ellington liked to joke that he had two edu-
cations’, Howland writes, ‘one in the pool hall and one in school’ (22). The
last chapter of Part I returns again to the juxtaposition of art and entertain-
ment, this time addressing others’ perceptions of Ellington as a cultural
icon. Olly W. Wilson and Trevor Weston explain that ‘Ellington was a piv-
otal agent in effecting an extra-ordinary (and perhaps inevitable) change in
the perception of African-American music by the American public in gen-
eral and the intellectual elite in particular’ (73). In the first chapter of Part II,
Magee comments on this element to Ellington’s music and lifestyle, empha-
sizing the contrast to public expectation that Ellington embodied:
The musical contrasts and anomalies that Ellington wrote into pieces
such as Creole Rhapsody—and into the shorter, more formally con-
ventional compositions that preceded it—also played out in his
public persona. Ellington consistently strove to present a dignified,

Review 99
sophisticated image to a public that was saturated with stereotyped

images of African Americans as happy-go-lucky or ‘natural’ musicians
(99).
In chapter 4, Brian Priestley explores the Ellington Orchestra’s over-

seas tours. The dichotomy between art and entertainment becomes a per-
vasive theme, as Priestley explains the European inclination to receive
Ellington’s band and music as high art in the 1930s, while their American
audiences still favoured racial stereotypes. Over the course of the book,
a multi-faceted picture of Ellington emerges: his integration of bawdy and
primitive expectations with sophistication and complexity in musical style
and social manner illustrate a control of his own destiny that was unprec-
edented in jazz.
On the whole, race is handled sensitively. Ellington was faced with day-
to-day challenges prompted by fronting an African-American band from
the 1920s. Magee writes about the segregation faced by Ellington and his
peers, and the racial language that permeated Ellington’s world. Ellington’s
jungle style at the Cotton Club is a well-known response to this. Later chap-
ters explain Ellington’s enduring drive to engage with African-American his-
tory in his music. Benjamin Givan writes about Ellington’s use of the blues,
demonstrating that the blues can be a subtle evocation of African-American
history, that ‘once referenced…could be just as easily evaded as fulfilled’
(179). In his second contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Duke
Ellington (chapter 16), David Berger considers Ellington’s use of suites and
extended forms. Berger comments on Ellington’s frequent use of African-
American history as subject matter: ‘Apparently, Ellington didn’t figure out
that the history of the American Negro was too big a story to be told in a
single piece of music, no matter how long, because he would come back to
this idea time and time again and never with complete success’ (247). It is
unclear what Berger means by success here: the term is commonly associ-
ated with works and composers from the classical world. By using the term
without qualification, Berger (perhaps unintentionally) reinforces the fact
that jazz and other musics of African-American origin always come out lack-
ing when evaluated by classical criteria.
David Berger introduces another recurring theme of the volume in chap-
ter 2: collaborative composition, or Ellington’s inclination to compose for
the specific musicians in his band, shaping features around their existing
styles:
When a player left the band his features were generally retired or rear-
ranged for an entirely different instrument. When new players joined

the band, in many cases they would barely solo at all for six months or
even a year until Ellington understood their musical personalities and
how to integrate them into the sound of the band (34).
Berger uses his own transcriptions and reproductions of Ellington’s sketch

scores from the Smithsonian Collection in Washington, DC to support his
explanation of the fluid nature of Ellingtonian composition. Fragments and
ideas could be ‘composed and recomposed’ to suit the musical personali-
ties in the band at any given time. Anna Harwell Celenza’s comments on
Ellington’s compositional process support this:
In general, he tended to work out the rough draft of a composition in

manuscript and then complete the writing process using the musi-
cians in his band. Manuscript drafts now held in the Smithsonian’s
Ellington Collection confirm this two-stage compositional process,
which many Ellington scholars have described as an improvisational
method that blurred the line between his identity as a performer and
his aspirations as a composer (130).
Indeed, many of the authors have studied the Ellington Collection of

scores, papers and recordings at the Smithsonian Institute and enhance
their chapters with insights from the collection. Bill Dobbins shows how
Ellington used his own piano playing as a compositional device, often
using it to introduce numbers or join together sections.
On perusing the many Ellington and Strayhorn scores that are pre-
served in the Ellington collection at the Smithsonian Institution, it is
striking that, with very few exceptions, there is not a single note writ-
ten for piano. As though the hundreds of compositions Ellington wrote
were not enough, he somehow maintained enough of a connection
to them all that he never needed even a sketch of a piano part (210).
Marcello Piras’s chapter offers another view on Ellington’s compositional

techniques, with a glossary of representational compositional devices used
by Ellington, which he calls ‘Duke’s Daunting Database of Depictions’. Each
effect is described, explained, and examples given. For example, ‘climbing
up to the altissimo register’, Piras writes, depicts ‘Ascension to Heaven’.
‘When Ellington wrote In the Beginning God (1965), he gave his trumpet
marvel, Cat Anderson, a cadenza at the end of the third section’ (219).
The final chapter in the collection examines ‘Duke Ellington’s legacy
and influence’. Benjamin Bierman’s take on this is innovative: he isolates
five aspects of Ellington’s persona and music, and identifies their continua-
tion in other musicians. (Bierman suggests that whether or not these musi-
cians have since passed away, Ellington’s inspiration stays alive, for ‘[these

Review 101
musicians] in turn have created legacies of their own’ [263].) According to

Bierman, Ellington’s model of composing in tandem with his bandsmen
is echoed in Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop. Gerald Wilson’s work as a
bandleader can be directly attributed to working with and following Elling-
ton: ‘He was my number one man’, said Wilson (266). Bierman selects the
longtime Ellingtonian trumpeter Clark Terry as an example of Ellington’s
legacy for showmanship, and Cecil Taylor as continuing his aesthetic as a
pianist. Quincy Jones is chosen as an Ellingtonian entrepreneur. The meth-
odology Bierman chooses shows that Ellington studies are alive, and that
musicians can still learn behavioural and musical characteristics from him.
The logical organization and range of viewpoints in the volume ensures
a comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to Duke Ellington’s life and
music. Sometimes accounts of the same incident vary, which adds to the
richness of the volume, despite the reader being left without a definitive
account. Endnotes and bibliographies are provided for each chapter, and
a more extensive general reading list at the end of the book. Several con-
tributing authors have published more extended works on Ellington, and
full references are provided. Indeed, in this way the book provides a snap-
shot of the thinking of many of the current leading names in Ellington schol-
arship: Howland explores Ellington’s use of symphonic jazz structures
at monograph length in Ellington Uptown. Walter van de Leur’s chapter
(12: ‘Seldom Seen, But Always Heard’) on the compositional relationship
between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn is a capsule version of his 2002
book Something to Live For.
The seventeen book chapters vary stylistically in writing and method,
sometimes straying from conventions expected of an academic volume.
However, this is a necessary compromise in order to provide a wide range
of perspectives on a well-trodden topic. This series often provides an
introduction to a subject for students, scholars and fans alike. Despite its
unevenness at times, I am glad the Cambridge Companion to Duke Elling-
ton exists. I hope it brings more people to Ellington’s music and story.
References
Howland, John (2009) Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the
Birth of Concert Jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/
10.3998/mpub.211239
Van de Leur, Walter (2002) Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/97801951
24484.001.0001

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[JRJ 11.

1 (2017) 5-6] (print) ISSN 1753-8637

Welcome to the latest issue of Jazz Research Journal.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

Keywords: ecology; jazz; promoters; scene

1. Haftor Medbøe is Associate Professor of Music and Jazz Musician in Residence

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

generating a positive audience experience from that which is promoted.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

Promotion and creation of scene

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

development given rise to a canon of rich stylistic variety and a diversity

3. The city is undisclosed in order to preserve the anonymity of the participants.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

regulatory governance (Brennan and Webster 2011: 15–17), the state of

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

Promoter C: I started [promoting] because I am a musician, so I’ve

Promoter D: I play piano. Not well, but I am enthusiastic at home with

Promoter E: To work, to actually play myself…

Whether as a means of taking charge of their own musical aspirations (Wall

Promoter C: I’ve always been an organizer which is unlike a lot of

Promoter D: I was unaware of what went on in the [local] jazz scene

The personal circumstances of individual promoters interviewed had clear

Promoter E: … we’re egocentric, we need an audience and also

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

I promote it now? Because, I think that jazz is an extraordinarily fulfill-

Promoter B: My motivation, the thing that gives me quite a buzz

Promoter C: I see [education] as an important function, definitely

One promoter found the term ‘educator’ too self-aggrandizing, interpreting

Sort of ‘herder of the ignorant’, maybe? … An evangelist, rather than

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

Promoter E: I do see myself as carrying the flame. Jazz is such a

In addition to expressing feelings of obligation to the furthering of jazz and

Promoter C: But I also challenged local … I went to [musician’s

Promoter D: whilst we are very open to people who perhaps aren’t as

The process of nurturing emerging talent was also seen to be perceived as

Promoter E: for example I played with a young chap called [musi-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

Artists, audiences and communities

In foregrounding the commonalities amongst those within the jazz com-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

Promoter C: Knowledge of the scene, I try and stay as knowledge-

As well as to provide a nurturing environment for musicians:

Promoter D: we wanted the audience here, we wanted the musicians

An appetite for inclusivity was thereby indicated by those interviewed, both

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a friend is going or if something changes in their perception of the

The understanding of the marketplace specific to a venue was also high-

Promoter C: I program according to what I think is going to go down

Inter-scene tensions became apparent when promoters expressed frus-

Promoter C: One thing that constantly disappoints me is the musi-

Further frictions were highlighted in the discussion of perceived inequalities

Promoter E: I don’t talk to those other people [jazz promoters], I don’t

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

ought to be, networking … which is strange because [the scene under

In summarizing interview data on programming, it becomes apparent that

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.

The same interviewee pointed to increased difficulties in attracting corpo-

Promoter A: I don’t think there’s been a shift, though [from corporate

The role of public sponsorship could nonetheless be observed, in inter-

Promoter B: I can see why it [public funding] is useful, I can see

Promoter B: We do something like 200 shows a year at [named music

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017.