The Jazz Community

Abstract

T HE literature on jazz, which has grown enormously in recent years, consists in the main of biographies of jazz musicians, record reviews, and analysis of the music itself. Relatively little attention has been devoted to the study of social groups in jazz and, with some exceptions, what literature exists is primarily descriptive and widely scattered. It is our intention in this paper to present a factual description of what we shall call the jazz community. The available literature, as well as our own empirical observation, suggests that this is organized along well-developed lines which reveal specific behavioral patterns. We are dealing, then, with a number of people who share an occupational ideology and participate in a set of expected behaviors. We use the term community here not to denote a group with a geographic locus, but in the sense of a community of interest; what is implied by the word is that the people described here share a set of norms which in turn define roles for them.