Jazz Concert Research Articles

Live Recollections: Uses of the Past in U.S. Concert Life

As an institution, the concert has long been one of the central mechanisms through which a sense of musical history is constructed and conveyed to a contemporary listening audience. Examining concert programs and critical reviews, this paper will briefly survey U.S. concert life at three distinct moments: in the 1840s, when a conflict arose between virtuoso performance and an emerging classical canon; in the 1910s through 1930s, when early jazz concerts referenced the past to highlight the music’s progress over time; and in the late twentieth century, when rock festivals sought to reclaim a sense of liveness in an increasingly mediatized cultural landscape.

An Interrogation of Language: “Radical Jewish Culture” on New York City's Downtown Music Scene

AbstractIn April 1993 the Knitting Factory, a small nightclub in Lower Manhattan, hosted a five-day music festival titled “Radical New Jewish Culture.” This event was part of a multifaceted creative endeavor undertaken during the 1990s by composer/improvisers on New York City's downtown music scene and dubbed “Radical Jewish Culture” by its main protagonist, saxophonist John Zorn. RJC brought Jewish music and heritage into the purview of a polycultural experimentalist scene shaped by jazz, rock, free improvisation, and avant-garde concert music. Artists downtown also engaged in an animated “conversational community” that spilled over into interviews, program notes, liner notes, and essays. RJC was especially productive as a conceptual framework from which to interrogate the relationship between musical language and the semiotics of sound. Two pieces serve here as case studies: “¡Bnai!” an Israeli “pioneer song” as interpreted by the No Wave band G-d Is My Co-Pilot, and “The Mooche,” a Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition as interpreted by pianist Anthony Coleman's Selfhaters Orchestra.

Live Recollections: Uses of the Past in U.S. Concert Life <br> doi:10.5429/2079-3871(2010)v1i1.9en

As an institution, the concert has long been one of the central mechanisms through which a sense of musical history is constructed and conveyed to a contemporary listening audience. Examining concert programs and critical reviews, this paper will briefly survey U.S. concert life at three distinct moments: in the 1840s, when a conflict arose between virtuoso performance and an emerging classical canon; in the 1920s and 1930s, when early jazz concerts referenced the past to highlight the music's progress over time; and in the late twentieth century, when rock festivals sought to reclaim a sense of liveness in an increasingly mediatized cultural landscape.

"The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever:" Pierre Bourdieu and the Shifting Ontology of Bebop

On May 15, 1953, Toronto’s Massey Hall played host to what has become widely known in text books and collectors guides as “The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever.” The concert featured iconic bebop musicians Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach – a stunning assemblage of musicians whom Downbeat Magazine proclaimed to be the “Quintet of the Year.” Curiously, however, the contemporary critical reaction was decidedly lukewarm. According to 1950s Globe and Mail critic Alex Barris, for instance, “All in all, it was neither a great concert nor a bad one.” How, then, has such an apparently pedestrian event come to be known as the “greatest jazz concert ever”? 
 
 This paper pursues an answer to that question by drawing on the socially-grounded aesthetic theorization of Pierre Bourdieu to help unpack the complex web of social and textual factors involved in the aesthetic valorization of the bebop. In the first section, I establish the theoretical framework, briefly explaining those elements of Bourdieu’s terminology and theory that are most germane to my study. In the second section, I apply Bourdieu’s concept of consecration to examine how music journalists, critics, and scholars discursively constructed bebop as a high art form. In the third section, I consider the musicians’ own effort to affirm their high art credentials. In the fourth and final section, I interrogate the consequences of the valorization of a primarily black music according to the aesthetic terminology and values of a primarily white establishment.

Revealing representations of jazz in the Weimar Republic

While in America and elsewhere jazz made its debut in the middle and late 1910s, the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) remained relatively isolated from jazz until 1920. Touring groups opted for travel in economically and politically stable areas. Until the first live jazz concert in 1924, Germans learned of jazz through sheet music, recordings, and soldiers returning from World War I. Lasting records of jazz culture exist due to the advances in sound recording, photography, and publishing. Jazz images from the Weimar Republic offer a glimpse into the triangular relationship of ethnic African and African-American jazz artists with jazz culture and with German audiences. Many images de-emphasize the African-American jazz artists by using stereotypical tropes, masking the artist, and avoiding physical portrayals of the artist. These techniques reflect the adaptation of jazz culture for audiences within a nation recovering economic and political stability.

Everyday Atrocities and Ordinary Miracles, or Why I (Still) Bear Witness to Sexual Violence (But Not Too Often)

Everyday Atrocities and Ordinary Miracles, or Why I (Still) Bear Witness to Sexual Violence (But Not Too Often) Susan J. Brison (bio) Seventeen years after having been jumped from behind, beaten, raped, strangled into unconsciousness, and left for dead at the bottom of a ravine in a rural area in the south of France, I still—as I just did—occasionally bear witness to the assault. Why do I continue to tell this story? It certainly isn’t because I enjoy doing so: at this point, telling the story is neither therapeutic nor retraumatizing. Frankly, after telling this story hundreds of times, to perhaps a million people (if one counts the readers of the Sunday New York Times), I’m bored by it. 1 But I continue to tell it, albeit with decreasing frequency, because doing so is bearing witness to something much larger, and much worse, than what happened to me personally: namely, the atrocity of widespread and ongoing gender-based violence against women around the world. I also mention it, somewhat paradoxically, to reassure other victims of sexual violence that I’ve moved beyond it and don’t feel the need to talk about it regularly any-more. Looking back on the several years before I was attacked, I see now that I was living a charmed life. I was newly married and had a full-time job I loved, teaching philosophy at Dartmouth, and enough energy and drive to teach additional courses at both New York University and Princeton, while sitting in on law school classes at NYU, taking tap dancing lessons in SoHo and musical theater classes in Greenwich Village, and singing jazz occasionally with friends in piano bars in the city. One term I managed to teach five days a week at Dartmouth and still spend every weekend in New York City with my partner going to cabarets and jazz concerts and Sunday night swing dancing at the Cat Club. And, then, wham! I lost it all, just that suddenly, and for a very long time, but—I can now report—not forever. In spite of my having [End Page 188] written, years ago, that I died in that ravine, I now have more in common with my preassault self than with the person I became for more than a decade afterward. Although I originally described my preassault life as a quite sunny one that suddenly went dark, I stopped thinking about it in that way after someone pointed out what he saw as the “gothic novel” structure of the tale I was telling. I became quite suspicious of the “reverse-conversion” narrative I found in many rape stories (including my own) and made a point of downplaying any contrast between my preassault happiness and my postassault misery. But now that I have emerged from the latter, I think I was genuinely blessed with joie de vivre and fortunate circumstances before that fateful day. There are many different reasons to tell a trauma narrative, and I’m guessing that, over the years, I’ve told mine for just about all of them. The very first time, I told it (mentally) to myself, as it was happening: “What is this? This is a nightmare. No, this is a rape. No, this is a murder.” The purpose of that narrative was to keep me alive, and by sheer luck, it did the trick. After my assailant had dragged my body to the bottom of a creek bed and choked me one last time, I played dead until he left, which enabled me to scramble up the ravine to a roadside, where I was rescued by a man in a tractor who took me to his nearby farmhouse. My next attempt to bear witness to my attack was met with incredulity, as the people who gathered around me decided initially that I must have been hit by a car, even though I kept saying that I had been attacked by a man. After I repeated my story to the police and the doctor who had been summoned and my account started to gain plausibility, someone said, to general agreement, “It couldn’t have been anyone from around here...

Finding the Kool Mixx: how Brown & Williamson used music marketing to sell cigarettes

Objective: To describe the history of Kool’s music-themed promotions and analyse the role that music played in the promotion of the brand. Methods: Analysis of previously secret tobacco industry documents,...

Jazz Adventures in French Culture by Jacqueline Dutton, Colin Nettelbeck

MLR, IOI .2, 2006 55 I expertise. Of the three interviews, the one conducted by Philippe Lejeune is themost interesting: it clarifies Ernaux's reasons for publishing parts of her diary. The singularity of Annie Ernaux's position, 'in-between', is convincingly argued throughout. Her use of this position, as highlighted by Charpentier and evidenced by this volume, is fascinating. The aggression and unfairness shown in the extracts from reviews of Ernaux's work given by Charpentier are a forceful reminder of just how difficult it is for awoman writer to create forms of writing that cross boundaries and fail to respect established rules. Thumerel's volume bears testimony both to Ernaux's efforts and to her success. UNIVERSITY OF WALES SWANSEA CATHERINE RODGERS Jazz Adventures inFrench Culture (=Nottingham French Studies, 43. I (Spring 2004)). Ed. by JACQUELINE DUTTON and COLIN NETTELBECK. Nottingham: University of Nottingham. 2004. i67 pp. T20. ISSN 0029-4586. This collection of articles by French, British, and US scholars on the various roles of jazzmusic in twentieth-century France excellently demonstrates, as Ludovic Tournes underscores in the introduction, the richness of jazz music as a topic of academic in vestigation. The first half deals with musicology, history, cultural policies, and colo nial studies, while the second half is dedicated to the relationship of jazz music with French literature and cinema. Hasse, who presents a chronology of Duke Ellington's visits to France, recalls that the pianist experienced in France his first proper jazz concerts, leaving behind the variety show format. Jean-Louis Pautrot rehabilitates Andre Hodeir as a jazz composer and insists on his particularly European contribu tion to jazz criticism. Prieto focuses on the triangular exchanges of France with the West Indies and the US to trace the birth of biguine, a creolized genre whose merit lay in its rhythmic predictability. Terri J.Gordon compares the evolution of Josephine Baker's career in France with that of jazz, both being understood as regenerative forces (after the First World War) and as symbols of degeneration. Adriana Costa and Anne Legrand present different viewpoints on the Hot Club de France: while Costa focuses on the musicianship of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, whose string quintet gave the Hot Club its distinctive style, Legrand takes a fresh look at the work of Charles Delaunay, the promoter, archivist, and editor for Jazz Hot, the club's official journal. Highlighting the similarities between the often demarcated scenes of French jazz and pop (including their eclosion in times of post-war crisis and their 'foreignness'), David Looseley demonstrates that both became categorized as sites of contrast to the supposedly 'national' and 'intellectual' chanson. Vincent Cotro outlines his new research on tribute albums in jazz music, discarding nostal gia and suggesting instead that artists generate new filiations through improvisations and personal adaptations. Matthew Jordan deconstructs the racialized judgements of early French jazz critics, who, attaching general qualities to the unseen voix negre in I920S recordings, had to revise their assumptions when artists' pictures started to ap pear on album covers. Jacqueline Dutton demonstrates the role of jazz in Le Clezio's Poisson d'or, whose protagonist journeys from her native Africa to France and the US eventually to become a jazz artist. Edmund Smyth develops the concept of the 'jazz novel' in his analysis of Christian Gailly's latest stories, showing how shifts in the narration echo jazz improvisation. In her presentation of Jacques Rieda's poetry and literary criticism, Marie Joqueviel-Bourjea similarly demonstrates the ability of prosody, with its elastic effects around the emuet, to reflect the 'swing' flexibility of jazz music. Focusing onJ'irai cracher sur vos tombes,Rashida K. Braggs explains that, despite his somewhat reductionist categorizing of black men as good musicians, Boris 552 Reviews Vian showed an unusual empathy for theAfro-American population. Outside fiction, Gilles Mouellic similarly emphasizes Vian's original contribution to jazz criticism and his role as a precursor in theorizing the links between jazz music and cinema. Finally, Peter Schulman and Colin Nettelbeck provide analyses of the influence of jazz in, respectively, Jean-Pierre Melville and Louis Malle's films. While jazz evokes bachelor freedom inMelville's films, Malle used jazz to...

Enduring Public Diplomacy

On April 11, 2003, over the caption: "Palace of Rubble: American soldiers yesterday inside a ruined palace in Baghdad that belongs to president Saddam Hussein's son Uday," the front page of the New York Times featured a picture of what had been a grand piano, reduced to rubble. Glancing at the demolished piano, two American soldiers ascended the palace's winding staircase, which had survived amid the surrounding wreckage.1 The photograph appeared during an international outcry after U.S. troops had neglected to safeguard museums and priceless archaeological artifacts from extensive looting and destruction. As the seeming triumph of Saddam's overthrow was followed by chaos, I recalled from my research a moment forty years prior when U.S. officials in Iraq described a strikingly different (if far from unproblematic) relationship with that country. In November of 1963, the Duke Ellington orchestra performed in Baghdad under the auspices of the State Department. What turned out to be a very eventful visit to Iraq began with the band's performance at a reception celebrating the founding of the United States Marine Corps held at the home of U.S. Ambassador Robert C. Strong. A U.S. embassy staffer later noted that the party for the 188-year-old Marine Corps took place in a 1,200-year-old city, further apprising the State Department that "the ambassadorial residence rocked," as four hundred Iraqis and Americans danced to "such old favorites as 'Take the "A" Train,' 'Mood Indigo,' 'Sophisticated Lady' . . . or crowded around the orchestra for a closer look at the ageless Duke."2 Local concert promoters had feared a lack of interest, but the first concert on November 12 not only sold out but was broadcast live in its entirety by Iraqi state television. According to the embassy, an enthusiastic first-night audience watched the concert at Khuld Hall near the presidential palace, while "all over the city thousands sat around television sets in open air cafés and restaurants or in the comfort of their own homes and enjoyed the artistry of one of the great contemporary figures in American music."3 While we cannot know the depth of the American official's appreciation of the ancient cultural heritage of Iraq, it is evident that he appreciated the richness of the tradition enough to revel in the comparison with the less [End Page 335] venerable U.S. Marines. Here, the juxtaposition of ancient Iraqi civilization with a military institution with extensive involvement in U.S. imperial policies was as striking as the official's portrayal of a vibrant modern Iraqi public culture, in which those unable to attend the concert partook of the experience through broadcast television in cafés, restaurants, and in one another's homes. The story of Duke Ellington in Iraq opens with a birthday party, but will continue with jazz concerts, nightclub appearances, a coup d'etat, and the U.S. sale of military helicopters to an allied Iraqi regime; and points us forty years ahead to all-too-familiar scenes of bombings, civilian casualties, looted museums, the torture of Iraqi detainees, and smashed pianos. I begin with this story not to suggest that the United States once had a better, or even a more complex and nuanced, relationship with Iraq, but because I think the story of Ellington in Iraq highlights the valuable challenges raised by Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas for practitioners of American studies, and especially those concerned with transnational American studies: what are the implications of the troubled history and present of American public diplomacy and the "state-private network for political warfare" for our endeavors to forge a critical American studies? Given the entanglement of public diplomacy in U.S. hegemonic projects of the past fifty years, and taking as a point of departure Kennedy and Lucas's compelling discussion of the distinctiveness of the contemporary regeneration of public diplomacy, we might begin with the obvious absurdities in the term "public diplomacy." The term, Kennedy and Lucas explain, was defined...

Arts participation as cultural capital in the United States, 1982–2002: Signs of decline?

We analyzed Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts for 1982, 1992, and 2002 to see if trends in U.S. arts attendance are consistent with the perception of many sociologists of culture that the role of the arts as cultural capital is in decline. From a Bourdieuian perspective, a dramatic deflation in the value of the arts as cultural capital (the “meltdown scenario”) would manifest itself in (1) large declines in high-culture arts participation rates (2) especially among the youngest cohorts that (3) are not evident in participation in middlebrow activities and (4) are concentrated among groups for whom cultural capital is most important, i.e. (4a) highly educated people and (4b) women.) Results are mixed. Trend data are not consistent with the meltdown scenario, but do suggest change in the position of different arts genres within cultural capital and ongoing attrition in the audience for many of the arts. Consistent with the decline perspective, younger cohorts’ attendance rates have fallen for most high-culture performing-arts attendance activities. (Because college attendance increased in the 1960s, the decline is not visible in the middle cohorts until one disaggregates by education level.) In contrast to the decline perspective, however, declines are as bad or worse for several middlebrow cultural activities; attendance rates for art museums and jazz concerts have increased; and rates have declined more slowly for women and college graduates than for others. Two changes are evident: first, greater elite and general interest in the visual arts and jazz and less in classical music, ballet, and theatre (trends consistent with Peterson's “omnivore theory,” aspects of postmodern theory, and the notion that the content of cultural capital evolves over time); and, second, gradual decline among almost all age/gender/education groups in rates of attendance at live cultural events broadly defined, probably reflecting greater competition from at-home entertainment options and changes in population composition and family structure.

Antecedents and Consequences—Organizing for Improvisation: The Backstage Story of the Vancouver Jazz Concert and Symposium

Overview of the process of organizing the Vancouver Jazz Concert and Symposium.

Cooperation as communicative accomplishment: A symbolic interaction analysis of an improvised Jazz Concert

Weick (1983) suggests that understanding prototypical cases of organizational communication increases our understanding beyond the event itself. In Weick (1990) he further argues that the jazz orchestra is one such case. Following Weick's call, this is a study of a jazz concert performed by a zero‐history group of seasoned professionals. The performance was videotaped, and one of the musicians acted as a participant‐informant, explaining instant‐by‐instant interpretive processes through the course of the concert. The two forms of data, videotape and participant‐informant, are analyzed in light of Couch's (1986) theory of elementary forms and Miller, Hintz, and Couch's (1975) theory of the elements of sociation.

A Review: Survey Organization Differences in Estimating Public Participation in the Arts

There are two main sources of arts participation data for the United States. One is the survey of public participation in the arts (SPPA '82 and SPPA '85), conducted for the National Endowment for the by the U.S. Bureau of the Census across the full twelve months of 1982 and the first six months of 1985. In each month of those years, a separate random sample of about 1,500-2,000 individuals aged 18 and over were interviewed personally as a supplement to the National Crime Survey. The SPPA's core questions concerned the extent to which respondents had attended arts performances (e.g., jazz concerts, opera, ballet) in the previous year. In March 1984 (as in 1980 and 1987), Louis Harris and Associates (1984) independently conducted its America and the Arts survey. This public opinion study included several questions on the public's participation in these same types of arts activities. While the specific questions did vary from those asked in the SPPA and there are no outside validity data for complete verification, there is enough commonality in content and consistency in results across activities to isolate significant differences across the two survey organizations. This review compares the survey estimate of arts and recreational participation for these two major data sources-one governmental and the other commercial. The self-report questions are not identical and differ somewhat in time of data collection so that the comparisons are not true experiments in the sense that the classic Stouffer (1955), Steiner (1963), Schuman and Presser (1981), and Bishop, Oldendick, and Tuchfarber (e.g., 1982) studies were. The analysis does involve comparing some questions that involve multiple behaviors in the same item (e.g., Did you do activity x or y?) with those that ask about a single activity (Did you do activity x? and Did you do activity

The Emergence of the Jazz Concert, 1935-1945

More than fifty years have passed since the famous concert given by Benny Goodman in Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938. It was an event acknowledged at the time as a landmark in the acceptance of jazz by American society-an important rite of passage for a music that previously had been associated in the public mind with the dance hall, the saloon, and the vaudeville theater. For all its symbolic significance, Goodman's Carnegie Hall debut was less an isolated event than the crest of a wave. The decade from 1935 to 1945, from the onset of the swing era to the end of World War II, may be seen as the period in which the jazz concert as institution took root in American cultural life.

Jazz and the Concert Halls: The Eddie Condon Concerts, 1942-48

At least since Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert', jazz has been performed in most of the major concert halls of America and Europe and is usually distinguished in the popular mind from pop, rock, or country musics. On the other hand, jazz is also distinguished from classical music and has never enjoyed the special governmental and philanthropic subsidies lavished on our major symphony orchestras. Neither has jazz enjoyed the commercial success of rock or pop music. In fact, jazz still mainly subsists in nightclubs. Eddie Condon (1905-73) was a plectrum guitarist, entrepreneur, spokesman, organizer, and promoter of jazz who caught the ambiguity of the relationship between popular and traditional culture in his mock proverb that isn't an Art. Canning vegetables is an Art. Getting a sun tan is an Art. Jazz is just unscored music.2 Despite this and other disclaimers, Condon did much to further the history of jazz as a concert music, and his efforts reveal both the rigidity and the endurance of our cultural categories for musical sounds. Condon's jazz concerts in New York City's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall began in 1942. Goodman's big band concerts in 1938 and 1939 had been performances of arranged music, although solo improvisations were certainly not lacking. Condon's brand of small-group jazz featured groups of seven musicians who improvised without reference to any written musical scores. Moreover, Condon's concerts were not once-a-year affairs, for he tried to put his concerts on a regular monthly basis, effectively establishing another financial and aesthetic format for the music.

Call for a New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Meeting

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New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Annual Meeting

New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Annual Meeting

Call for a New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Meeting

Call for a New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Meeting

New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Annual Meeting

New Orleans Jazz Concert at the 1973 APSA Annual Meeting

Chamber Music for the Musically Gifted

source of recognition. Are directors short-changing students by spending two or three months out of the school year preparing a huge Broadway spectacular, or by taking outstanding wind players and spending an equal amount of time readying a stage band for an exclusive jazz concert or competition? Broadway show productions require hundreds, and in some instances thousands, of man hours outside regular rehearsal time. In today's secondary schools academic pressure is continually increasing. Examinations have become more frequent and demanding. Many of the musically gifted, who are also academically gifted, are being forced to weigh the importance of music participation in their school curriculum.