Search Results

This chapter examines some of the meanings that emerge from jazz performance based on statements by musicians regarding their approaches to musical events and their interpretation and evaluation. Through identification of their common concerns, it proposes that they have developed and operate within the parameters of a set of normative and evaluative criteria called a “blues aesthetic.” In defining that aesthetic, the chapter explores its foundations in African American culture and other, parallel and competing, discourses and aesthetic formations.

This chapter examines how jazz fans, especially the most active concertgoers (the regulars), respond to a musical performance. It first considers how fans become part of jazz communities and how they contribute to the New York City jazz scene. It then shows how nonperforming musicians fill the performance space, suggesting that these offstage participants, who are also “performing” jazz, constitute the unseen scene, the silent and not-so-silent majority that forms an integral part of communal music-making. It also explains what happens when fans are in the house: how their musical tastes develop, how they view performers and performances, and how their private and public listening practices inform their understandings of and appreciation for jazz and jazz performances. The chapter concludes that when jazz audiences with “big ears” attend to and interact with live music and musicians, it creates a sympathetic environment where jazz can come alive.

This chapter suggests that consideration of space and spatiality enhances a jazz historical narrative which generally renders geography as inert and subservient to time. In particular, those two concepts highlight the impact that attempts to regulate the use of space in cities has had on jazz historically—determining, among other things, where jazz musicians can perform, how often, and for whom. Zoning laws, uneven spatial development, and a shift from an industrial to a service economy over the last several decades have been just as crucial as developments in musical style for the making and interpreting of jazz. The chapter argues that jazz performance is inseparable from a loose and shifting assemblage of agents and institutions—the jazz scene—which facilitates (and inhibits) the public presentation of the music and musicians in live performance and on recordings.

This chapter examines the role of jazz presenters in connecting artists and audiences in the here and now of improvised performances. It first provides an overview of the business of live jazz performances that take place in concert halls and clubs and in less formal performance spaces, along with the challenges faced by presenters running their venues as for-profit businesses. It then analyzes the attitudes and activities of venue operators and concert producers in the context of their professional endeavors and particularly in their interactions with musicians and fans. It also considers the presenters' relationship with jazz musicians and audiences and shows that they are part of the unseen scene whose role in providing a place and time is vital to collective expressions of music.

This chapter examines how intimate social correspondence between active participants in New York City's avant-jazz scene engenders individual and group identities—a sense of who we are, where we go, what we love, and how we live. It first considers how fellowship, and particularly camaraderie, develops among fans during and after jazz performances. It then looks at how jazz fans interface with “club/houses” and the people that run them and goes on to discuss social determinants of musical taste. It also explores one of the occupational hazards associated with jazz fandom in New York City, what Steve Dalachinsky called “divided nights.” The chapter shows that active concertgoers, particularly avant-jazz fans, collectively identify and express themselves through improvised music, and describes gregarious yet self-contained, intimate jazz communities as an example of both an extended family and “a group of separates.”

This chapter discusses some of the ways in which individual listeners interface with, understand, and thereby appreciate improvised jazz performances. It first considers the different explanations for the role of listener agency in the act of musical perception, along with musical “facts” associated with a given performance. It then examines musical elements that resist analysis and classification, including timbre, nonstandard pitches or tunings, and rhythmic flexibility. It also explains how jazz musicians respond to emergent developments in a group improvisation and how people's ways of comprehending jazz are informed by the various contexts of listening. Finally, it looks at the elements of surprise that contribute to the overall immediacy of a performance.

This chapter focuses on the communication between musicians and listeners during jazz performances: how performers engage listeners, how jazz audiences express agency, and how both derive deep meanings from reciprocal interactions that culminate in collective improvisations. The discussion shifts between the views of musician-performers and that of audience-performers, with special attention given to avant-jazz concertgoers. The chapter first considers how jazz musicians engage with lay audiences during performances and how listeners, as coagents and co-performers, engender and elaborate collective sociomusical improvisations. It then describes jazz's extramusical and metaphysical aspects and explains how it derives deep meanings from its racial and cultural heritage. It shows that the realization of jazz's profound intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, and metaphysical “truths” transcends the here/hear and now, the place and time of music-making, to create a temporary state of social and spiritual synergy.

This chapter discusses the music of the men surrounding pianist Lennie Tristano in the mid-1940s. Their music is usually regarded as crucial to the development of the jazz avant-garde because “Intuition” and “Digression”—recorded in 1949 by an ensemble that included saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and guitarist Billy Bauer—are reputed to be the first “free,” totally improvised jazz performances. The Tristano ensemble's free pieces sound very Tristano-like and would seem to have little or no organic connection with the music of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and company. The deeper significance of the Tristano-ites lies in Tristano's transformation of jazz's historical self-consciousness into a rationale for making a new kind of music.