Music Practices as Social Relations: Chicago Music Communities and the Everyday Significance of Playing Jazz.

Abstract

Scholars often consider jazz in terms of its most innovative performers, exemplary recordings, and groundbreaking performances. Yet most jazz is played by little-known musicians who rarely record or perform at major venues. This study, written against the monolithic history of jazz, argues that musical meanings are deeply connected to specific, local, face-to-face social relations, that these face-to-face musical practices contribute to the intersubjective construction of individual and community identity, and that face-to-face communities use general musical practices, broad social identities, and urban space to achieve local social goals.

This dissertation depicts the social and musical practices of several distinct communities and is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2006 at jam sessions and performances held at The Negro League Café, The Chambers, and other Chicago venues. Detailed narratives show how musical practices and social relations are connected at fundamental levels. For example, different approaches to harmonizing jazz standards determine not only which notes are played, but also which players are welcomed to the bandstand. Ethnographic accounts portray musicians as they construct racial, gender, artistic, and professional identities that draw on grand narratives, while firmly rooted in local social relations. Considering jazz as a variety of face-to-face musical and social practices complicates understandings of individual and communal identity, and challenges the notion that jazz has a single authentic history or that it unproblematically represents “America’s music,” “African American music,” or other broad social formations that are, in Benedict Anderson’s terminology, “imagined communities.” Deep connections between jazz practices and local social relations suggest that such connections also exist in other musical communities and among amateurs and professionals engaged in other artistic activities as well.

Music need not be ‘great’ in order to do the kinds of social work so important to musical practice. People play jazz in many ways to many different ends, none truer than the others, each true to the particulars of their time and place of performance. Musicians create deeply felt identities, social bonds, and aesthetic values through virtuosic and amateur performances alike, and they need not change musical history to change their own.