BBJ blog archive, Part 2 (March 2010 to May 2011)

Space Music and World Politics

By Jason Toynbee, 29 March 2010

Jerry Dammers brought his new band, Spatial AKA, to Warwick Arts Centre at the beginning of March. For the former leader of The Specials this was something of a home coming. Despite the Olde English name, Warwick Arts Centre is actually located on the edge of post-industrial Coventry in which city Dammers played a leading part in launching Two Tone over twenty years ago. More than just a record label, Two Tone was a multicultural social movement built on anti-racist politics and a thumping hybrid of punk and ska.

With the new project Dammers has reinvented the Two Tone concept. Where the Specials documented the end of the 70s via a downbeat, kitchen-sink realism, the Spatial AKA summon up a fantastic vision of the future. A multitude of sounds and textures are deployed for this conjuring trick. With eighteen pieces that include a large brass section, the band also sports electric and acoustic basses, drum kit, hand drums and tympani – plus Dammers on squealing synthesiser. In addition there’s an electric piano, up to two electric guitars, and vibraphone. Put simply the sound is enormous: jazz on steroids in which excellent improvising is supported by thunderous rhythms and looping riffs. It’s wonderfully theatrical too. All the musicians wear costumes, including masks, robes and in the case of avuncular vibes player Roger Beaujolais, the magnificent headgear of an Egyptian pharaoh.

The Two Tone dimension comes partly from the fact that the orchestra is peopled by black and white musicians. There are leading exponents of black British jazz like Denys Baptiste, Jason Yarde and Nathanial Facey, together with white players such as Larry Stabbins and Terry Edwards, as well as Zoe Rahman of Asian heritage on piano. That’s only part of it though. What matters is that this band of colours produces a wildly cosmopolitan world of sound. The model here is clearly the Sun Ra Arkestra, several of whose tunes get an airing. But Dammers draws on plenty of other sources too – crass mass culture in the theme from the Batman TV series (itself once adapted by Ra), the wistful minimalism of Eric Satie, Moondog’s outsider music and then naturally enough ska with a guest appearance from pioneer trombonist Rico Rodriguez. Some tunes from the Specials songbook are thrown in for good measure too.

It’s an exuberant mixture which nevertheless keeps a critical edge. If this is a carnival it is also a party for the end of the world. The Specials’ tune ‘Man at C and A’, with its warning of ‘Nuclear attack!’ turns into an excursion for wailing, free-improvisation and an impassioned incantation from poet, Anthony Joseph – Joshua at Jericho, although it’s not clear if there will be any survivors in this particular siege.

A comparison with Orphy Robinson’s RawXtra big band (discussed on this blog, October 2009) ought to be illuminating, as both bands are inspired by the Sun Ra Arkestra. Of the two the Spatial AKA are more pop and populist. They embrace groove and exhibition, purveying a kind of knowing materialism – the music is about the world even if it is seen through a sci-fi lens. RawXtra are more ascetic, more spiritual and world transcending. The focus is on process, on working out how music might be made collectively, and therefore involves breaking up groove as much as holding it down. Both bands have a radical politics then. But where the Spatial AKA by turns celebrate and critique the (dis)order of things, RawXtra try to show how things might be changed.

Telling black British jazz in Ohio

By Jason Toynbee, 27 April 2010

I gave a paper to the School of Music at Ohio State University, Columbus, USA in mid-April at the height of the great volcano, ash and air scare. Would I ever get home, I wondered as I rehearsed my presentation. Daunting, but maybe a touch of paranoia is useful – helps you sharpen up your act?

The paper was on the history of black British jazz, but also about how that history might shed light on relations between race and the ‘great tradition’ in jazz. My argument was that while there has been a tendency in recent jazz scholarship to deconstruct the notion of the tradition, and with it the idea that jazz might be an originally African-American form, actually this tradition is indispensable. Any music which calls itself ‘jazz’ makes an implicit claim to revive, develop, transcend or transgress the body of work and the forms of practice which emerged in 1920 – 1975, precisely the period when African-American musicians predominated. Not to acknowledge this conjuncture and its racialised dimension is to make an ontological error (failure to get what jazz is) but also an ethical mistake (failure to bear witness to the entwinement of jazz and racial power and resistance).

In this context a key issue emerges about the jazz produced by black British musicians. It is in and through a certain mode of creativity, which embraces the great tradition of mid-twentieth century African America yet also reaches beyond, that such musicians have been able to innovate and renew the form. We might call this a Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993) mode of creativity. The point is it calls on wide African and African diasporic resources, thus encompassing rather than just denying the ‘great tradition’.

I knew that pitching this to an audience at Ohio State could be tough. I mean that there are world leading music scholars here, including jazz specialists and committed postgraduate students. Also maybe Americans, including African-American scholars, might be sceptical about music made in this remote, European outpost of jazz. But I needn’t have worried. The response was terrific. Around thirty people in a packed seminar room underneath the old (by North American standards) Music/Dance Library listened and then subjected me to hard, but perfectly fair questions, for three quarters of an hour. By the end we were riffing on deep issues of music and creativity, racial identity and the linear - or not - nature of musical histories.

Altogether, then, this was a wonderful experience and a great platform for both disseminating and trying out ideas from the WIBBJ project in the land where jazz was invented. I have to sincerely thank all who participated in the event but particularly Professor Graeme Boone, organiser of the Lectures in Musicology series who invited me and was such a generous and welcoming host.

Jazz virtue

By Mark Doffman, 4 May 2010

Anybody with an interest in jazz is acutely aware of its perennially uncomfortable position, bumping up against competing, more valued art worlds within British culture. The history of its being politely ignored by the cultural establishment is rendered even more poignant with the ever tantalising threat of its being proclaimed ‘the next BIG THING’. For people involved in jazz, in the face of this historical indifference and the fantasy of soon to be delivered riches, I am left wondering what it is about this music that draws so many musicians to it. At a time when ever larger numbers of wonderful young players are emerging from training institutions and often struggling to find work, what are their rewards going to be for committing to a life in jazz?

In understanding why musicians devote their lives to it, why it is worth pursuing [at whatever level of expertise] and with a subtext of why policy makers should take it more seriously, I want to point to the virtues of jazz as being intrinsically social rather than purely musical. So, what is jazz sociality? It could be defined in a number of ways, but I would argue that there are two particular elements of jazz as a social practice that mark it out as distinctive. Firstly, it sets up a dialogue between on the one hand a rich tradition and on the other an aesthetic of in-the-moment change (i.e. improvising) , and so offers us a musical analogue of the virtuous life we might all like to lead. That is, one that is grounded in our different heritages but rigorously subjected to examination in the moment. There is a second element and perhaps more significant element to jazz sociality and that is the constant, creative collision between the individual player’s needs and the demands of the group. The social/cognitive demands of being yourself within a group are evident in all music but I don’t feel that any western musical form other than jazz actively works through this ‘collision’ in as powerful or nuanced a manner.

The virtues of understanding yourself within a tradition (across time) and being yourself within a group (in real time) can be examined through thinking about the way in which musicians improvise and groove – two central practices within jazz culture.

What is meant by groove? The term gets used in a number of ways, but for the purposes of my argument here, I want to focus on it as the feeling of flow, togetherness and rhythmic coherence in the music in real time. Many musics of the world (if not nearly all) have vocabularies that describe such feelings of mutuality and collectivity but each will have a different focus for these feelings. Groove, in jazz and much black music, can be seen as the establishment of such feelings through consistent, synchronous musical behaviours which may be often signalled through bodily movements such as head nodding and foot tapping. The power of music and dance to reinforce sociality has been described as muscular bonding and although we witness this most obviously in societies which maintain ritual music practices, anyone who has ever been to a gig and seen the groove expressed by audience and players alike can testify to the feelings of sociability that groove can engender.

Research into cognition and social behaviour suggests that our basic sensori-motor systems function in part through processes that could be imagined as neurons grooving together! And in social terms, learning how to synchronise with others is a key component of successful social interaction. Recent research into these different areas has understood such cognitive and social processes as forms of entrainment. A phenomenon that was first identified by van Huygens, the Dutch physicist, in the mid 1600s as he watched two pendulum clocks fall back into synchrony after his disturbing their motion. Entrainment is the process by which independent rhythmic units come in to a consistent rhythmic synchrony and it is now used as an explanatory tool in a huge range of research disciplines from chronobiology to wave dynamics. While entrainment has only recently been applied to music, it offers a powerful model for contributing to our understanding of how humans can synchronise to external rhythms (and to one another) and may explain why musical experiences such as groove are felt so profoundly.   But I don’t want to appeal only to cognitive development as an example of the power of groove; certainly, when musicians entrain/groove together, they do develop motor skills that allow for this coupling to emerge but just as importantly, they develop socio-cultural skills as they realise that to make the groove work they need to negotiate with one another at some level. At that point, grooving becomes a virtue as much as a skill. Although different researchers have shown how the gravitational pull of playing in time together works at a largely unconscious level (we don’t really think about being in time together until it goes wrong!), jazz culture and discourse highlights the complex feelings that arise through being in time together. It reflects the sociality of playing and the idea that working towards a common goal in music is really the point (rather than becoming terribly good at playing Giant Steps in every key, impressive though this may be).

If grooving can be seen as the realisation of our social bonding in the moment, improvisation can be characterised as the creative voice not only within the collective but within the traditions of the collective. In other words, this central characteristic of jazz playing appeals to both elements of jazz sociality that I alluded to earlier.

What seems to make improvising so powerful and yet in a sense ordinary ( and is the signal difference between improvisatory music making and music that is memorised or read) is similar to the difference between conversation and recitation. In informal speech, an almost infinite range of utterances can be produced from a quite constraining set of rules, and some music research has looked specifically towards Chomskyan linguistics for understanding how this achievement is possible. Beyond cognitive grammars however, there are the cultural traditions of speech that also constrain what we wish to say in the moment. Jazz mimics these sorts of processes in the utterances of improvisers. As Ingrid Monson in her excellent ethnography of jazz improvisation ‘Saying Something’ has pointed out, jazz musicians routinely refer directly to or improvise around the sounds of players of earlier generations, so weaving the past into the immediate present. In so doing, they are making significant statements about who they are and how they belong.

Improvising does not just however draw on the resources of the traditions and learning practices within the music. Although, the focus on improvisation is often tied to a particularly individualistic notion of creativity, in my view, becoming a great improviser within jazz practice is also about the capacity to engage with the musicians around you in the construction of the solo. In that sense, it ceases to become ‘your’ solo; the musicians around you have a stake in it too. I don't mean that the virtues of jazz lie however in some misty-eyed notion about the collective, rather they emerge from the complex, practical working out of how to negotiate your position and responsibilities in real time music making – without a word necessarily being spoken.

To finish, I believe that the practices of jazz have a lot to say about conduct with others – whether it be improvising in relation to a tradition or grooving with those around you. As jazz educators up and down the country will attest, the fundamental principles of jazz are as simple and straightforward as striking up a conversation. That its skilled practice takes a lifetime only reinforces the view that the simple, ordinary things of life demand our constant attention. I really don’t want to romanticise jazz and music-making nor suggest that grooving and improvising will cure all social ills. But, and this is where my subtext is made apparent, music does a lot more than teach you how to play scales and as that is the case, then the practices of a music matter. The practice of jazz with its conversational qualities, open-ended musical negotiations and re-working of sounds past, has important lessons to teach anyone about dealing with others and how to find our place in the world. I think its practice can do this probably more effectively, for instance, than following a conductor. Despite my opening remarks, it is clear that things have been moving in the last few years but the jazz policy of large cultural organisations in this country still appears to deny the true value of the music and policy makers could make so much more use of jazz and its virtues in broadening the horizons of young people in this country.

Bebop and Post-Bop, the Netherlands and the UK

By Byron Dueck, 13 July 2010

This week I had the opportunity to read an engaging essay by Kristin McGee, a colleague doing research on jazz in the Netherlands (the chapter will appear in Migrating Music, edited by Jason Toynbee and me, forthcoming with Routledge). McGee discusses the prominent place of bebop in contemporary jazz pedagogy and practice, and the roots of this high standing in both ideology and community practice. She advances a convincing critical argument that music of the bebop era, long celebrated in popular and scholarly music historiography as a kind of culmination for jazz, casts a long shadow in Europe as well. While reading through the paper I found myself thinking of the importance of bebop at the numerous workshops and pedagogical events we’ve observed and recorded over the last year and a half of the project.

In “Do You Know...?”, Howard Becker and Robert Faulkner argue that repertory is of fundamental importance to jazz sociability, and especially of the ability of musicians to perform together competently. Their research suggests that two large bodies of repertory exist: the standards repertory, which tends to be relatively unified in terms of harmonic, melodic, and formal structures, and post-bop music, which tends to be more experimental so far as time signature, mode, and form (among other things) are concerned. They furthermore observe that certain players tended to gravitate more towards one body of music than another – and that their preference has implications for who they can perform with competently.

Complicating this distinction, in the case of the music we’ve been listening to over the course of the project, is that many musicians perform standards in a post-bop style. I’m thinking for instance of a group of young musicians coached by Gary Crosby who add a decidedly contemporary coda to Charlie Parker’s ‘Cool Blues’ and lend Sonny Rollins’s ‘Oleo’ (a tune based upon that ultra-standard, ‘I Got Rhythm’) a post-bop rhythmic complexity. Clearly bebop occupies an important place in jazz pedagogy and performance here as in the Netherlands and the US. But it is interesting to see the ways in which contemporary performers inflect it by means of a post-bop aesthetic.

The jazz economy: free entry for all?

By Mark Banks, 21 July 2010

The history of jazz owes much to the capitalist market. The market has provided the principal means for the manufacture, distribution and promotion of musical works, a coterie of willing buyers, and a means of accruing incomes that have sustained musicians and financed further production. Yet while jazz musicians have used the market in order to distribute and support their otherwise invisible (or rather, inaudible) music, they have also demanded distance from it in order to create ‘autonomous’ art-works beyond the reach of economic interest. Most sociological accounts of jazz work suggest that the fundamental and recurring problem for jazz musicians is balancing or trading artistic impulses against economic necessity; that is, deciding whether to ‘play jazz’ (art) or ‘go commercial’ (or something inbetween). Strongly implied here is that the notion that all musicians have the same facility to make that choice.

Yet the problem of the ‘free’ marketplace, despite its apparent openness to all-comers, is that other social forces can act to restrict certain groups from it. Thus one problem for black musicians is that the ability to freely choose whether to pursue one's aesthetic or commercial ambitions (or both) is obstructed by the fact that the market is not ‘colour-blind’ as its defenders might advocate, but often displays antipathy towards black entrants. This is one theme that is coming through strongly from our interviews with black British jazz musicians. Particular concerns that have arisen include some disquiet about the apparent unwillingness of ‘the industry’ – particularly record labels, promoters and event managers - to employ or support black artists to the same degree enjoyed by their white counterparts.

For example, interviewees noted that while there is fulsome industry support for white jazz artists (citing for example Jamie Cullum, Joss Stone, Clare Teal, Led Bib, Polar Bear) equally talented and creative black artists tend not to receive the same backing. And while there is never any overt public disavowal of black artists – behind closed doors or when the resources are not forthcoming it becomes clear that black jazz musicians are considered as less ‘marketable’ than white artists. Lack of support from promoters and record companies leads to reduced opportunities to perform, low public visibility and diminished sales – and so the myth that black jazz artists are not commercially popular is reproduced from within.

Even when promoters or labels do venture to take on a black artist, as many have described, they tend to be marketed as ‘minority acts’, specialists deemed only attractive to members of the ethnic group they are assumed intrinsically to represent. In this way not only is the marketplace relatively closed to black entrants, but even when it allows entry, it effects to restrict their possibilities for economic (and, we should note, cultural) expression. Our interviews indicate that for black British jazz musician, the fundamental problem of jazz work is not whether they should be ‘artistic’ or ‘go commercial’ but whether they are fully able to access the possibility of making that choice in the first place.

Harry Beckett, goodbye

By Jason Toynbee, 2 August 2010

Harry Beckett died on 22 July – sad news indeed. Harry was a gentle musical giant of the British jazz scene, an extraordinary trumpet and flugelhorn player, and a composer too, with a strongly idiomatic sound. In jazz, of course, everyone is supposed to have their own distinctive idiom. But Harry really did, being able to play in a range of moods and styles, from the lyrical to the acerbically free, yet always with a unique sense of phrasing. The architecture was different in his solos, apparently out of kilter, but with every note played to stunning effect.

Although he arrived in London from Barbados in 1954 he didn’t start performing jazz regularly till the mid- 60s. In the interim he had a long 'apprenticeship' in dance bands, the early London rhythm and blues scene, as well as the highlife group of Ambrose Campbell. Rarely out of work he was a stalwart of the musicians’ ‘labour exchange’, Archer Street in the West End. When he did make the transfer to jazz full time, initially with bassist Graham Collier, he never looked back. To bring the story up to date it’s worth reading John Fordham’s excellent obituary. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jul/26/harry-beckett-obituary

I’d just like to add a personal recollection though. A long-time fan, I had the great privilege of interviewing Harry for the project last year. When I explained to him about the theme of our research – black British jazz – Harry was rather put out. He made it clear that music was all about transcending the lines of race, and every other arbitrary division between people. It took some persuading to get him to continue with the interview but I’m so glad he did, because he travelled back in time, recalling his earliest musical memories, singing at home and in the neighbourhood, following a tin whistle player through the streets of Bridgetown, Barbados, rehearsing with a sax playing soulmate – ‘practicing all the time, playing with who you can wherever you can – the word is happiness’. This summed up his immense modesty, and sense that music making was a collaborative activity which was nothing unless it lifted people, improved their condition.

Harry will be missed, but his contribution lives on in the influence he has had on countless others, and of course in the recordings too. Fortunately a couple of classic albums from the early 70s with Harry as leader and composer have been re-released recently. Check out the double CD Warm Smiles/Themes for Fega from 1971-2. It’s glorious music.

Jazz in the Bay

By Catherine Tackley, 11 October 2010

I travelled to Cardiff recently to meet Patti Flynn, a professional singer who has returned to the city of her birth having performed and resided all over the world. Patti and Humie Webbe, who I interviewed in the summer, run the Butetown Bay Jazz Festival which involves the community in music and brings people into contact with their heritage. After talking to Patti in the Butetown History and Arts Centre, we walked from the docks (now the regenerated site of the Wales Millennium Centre and National Assembly) to the centre of Cardiff along Bute Street, which is bordered along one side by a high wall. This wall and the train tracks which it shields mark the eastern extremes of Butetown, the residential area adjacent to Cardiff docks which together are popularly known as ‘Tiger Bay’. In the 1940s, the segregation of 95% of Cardiff’s black population in this area was described as almost unique by Kenneth Little in his pioneering study of Cardiff. Segregation is not too strong a term, as the area is further defined by railway lines to the north and water to the west and south. Bute Street was and is the main access route, and its cafes and nightlife defined and distorted perceptions of the area for outsiders, including the media. Chris Hodgkins, now Director of Jazz Services, remembers well the sensation of being literally ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ in his teenage forays into Butetown which fuelled his interest in jazz. Today, the names of the streets leading off Bute Street provide virtually the only physical reminders of the area in which Patti grew up, since the original buildings were mostly demolished in the 1960s. Patti, along with some other notable Bay residents, has been immortalised in Cardiff’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in which she shares a pavement domino with George Glossop, a guitarist who in the 1930s was one of the earliest the first musicians from the Bay to work professionally in London.

I began work on ‘What is Black British Jazz?’ with the idea that Cardiff would be an interesting case study for the roots/routes strand, and over the past two years my curiosity and research has been amply repaid. Delving further into the history of the city has proved to be not only fascinating in itself, but has exposed the prime significance of a group of black Cardiff-born musicians who were active alongside newly-arrived black immigrants and visitors on the London scene in the 1930s and 40s. The musicians’ stories demonstrate the formative importance of roots within UK alongside consideration of the influence of wider socio-cultural background. For example, the father of the Deniz brothers (Frank, Joe and Laurie) was from the Cape Verde islands, but it was learning to play West Indian calypso which was in demand in the community which allowed the brothers and their contemporaries to begin to earn money from music. Moving to London was a significant step towards professional status. Many of our interviews with living jazz musicians have suggested that similar ‘internal migration’ can promote reflection on cultural identity and its influence on creative activity, but in the 1930s and 40s black British musicians secured work through their perceived synonymy with African American and West Indian musicians. Whilst the former were demand in London due to government restrictions on American musicians imposed from 1935, the UK offered attractive opportunities for the latter, and the formative experiences of the Cardiff musicians meant that they were particularly well-placed to develop successful careers in London.

Tomorrow's Warriors: an education

By Mark Doffman, 29 October 2010

One of the developing interests on the project is the work of Tomorrow’s Warriors, the educational project within Dune Music that Gary Crosby and Janine Irons have set up to provide a platform for young aspiring jazz musicians.  While the focus of their educational work is with young musicians of the African diaspora, the ethos of the project is one of inclusion and diversity. Young players come from many social and musical backgrounds, sharing their passion for jazz.

The Tomorrow’s Warriors project has yielded some spectacular results. Tomorrow’s Warriors Biggish Band, a septet of school age musicians, won the Yamaha Jazz Experience competition earlier this year and their prize for coming first is the opportunity to play at Ronnie Scotts Jazz Club in November opposite the legendary Jon Hendricks.  Rather more experienced TW alumni have also been in the news; Empirical carried off the 2010 MOBO award for Best Jazz Act. These are just two examples of many groups and individual players who are within the TW umbrella or have recently emerged from it – other notable players include Binker Golding, Duncan Eagles, Alex Ho, Eddie Hick who are all in their different ways contributing to the London jazz scene.

Quite striking in our exploration of the TW project is the sense of inclusion that the project engenders and the striking results that it produces (as shown above). Not only do young musicians join the project from different backgrounds but also strikingly different levels of experience and yet this appears to enhance the quality of the learning experience rather than necessarily detract from it.

Within a single group or at a particular workshop, musicians learn how to negotiate their way not only through the technicalities of improvising but also develop tacit knowledge about how to deal with the complexities of collaborative creativity.  An ethos of shared ownership of the music, a view of music-making as a participatory rather than competitive arena and a full commitment to high standards of performance make the TW workshops a powerful site for the development of the best in jazz.

On Thursday 18 November 2010, the Black British Jazz project will be hosting the panel discussion ‘Learning to play, learning to live’ at OU London in Camden Town. It will look at the relationship between black British jazz players and education.

What's that sound? Becoming a black British jazz musician

By Mark Banks, 4 February 2011

As we discovered at our recent panel on black British jazz and education (‘Learning to play, learning to live’) most of the musicians we have come across tended to grow up in a ‘musical household’ – with music being frequently played and listened to, and family gatherings with familiar sounds and songs featuring prominently in the memory. But very few of our musicians came from a family where jazz was prominent or popular. Many had parents who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s, and while music such as calypso, mento, reggae, pop and soul featured prominently, and classical music was often an integral part of childhoods, exposure to jazz was rare:

‘Soul music, R ‘n’ B… not jazz, not jazz’ (Trumpeter)

‘…never had any exposure to jazz’ (Singer)

A common theme emerging is that people ‘came’ to jazz, not through their parents, nor through immersion as a child, but through a gradual or accidental exposure, or more ‘back door’ or unusual routes – hearing curious sounds in record shops, on radio or through friends. Once heard, the love of jazz was cultivated through self-seeking and learning – it was therefore something acquired and not endowed.

Most black jazz musicians developed in their teens, either through school or local youth orchestras, community music workshops or church groups (all very active in the 1970s and 80s), or by learning from available peers or, indeed, were self-taught, often having been inspired by particular pieces of music or performances. For our musicians the role of individual, inspirational teachers – who were usually named and clearly revered - was a strong theme; and (certainly in London) the vital role played by a loose network of primary and secondary music teachers, peripatetics, band leaders and community musicians opened up the possibilities of jazz as a vocation.

Typically black musicians did not learn or train in established schools, formal bands and well-known orchestras – in contrast to most white musicians, jazz education was a much more community-generated practice, looser and more informal than conventional music education. In the 1980s it was unusual to find black students at the jazz colleges, as this singer describes, reflecting on her experience in higher education:

‘I was the only black person on the course (…) I knew other black musicians around that time (…) they’d done the gospel thing, they’d been singing in church, or they’d done the workshops and almost community-based learning. That was more typical and so I think I was a little strange.

The expansion of jazz education more generally has now enabled greater numbers of black and ethnic minority musicians to obtain places in the elite institutions – the picture has moved on somewhat since the 1980s. Arguably, British jazz, for many, has entered a more progressive ‘post-racial’ phase. But at the same time, black musicians remain under-represented in music colleges (not just on jazz courses), and we have seen a sharp decline in the variety and scope of informal and publicly-funded community music activity focussed on jazz. Notwithstanding the efforts of organisations like Dune, the opportunity for young black musicians to ‘come’ to jazz has been diminished by the slow decline and withdrawal of support for peripatetic music teachers, ‘inspirational individuals’ and community music groups – and in the current financial climate this is likely to get worse.

An important issue for us is, then, what are the consequences of both the expansion of formal jazz (higher) education and the diminution of informal ‘community’ jazz learning? Does it mean an advancement of skills or just standardization? Does it point to a democratisation and an expansion of a ‘proper’ jazz education, one more available to all, or - given the rising cost of higher education – an expansion of opportunity but only for elite social groups? And given the historically vital role played by informal networks of practitioners in black and ethnic minority contexts, what will happen if jazz continues to fade as a form of community music? How will the next generation ‘come’ to jazz in the future?

Bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside

By Byron Dueck, 18 April 2011

Last month I had the opportunity to present some of my recent research at forums at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Northern College of Music (the latter my own institution). In the talks I discussed a rehearsal Mark Doffman and I recorded at the Open University last year. Revisiting the events of the rehearsal – and condensing a 9000-word article into a 45-minute talk – was a good opportunity to rethink arguments I had drafted in the summer and autumn of 2010. Questions posed by various attendees also provoked reflection.

One issue that arose in both Edinburgh and Manchester concerned the skill level of the musicians we had recorded: they were younger players, still actively consolidating repertories and skills. We had asked them to work together without their regular mentor on an arrangement of a jazz standard, and recorded their activities. I had relied upon close study of this rehearsal to draw conclusions about the musical dynamics that enable musical endings, the interpersonal negotiation of aesthetic differences, and how such musical and social interactions stand in relation to broader jazz networks. Attendees at Edinburgh and Manchester asked whether I would have observed the same kinds of processes had we recorded highly accomplished professionals performing at the peak of their powers.

I suggested the interactions of developing players enabled a particularly clear perspective on certain aspects of jazz practice. First, especially so far as the dynamics of musical engagement are concerned, more tentative interactions paradoxically highlight and clarify the musical grammar in play. Patterns rendered seamlessly in the performances and rehearsals of established musicians are, in the effortful work of apprentices, revealed to be comprised of multiple parts. Also brought to light is the musical labour that goes into learning such a musical grammar and beginning to employ it. In short, studying the interactions of learning musicians highlights foundational musical processes, skills, and repertories, often taken for granted, in the same way that watching children learn to talk clarifies structural aspects of the language they are assimilating.

Focusing on developing players also calls attention to another important point: the extensiveness of jazz publics, and of the musical labour that enables them. Discussions of jazz often focus on learning, mentorship, and the influence of one generation of jazz players on the next. But such stories tend to privilege the greats: the very best known mentors and their lineages. These frequently repeated tales can obscure the immensity of the network of developing musicians who (at this very moment!) are in the process of orienting themselves towards future engagement with one another through acts of practice and rehearsal. In short, looking at learning players highlights the breadth of the community of jazz practice and the extent of the everyday efforts that help to bring it into existence.

Working the beat? Jazz workers as archetypes

By Mark Banks, 17 May 2011

To most people, in both cultural and economic terms, jazz presents an image of fusty irrelevance – a minority interest in the art world, a miniscule contributor to the image and activity of the creative industries – but is this so? Can jazz help tell us something about our new cultural economy?

In the Ownership strand of our research we have been looking – sociologically and qualitatively - at the working lives of jazz musicians. The pioneering work of Carlo Lastrucci, Howard Becker and Robert Stebbins in the 1940s, 50s and 60s has been an important touchstone, as has more recent work by Paul Lopes (developing Becker’s ‘artworlds’ approach) and Pierre Bourdieu-inspired writers such as Charles Kirschbaum and Timothy Dowd. In a more quantitative vein, Joan Jeffri’s ‘Changing the Beat’ reports, produced in the USA context, represent the most comprehensive employment survey of jazz workers yet undertaken. Other writers in jazz studies with a sociological eye (such as Ingrid Monson, Paul Berliner and Scott DeVeaux) have helped our research take shape.

Common to these studies is the recognition that, for most, jazz work is (and has always been) precarious, piecemeal and poorly paid. Joan Jeffri’s work has shown that even in the USA context - where jazz commands much bigger audiences and more commercial opportunities – making a living solely from jazz is a rare luxury. Conversations with colleagues on our recent trip to New York and Chicago further emphasised the precarious nature of the jazz career – New York has around 30,000 self-declared professional jazz musicians, the majority of which struggle to make a living purely by playing jazz. It seems things have changed little since Becker first described the mobile and hustling jazz workers of the post-war period – but maybe in its durable precarity and marginality, jazz has something to tell us about how the cultural and creative economy works more widely, in its present incarnation.

Jazz musicians are often individuals who tend to move between groups in order to perform (rather than fixed members of a group as tends to occur in pop and rock), and they have some difficulties in identifying and accounting for their ‘place of work’ and ‘career path’. The jazz economy, with its low levels of reward from record sales, royalties and so on, tends to provide only for those who can resourcefully undertake a mix of performance, recording and teaching jobs and combine and juggle the income from these different activities. In some respects then, the jazz musician is an example of the fully mobile, self-determining and individualized subject so often utopianized in creative industries discourse – a model ‘portfolio’ worker. Charged with self-responsibility, hustling for various gigs, working across bands and collaborations, picking up fragments of work and involved in myriad ‘projects’ the jazz worker is a model of the consummate new economy professional. Motivated by love and the joy of the practice, but also condemned to the freedom that such work demands and endows, the jazz worker might be seen as an archetype – an original model. But this is not necessarily to be celebrated – the joys of portfolio living are regularly countered by uncertainty, insecurity and poverty.

But what further happens when we add a raced dimension? The creative industries – despite their egalitarian image – have been widely found to be less, rather than more, open to ethnic minority entrants. Our ongoing work into the black British jazz community is thus starting to explore how the jazz worker is archetypal - not just as a portfolio worker – but as an ethnic minority participant in the cultural economy. Our ongoing employment survey into the working lives of black musicians (to be published in the Autumn) is exploring how race makes a difference to the brave new world of cultural (jazz) work. We therefore hope to show that the black jazz worker (far from being part of something irrelevant) might have a particular status as both symbol and harbinger of creative economies in-the-making and to come.