The Outside of ‘Sitting In’: Jazz jam sessions and the politics of participation

Abstract

Jazz jam sessions project an aura of open participation by allowing musicians to “sit in” and through a general relaxation of formal performance constraints. This essay examines the jam session historically, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s, to demonstrate how it was also informed by an ethic of exclusion. Professional jazz musicians, working in a highly commercialized entertainment business, consistently prized jam sessions as events where they felt liberated from the demands of the public--whether conceived as a live audience or as the potential body of consumers of recordings--and where they could play “for musicians only.” The allure of freedom and spontaneous interaction that marked the jam session, however, proved irresistible to club owners, who sought to stage jam sessions for paying audiences. Impresario Norman Granz strove to realize their promise of democratic participation by promoting a new kind of concert in which audiences were encouraged to participate actively with voice and body. Most efforts to stage jam sessions provoked defensive responses from professional musicians, as though the image of participation offered within the performance frame had to be carefully maintained by protecting it from potential intrusions by the public.