Professional Jazz Musicians Research Articles

Musical identities of professional jazz musicians: a focus group investigation

Views about jazz, and being a jazz musician, were gathered from current Scottish practitioners. Jazz is a uniquely interactive creative practice, dependent on shared practices and meanings. These are inseparable from social and cultural contexts; however, research on musicians’ views has been concentrated on individuals in the USA. This study therefore uses focus group interviewing to access group musical identities in the UK. Reflexive issues of the research procedure are also addressed. Maintaining swing feel and a balance of collective and individual practices emerged as important. Eclectic professional practice created a demanding lifestyle; in this context, the group aspect of jazz is integral to related musical identities. Diverse discourses highlighted the constructed nature of these identities; focus groups are thus a useful method for this field. Consideration of the interview circumstances suggests how these function, and has implications for subsequent research.

Joseph Santini: Divided I Stand

This short story chronicles a professional jazz musician, Joseph Santini, in conflict about whether he should accept a full-time teaching position as a high school music educator. This story focuses, interprets, clarifies, and communicates Joseph’s conflict. It also demonstrates the use of stories for culturally relevant research. Joseph’s experience transcends impressions of musicians and teachers prevalent in the dominant cultural milieu. The story offers a deeper insight into Joseph’s life as he explores teacher education and is guided by his artistic and performative experience. The coda at the end briefly discusses the use of creative nonfiction in research and how it can be a powerful tool to help musicians resolve their conflicts.

Relationship Between Complexity and Liking as a Function of Expertise

The inverted-U hypothesis has much empirical support in the field of experimental aesthetics. This hypothesis predicts that moderately complex art objects should be preferred over very simple or very complex art objects. Although it is tacitly believed that this hypothesis applies to experts, the literature does not contain any convincing studies that demonstrate this as fact. The present study addresses this issue. Professional jazz and bluegrass musicians rated the complexity of and their liking for short, but complete, jazz and bluegrass improvisations. Complexity and liking were operationalized by subjects� judgments on seven-point Likert-like scales. Regressing liking onto complexity did not reveal any evidence for an inverted-U relation for experts. Moreover, no relationship between liking and complexity was found for the jazz musicians; a negative relation was found for the bluegrass musicians, but only when listening to the bluegrass improvisations. Furthermore, by comparing the expert data with a reanalysis of nonexpert data collected in a previous, but identical study, we propose as a first approximation that musical expertise dissolves the relationship between liking and complexity.

The Jazz Community as an Art World

Just over forty years ago, the American anthropologists Alan Merriam and Raymond Mack published a paper in which they aimed to present ‘…a factual description of what we shall call the jazz community’ (1960: 211). As they recognised, the term ‘community’ is problematic in various ways, but what Merriam and Mack had in mind was that group of people who not only have an interest in jazz, but who display an ‘…extreme identification with and participation in the occupational role and ideology of the professional jazz musician’ (ibid.) They noted the relatively large proportion of the jazz community who were themselves musicians of some kind, ranging from former professionals to occasional amateurs, and, in part because of this, emphasised the extent to which, from a sociological point of view, professional players and their public could be regarded as members of a single group, sharing a particular ideology (ibid: 217). As more recent research has shown (e.g. DeVeaux, 1995), the high proportion of performers within the jazz public has remained a significant characteristic of the jazz scene generally. For the moment however, I want to focus on the central idea developed by Merriam and Mack. In their words: While the jazz community is characterised by a number of distinctive behavior patterns, almost without exception these tend to cluster around one central theme – the isolation of the group from society at large, an isolation which is at once psychological, social, and physical (ibid).

Improvisational creativity: An analysis of jazz performance

Abstract: This article addresses the phenomenon of improvisational creativity, taking jazz performance as a prominent example within American culture. A series of interviews were conducted with professional jazz musicians. The interviews focused on creativity and jazz improvisation. Five salient characteristics of jazz improvisation, which distinguish it from compositional creativity, were identified in the interviews. Improvisation and composition are compared and discussed within the context of current creativity theory. Given that most creativity theory has focused on compositional forms of creativity, the analysis of improvisational performance could provide a new perspective on the creative process.

The relationship between selected scales of the Adjective Check List and musical creativity: A validation study

The purpose of this study was to determine whether personality characteristics associated with creativity in other samples of creative adults would distinguish a group of professional jazz musicians, selected for excellence of improvisational ability, from a group of professional symphonic musicians. A second purpose was to determine whether such differences found between these professional groups would also characterize groups of adolescent jazz and symphonic music students. In this regard, 60 male professional musicians (30 jazz and 30 symphonic) and 60 male student musicians (30 jazz and 30 symphonic) were asked to respond to items of the Adjective Check List (ACL). The ACL failed to distinguish between the jazz and symphonic players at every level of analysis—from two specific creativity scales, through profile analysis, and on down to the item level. These findings raise questions about the generalizability of the ACL creativity scales.