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CHAPTER 3

Jazz and Spatiality

The Development of Jazz Scenes

On many nights during my fieldwork, I would leave my apartment on 119th Street and walk to the 1/9 train station at 116th and Broadway. After descending the stairs on the downtown side, I would proceed to the far end of the station in order to get a seat in the front car. Upon arriving at 14th Street, I’d exit the station on the downtown side and walk up the stairs into the New York night. Turning 180 degrees toward 7th Avenue South, I’d orient myself by looking for St. Vincent’s Hospital and then looking right, where I could see the now-fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the southern horizon. Walking down 7th Avenue in their direction, I would soon encounter the red awning of the Village Vanguard stretching over the sidewalk. If I continued in that direction, I could look to the right at 10th Street, as I passed under the sign for Dix et Sept, and see patrons waiting to enter Smalls. Going further down, past Christopher Street, I might also see the enclosed sidewalk café of Sweet Basil (later Sweet Rhythm), through whose windows I could gauge the number of patrons within and perhaps catch a glimpse of the performers. Alternatively, I might have turned left at Christopher and headed toward 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street, where by going to the left I could choose between performances at the Blue Note and Visiones in a single block.

Other potential routes might have taken me north and east toward Bradley’s on University Place, north and west toward Zinno on 13th Street, or much further south, into Tribeca, where the Knitting Factory was located on Leonard Street. Regardless of my destination on a given night, the proximity of those venues to one another, as well as to Russ Musto’s Village Jazz Shop (at 163 West 10th Street), made that area of Greenwich Village a jazz neighborhood. More accurately, my walks through the city on those evenings, my routes and routines (Certeau 1984, 97–110; Román-Velázquez 1999, 64–65), created a jazz-related understanding of the neighborhood through my deemphasizing spaces that equally characterized the area: piano bars like Rose’s Turn, rock clubs like the Lion’s Den and the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, or the various pizza shops, cafés, lounges, restaurants, and bars that might have attracted other people. Indeed, in discussing the neighborhood with friends who had a stronger interest in other aspects of New York nightlife, I was generally astonished to find that we had wildly divergent conceptions of the same terrain.

Such experiences reinforced for me the notion that space, in its geographic and theoretical dimensions, is a crucial component for understanding and conceptualizing jazz. Accounts of the music’s development, usually starting in New Orleans, moving to Chicago, and finally settling in New York—with brief side trips to Kansas City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other locales—generally acknowledge the role of space, but, like race, its importance registers in such accounts primarily in jazz’s past. Those locales figure in the historical narrative only as backdrops for the supposed real action: the development of musical style as exemplified in the work of the music’s masters. The places where Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Ornette Coleman, for example, spent their childhood years (in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, respectively) are important only because they initially shaped musical lives that seemed less affected by geography once those individual musicians’ styles were formed. In other words, rather than being considered constitutive of musical or historical development or being viewed dynamically, the locales in which jazz musicians have flourished were a scrim in front of which they marched on their way to making history. Even those works that have explored the role played by various cities, states, and regions in jazz’s development (e.g., Ostransky 1978; Gordon 1986; Pearson 1987; Gioia 1992; Oliphant 1996; Björn and Gallert 2001; Suhor 2001) see space as subsidiary to time, devoting less space to geography after jazz styles or musicians have emerged.

In differing ways, these writings describe the built environments, legal structures, and migration patterns that make certain places attractive and fertile (temporary) destinations or points of embarkation for musicians. Each city, state, or region (with New York City as a notable exception) experiences a rise and fall (cf. Kruse 2003, 14), so that New Orleans ceases to be important after the closing of the Storyville red-light district; Chicago loses much of its centrality once New Orleans migrants and other musicians, following a crackdown on speakeasies in the late 1920s, depart for New York; Kansas City “fades out” with the end of the Pendergast political machine; and Detroit’s lively jazz scene is eclipsed by the rise of Motown Records. Studies of jazz outside the United States (Godbolt 1984, 1989; Kater 1992; Starr 1994; Atkins 2001, 2003) act as supplements that mildly challenge the standard narratives without necessarily expanding the role of geography. Those nations and regions are simply other places whose roles in jazz’s development merit consideration. The master narrative itself, however, remains intact—at least in the United States—and isn’t subject to modification or elaboration.

Careful observers, however, might notice the threads linking local stories and might see as well what many of those tales tend not to emphasize: that jazz activity does not disappear from those localities after their supposed declines. The elements that comprise a given scene—musicians, educational institutions, performance venues, and the like—continue operating long afterward, if only on a muted level. After all, New Orleans from the 1970s to the ’90s nurtured the careers of Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Payton, Peter Martin, and Brian Blade. Detroit did the same for Robert Hurst, Kenny Garrett, Geri Allen, James Carter, Jaribu Shahid, and Craig Taborn, just as Chicago earlier did for Sun Ra, various members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Steve Coleman, and Lonnie Plaxico or as Los Angeles did for Charles Mingus, Horace Tapscott, Charles McPherson, Arthur Blythe, and David Murray, among others. Even those places that might seem peripheral in the development of jazz, like St. Louis and Memphis, have done similar work for musicians such as Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, James Williams, Mulgrew Miller, and Donald Brown. Although some of those musicians might have moved to specific metropolitan areas as young adults, the role played by their previous homes in their development is unassailable.

These observations suggest another way of examining jazz’s development, one that devotes greater attention to the roles of space and spatiality over time and addresses the ways in which jazz musicians and other interested parties have sought to negotiate them. As developed in the work of Marxist geographers (e.g., Harvey 1989b; Soja 1989), inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974), those terms draw our attention to the variability and contingency of geography. Although literal space might be taken as a given, seen in commonsense terms as an arrangement of physical elements or a particular landscape, spatiality is something different, a function of how people manipulate space and make it useful for their own ends. As a concept, then, spatiality is—like society—a dynamic product of the relationships between individuals and groups and is, as a result, instrumental in the way that they navigate both space and time.

Edward W. Soja writes that, for its part, spatiality is distinct from both the “physical space of material nature and the mental space of cognition and representation, each of which is used and incorporated into the social construction of spatiality but cannot be conceptualized as its equivalent” (1989, 120). He argues further that human activity (e.g., the construction of buildings, the paving of streets, and the passage of laws regulating the use of them) and representations of geography (e.g., Greenwich Village as a jazz neighborhood, New York as “the city that never sleeps”) transform material space into something that transcends our most simplistic understandings of it. Spatiality is a direct result of these transformative processes, but it is neither static nor a one-time result of them: it “always remains open to further transformation…. It is never primordially given or permanently fixed” (122). The complex of factors that has allowed jazz to flourish in particular spaces at different times, therefore, argues for a history that takes account of the built environment and human uses and representations of it as more than silent partners to presumably more vocal historical processes. A jazz scene, provisionally understood as a spatial formation, is not something that was constructed in the 1920s, for example, and subsequently became a self-sustaining entity, the interrelationship of whose elements did not change.¹

In a dramaturgical sense, we might conceive a scene in complementary ways that encompass both space and time. On one hand, the term references space: it denotes a backdrop, background, or context, something that provides a setting for action. In this sense, a scene constrains and conditions the kinds of interactions that can take place among those positioned or performing in it. It is thus more than an inert setting for musical activity: through both their actions in and representations of that space, musicians and other participants transform it into something usable (Cohen 1999, 247; see also Olson 1997, 275). On the other hand, a scene can signify time: a brief episode in the larger unfolding of a narrative, an identifiable, bounded temporal space that is not fully meaningful when removed from its narrative context. Either way, studying scenes allows a researcher to place various relations between groups and their negotiation of space and time at the center of inquiry and to move beyond the oppositions between musicians and various others. Moreover, the frequent use of the term scene by jazz musicians and critics gives it an emic valence and specificity missing from other formulations.²

Perhaps the first sustained meditation on musical scenes in popular music studies is an article published by Will Straw (1991). In it, he begins by denning musical communities as entities that are presumed to have stable populations and to be exploring one or more musical forms within a specific geographical heritage. Musical communities are most effective, he writes, when they link contemporary musical practices with a specific heritage that renders those practices meaningful. In contrast, a musical scene “is that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (373). For him, rather than working as an exploration of a particular style over time or in terms of a specific heritage, a musical scene operates on the principles of alliance building and musical boundary drawing through varied forms of communication. Participants in a musical scene are involved not only in the exploration of a style, but also in the active denning of that style’s parameters through relations with other musics, musicians, and audiences. As such, they both observe and modify conventions through their practical action.

As processes of internationalization and globalization have become more central in the recording industry, and as ownership of recording companies has become the province of a few large conglomerates (including Universal, Sony, and Time Warner), processes occurring on the national and international levels can and do have a significant impact on positionings and articulations within localized musical scenes (Erlmann 1993; Garofalo 1993; Guilbault 1993; Negus 1992, 1999; Román-Velázquez 1999). In describing the constant spatio-temporal circulation of recordings and live performances, however, Straw rules out the possibility of a particular local scene having a significant effect on the nature or composition of other local scenes: “The relationship of different local or regional scenes to each other is no longer one in which specific communities emerge to enact a forward movement to which others are drawn” (1991, 378). Instead, he says, musicians are easily able to circulate from one local scene to another without having to adapt themselves to local circumstances (374; see also Florida et al. 2010, 786).

Although Holly Kruse (1993) agrees with much of what Straw has written, she is highly critical of his last point. She argues that the emergence of highly influential local rock scenes originating in Champaign, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Seattle, Washington, in the 1980s and ’90s undermines Straw’s conclusion. She is critical as well of two other studies that focus on local musical communities: Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians (1989) and Sara Cohen’s Rock Culture in Liverpool (1991). She feels that both writers “overlook an important way in which musicians and others involved in local scenes understand their own involvement: as something that differentiates them from individuals and groups in other communities” (Kruse 1993, 38). She admits, despite her critique of localized inquiry, that “local musical scenes are the sites at which we may first want to look … in order to understand the relationship between situated musical practices and the construction of identity” (39), especially since, as Straw suggests, many musicians do not always find it possible to circulate easily from one scene to another (40). The common thread in the work of Straw and Kruse, nonetheless, is the advantage that the study of musical scenes has over that of musical communities. Rather than resting on static conceptions of style or geography, a scholar focused on a particular scene has to engage with the interactions among actors and institutions on both local and translocal levels over time.

In this context, Barry Shank’s 1994 study of the “rock’n’roll” scene in Austin, Texas, is exemplary. He sees its emergence as the result of both local practices and modes of identification reaching back to the late nineteenth century and larger interactions with the recording industry and other nonlocal agents and institutions. For him, a musical scene is a “signifying community,” “a necessary condition for the production of … music capable of moving past the mere expression of locally significant cultural values and generic development—that is, beyond stylistic permutation—toward an interrogation of dominant structures of identification, and potential cultural transformation” (122).³ Although Shank might be accused of uncritically grafting the subcultural work of Hebdige (1979) onto American cultural forms, he is on more solid ground in describing musical scenes as systems capable of producing meaning, ones that allow for varied associations to be made among “cultural signifiers [e.g., musical signs and individual bodies] of identity and community” (125). Scenes for Shank are thus predicated on the interaction between older notions of community—geographically and historically rooted—and extralocal processes of communication and identification. Musicians involved with local scenes are concerned simultaneously with the construction and maintenance of local and translocal identities and their attendant boundaries (see also Kruse 1993, 38).

Choosing the scene as the unit of study, therefore, involves enlarging one’s focus within a single locale as well as beyond it. Shank’s inquiry highlights the important roles played by musicians as well as various social movements, economic factors, publications, record stores, zoning regulations, and performance spaces in the constitution of a scene on the local level. In addition, he links those local activities to the larger national and international activities of the recording industry and various musical forms. All of them are important in the constitution of the Austin scene and, by extension, other local scenes.

Drawing upon popular music writing, as well as those local jazz studies cited earlier, one might begin to glimpse the general contours of jazz scenes. Each one consists of groups of participants (musicians, audiences, teachers, venue owners, managers, recording industry personnel, critics, and historians), as well as educational institutions, performance venues, record labels, and publications, which collaborate to present, develop, and comment upon musical events in both recorded and live forms. The specific shape of any local scene is dependent upon the participation of different combinations of these groups of agents and institutions. Their collective work, moreover, is both enabled and constrained by accommodations to and modifications of the built environments in which they are situated. The regulation of public space expressed in zoning laws, for example, determines whether, when, and where performance venues can exist. The emergence and eventual demise of jazz districts in specific places at specific times—Storyville in the 1910s, the South Side of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1950s, Harlem in the 1920s, or Central Avenue in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s—are a function of such interactions on the local level (Ogren 1989; Lopes 2002).

In Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1920 (1984), for example, Lewis Erenberg discusses the changes in public entertainment occurring in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. He describes the novel forms of social interaction centered on cabarets and rathskellers, particularly in the Times Square area in the 1910s. Although rathskellers were associated primarily with public drinking and vice, cabarets, often lavishly decorated, were conceived as a respectable alternative for well-heeled patrons. Both kinds of venues had high cover charges, served expensive food and drink, and offered their patrons floor shows and opportunities for dancing (119). The atmosphere in cabarets differed in one major respect: it brought men and women “into a more intimate relationship than was possible in conventional theatres…. Performers appeared on the floor at eye level, standing or moving amid the diners seated in a semi-circle…. The audiences were close enough to touch the performers, and they often did so in specially designed numbers and rituals” (124–25). The sociability encouraged in cabarets, which catered primarily to audiences who had seen theatrical performances earlier in the evening, led to the establishment of the nightclub:

In order to allow patrons to remain undisturbed by the 2:00 a.m. curfew laws and police harassment, promoters began buying the charters of defunct private social organizations in the fall of 1914 and turned special rooms of their establishments into so-called clubs…. When the regular portion of the restaurant closed, members adjourned to the room set aside for the club…. Some establishments adhered to strict rules of membership and dues, but most merely declared those remaining after the legal closing hours as members. Writing their names on cards supplied by the management, customers henceforth had proof of membership. The night “club” remained open as long as the desire for enjoyment prevailed, rather than as the law or the duration of the play demanded. (129–30)

Legally sanctioned as places where alcohol could be served, cabarets and their attendant nightclubs encouraged their patrons to lower their inhibitions in pursuit of pleasure and afforded them limited opportunities to mingle with less respectable people (like gangsters and gamblers) without threatening their social status. In other words, a change in the definition and use of public space was a crucial component in the transformation of cultural life for at least one group of people in New York City.

New York, however, was not unique in this respect. Kathy Ogren (1989, 56–86) details the way in which similar scenarios played out in other metropolitan centers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Transitional areas and vice districts—particularly after the passage of the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, in 1920—became the primary locus for cabaret-style entertainment. Ogren observes that “residential zoning laws designed to regulate commercial development and racial segregation often combined … and forced blacks and other inner-city residents to live in the same areas that supported vice” (1989, 60; see also Ostransky 1978, 63, 85–86). Wherever they existed, and however they came into being, such spaces proved crucial in the development of jazz, for they gave professional musicians opportunities to perform and allowed audiences the opportunity to hear them. Moreover, the work of publishing and recording companies as well as coverage in newspapers and other contemporary publications, both local and national, helped not only to create scenes but also to generate public interest in them. Additionally, the success of early jazz and blues recordings beginning in the late 1910s helped to cement interest in the emerging musical styles in New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other places.

Many musicians were drawn to New York City in the 1910s and 1920s by increasing opportunities to perform and record, as Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt show in Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (1962). The authors present a richly detailed account of the early jazz scene in New York City, discussing musicians, various performance venues, and the spaces in Harlem and near Times Square that were the centers of music-related activities through the 1950s. In their chronicle of the careers of musicians such as James Reese Europe, Scott Joplin, Fletcher Henderson, and Bix Beiderbecke and the fortunes of venues in different parts of the city, they continually remind their readers of the importance of seeing jazz’s development as encompassing more than progressively more intricate musical arrangements:

By 1923 and 1924 it had become fashionable to listen to jazz. Not the rough, crude jazz of a few years before, but the new “symphonic” jazz. Just as in the 1950s, another of jazz’s brief moments of stylish attention, there were lectures on jazz, “concerts,” lengthy articles in slick magazines, and some interest from [music] publishing houses…. Carl Van Vechten, Abbe Niles, Henry Osgood, Virgil Thomson, and Don Knowlton were contributing articles to magazines like Harper’s, Literary Digest, and New Republic. The Negro revues, with their jazz orchestras and blues vocalists, were playing to large and enthusiastic audiences along Broadway. (131–32)

The real rush to Harlem began about 1926, and by 1927 and 1928 it was one of the fashionable places in New York. The night life began to have some of the glitter that [Jazz Age] novels described. There were nightly radio programs from the larger clubs, the bands were getting frequent notices from the magazines and newspapers, and there was a noisy parade of musicians through most of the small clubs. (196)

[During the swing era, the] expenses of organizing and advertising a band were so high that the successful leaders had to enter into complicated financial arrangements with outside backers. Everything about the new bands cost money, from hiring soloists away from their present bands to buying uniforms and music stands…. Newspapers and trade magazines were flooded with press-agent releases. As the publicity grew more insistent, the personalities became more and more the centers of attraction. They were given nearly as much publicity as successful movie stars. If the promotion caught the public’s eye, the investment could be made highly profitable. Willard Alexander’s M.C.A. booking office handled the very slick and very expensive promotions of both Benny Goodman and Count Basie and realized a small fortune on the percentage of the bands’ gross take…. Behind the elegant face that swing presented to the public was a nervous, tensely competitive entertainment industry that was exploiting the new style. (242)

In short, a number of factors drew musicians to New York City, provided opportunities for them to perform in different parts of the city, and made the public aware of their activities. In addition to musicians, moreover, critics, publicists, venues, and fans played prominent roles. Together they entered a stage framed by the scene, commented upon it, and, through their actions, sustained and transformed it. The development of jazz, then, was not simply a function of developments in musical style; it was also a function of developments in the use of urban space—the peregrinations of European American “cultural tourists” to largely African American areas for entertainment, the continued movement of African American musicians (but not non-performers) to downtown performance spaces (which were presumably safer for middle-class white patrons), and the use of nascent broadcasting technologies both to attract audiences to those spaces and to allow them to experience, at least vicariously, what occurred in them without actually being present.⁴

Paul Chevigny’s Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City (1991) shows how incomplete any history of the New York scene is without consideration of the municipal regulations that determined who could perform in the city’s venues, how many musicians and what instrumental combinations were permitted, and where venues could be located. These regulations, collectively known as cabaret laws (after the early twentieth-century venues that inspired them), imposed what now seem absurd strictures on venue owners. As legally defined in 1926, a cabaret was “any room, place or space in the city in which any musical entertainment, singing or dancing or other similar amusement is permitted in connection with the restaurant business or the business of directly or indirectly selling the public food or drink” (quoted in Chevigny 1991, 56). Anyone operating such an establishment was required to have a cabaret license. Initially, only venues were required to be licensed, but following the transfer of licensing functions to the police department in 1931, anyone who worked in a cabaret was required to be licensed as well. After 1940, both potential performers and regular employees of such venues were required to be fingerprinted and undergo police background checks. Depending on the results of the investigations, applicants were either issued identification cards signifying their suitability to work in cabarets or denied them in an effort to minimize the corrupting influence on cabaret patrons of “criminals and other undesirables … who come into contact with patrons under conditions conducive to criminality” (58).

The requirement of identification cards, Chevigny observes, was based on a preemptive logic that was not, at least according to existing records, supported by any actual cases of criminal conduct by musicians in or near clubs. Those musicians who were denied cabaret cards typically had criminal records, frequently for drug possession, though few, if any, arrests took place at performance venues. Rooted in fears about intimate contact between the public and (black) musicians or left-leaning comedians such as Lord Buckley, the cabaret and cabaret card laws were both paradoxical and hypocritical. As Chevigny (1991, 59–64) explains, the laws were arbitrarily enforced, so that Billie Holiday, denied a cabaret card after being convicted for narcotics possession and imprisoned in 1947, could still perform in concert in Central Park in 1948, and Frank Sinatra worked frequently at venues such as the Copa-cabana in the 1950s without ever obtaining a card.

Although the laws requiring identification cards were rescinded in 1966,⁵ other laws regulating the clubs continued to have an effect on jazz performers’ fortunes into the late 1980s. Dismayed by provisions in the city’s zoning regulations that forbade live performance in restaurants outside the areas where entertainment was permitted, lobbyists from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and later the owners of Greenwich Village coffeehouses convinced the mayor and the City Planning Commission to amend the existing laws in 1955 and 1961, to allow “incidental musical entertainment” performed by “up to three musicians, playing strings or keyboards” in restaurants (Chevigny 1991, 70–74). Because incidental entertainment could not feature horns or percussion instruments (including the vibraphone), in part to comply with noise regulations, this exception was damaging to venue owners who favored jazz but didn’t have the capital to obtain a cabaret license in addition to the other permits required to operate a business in New York City. As a result, many of them

tried to tailor their music to the … exception. The Burgundy Café … stopped using saxophones and began to emphasize the piano and hire singers. At Gregory’s, Warren Chiasson stopped playing vibraphone and switched to piano in the Chuck Wayne trio on Tuesday nights. Discovery, in 1985 a new place at Broome and Mercer Streets in Soho, took the ingenious approach of offering a trio of Reggie Workman on bass, Stanley Cowell on piano, and violinist Ali Akbar…. [But when] Bob Belden, a young saxophonist fresh from the big bands, tried to play his demonstration tape at the West End Bar … the management told him they could not hire sax players. Belden heard the same story at 55 Christopher Street, a small place in Greenwich Village. (84)

Chevigny chronicles the absurdity of the regulations and the varied legal strategies employed by the AFM, musicians, attorneys, and venue owners to have them overturned starting in the 1960s. Those efforts culminated in the incidental musical entertainment exception being ruled unconstitutional in January of 1988 by judge David Saxe, though actual change still lagged behind (86–131). The repeal of the laws was welcome, but Chevigny and a number of the people he interviewed felt that irreparable damage had been done to the scene. Indeed, the prospects for musicians seemed not to change markedly. Established performers, the very ones who could draw larger audiences, might have been less inclined to play in the venues that opened in the wake of the repeal of cabaret laws, preferring instead to devote their energies to teaching as well as performing in the dwindling number of clubs outside New York and in jazz festivals in the United States and abroad. Younger, less-established musicians perhaps benefited most from the repeal, for they found themselves with more opportunities to perform in restaurants in various parts of the city (154–66). For those reasons and many others, the economic climate for jazz venues was increasingly volatile in the 1980s and ’90s.

Some of the difficulties have a direct connection to many cities’ shifting toward neoliberal strategies to spur growth and derive tax revenue through the regulation of public space beginning with the fiscal crises of the 1970s (Sites 1997, 540). For much of the twentieth century and especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States and other capitalist nations experienced unparalleled economic prosperity based on their ability to manufacture goods for domestic and foreign consumption (Harvey 1989a, 129). Indeed, the military and financial power of the United States led to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, which “turned the dollar into the world’s reserve currency and tied the world’s economic development firmly into U.S. fiscal and monetary policy” (Harvey 1989a, 137). In this climate, ever more efficient, scientifically managed American corporations found ways to liquidate surplus goods overseas and to pass the benefits of their profitability along to their employees, especially those who were members of unions.

Between 1965 and 1973, however, signs that the postwar boom was coming to an end were ever more apparent. During that time, David Harvey writes, U.S. corporate productivity and profitability were declining; inflation accelerated to the point where the dollar’s stability as a reserve currency was called into question; and Western European nations and Japan challenged U.S. manufacturing dominance—all with the result that the dollar was devalued (Harvey 1989a, 141). One additional result of these changes, exacerbated by OPEC’s raising of oil prices in 1973, was that leaders in major municipalities had to acknowledge more directly that their tax bases were eroding. That is, the postwar boom had perhaps made it easier for them to ignore the fact that, beginning in the late 1940s, not only had affluent and middle-class dwellers (including white male heads of household who enjoyed the benefits of union membership) had chosen to move to more spacious and presumably safer suburbs (leaving other residents to deal with declining services, increased joblessness, and an attendant increase in crime; see Sugrue 1996), but corporations were also progressively transferring their manufacturing operations to more remote areas within and outside the United States as they struggled to remain competitive.

No longer able to depend on the tax revenues of the boom years, municipal leaders like those in New York City turned their attention toward the reconfiguring and regulation of space as a way of attracting capital investment from corporations and real estate developers, particularly in parts of Lower Manhattan (Sites 1997, 542–45; Hudson 1987). One related manifestation of this shift, with direct effects on jazz scenes, was those same leaders’ increased reliance on the revenue that could be derived from tourism. That is, municipal governments invested significant resources in building convention centers, improving roads in, around, or leading to central business districts, renovating or creating parks on riverfronts, revitalizing entertainment areas, providing incentives for professional sports teams to relocate, and emphasizing—sometimes even inventing—their unique cultural heritages in an attempt to attract business travelers and other visitors (Blank 1996; Zukin 1997; Hoffman 2003; Judd et al. 2003), despite little evidence that such schemes would result in the desired outcomes.

This same period witnessed the establishment of annual jazz festivals in New Orleans, Detroit, New York, and other cities (see, for example, Atkinson 1997), as well as shifts in locations where one might prominently find performing venues. As David Grazian observes in his study of blues clubs in Chicago, the cultural tourism of prior decades, which often entailed white patrons going into predominantly black areas to hear blues and jazz, was replaced by the relocation of venues to whiter, more centrally located areas—the very ones that might more easily draw visitors on vacation or on business. And as musicians realized there was more money to be made in these newer locations, it became increasingly difficult for venues located in lower-income or crime-ridden areas to remain solvent (Grazian 2003, 165–96). In New York, a similar process was underway as the aggregate number of venues decreased and the “slow march downtown” (Szwed 2000, 73), which had begun in the 1930s, continued. As a result, venues came to be more concentrated in and on the fringes of Greenwich Village. By the end of the twentieth century, even the lofts that had seemed a viable alternative in the 1970s were “done in by gentrification and new city laws that drove … musicians out. It was … a dry period for jazz, and only the oldest and most stable clubs survived. There would be other clubs coming along, but … most of the new ones were either supper clubs modeled on an old-time idea of social class, tourist sites aimed specifically at foreign clientele (and sometimes owned by foreign money), or eclectic new takes on ’60s-styled loft clubs” (Szwed 2000, 74–75; see also Deutsche and Ryan 1984). In such a climate, musicians increasingly turned to alternative ways of supporting themselves, including teaching in emerging jazz studies programs and competing for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a number of local and regional agencies (Anderson 2002).

Indeed, even the media channels that had provided one means for musicians, venues, and labels to promote jazz began to decline during this period. The recording industry, feeling the effects of the economic downturn, was in a slump toward the end of the 1970s, with the result that many labels, including CTI, Atlantic, Elektra, and Columbia trimmed their (jazz) artist rosters and laid off employees in an attempt to remain viable. To the degree that they managed to profit from sales of recordings, they did so largely with fusion-oriented releases rather than more traditional forms of acoustic jazz. As Ricky Schultz, the national promotion manager for Warner Brothers’ jazz and progressive music department, told one reporter, his label was being more cautious about investment and expenditures: “All areas are going to be scrutinized carefully … and areas like tour support and advertising are definitely going to be affected. Also, instead of an extensive marketing campaign up front, there will be more of a wait-and-see attitude” (Paikert 1979, 44–45).

Given such grim news from the labels, the demise in 1980 of WRVR (106.7 FM), New York City’s last commercial jazz radio station, should have come as no surprise. Originally established at the Riverside Church in 1961, the station had always presented an eclectic mix of music. In a move spearheaded by Robert A. Orenbach, WRVR switched in 1974 to an all-jazz format that was dependent on advertising revenue from labels and venues. After losing money for a couple of years, the station was sold to the Sonderling Broadcasting Corporation, which altered the format to include more fusion- and pop-oriented jazz (Gans and Tusiewicz 1978). Despite the changes initiated by Sonderling’s program directors and signs that the prospects for jazz were improving by 1979, the station, then owned by Viacom, was unable to generate either solid ratings or sufficient revenue and abruptly switched to a country music format on 8 September 1980 (“WRVR-FM Switches” 1980; Jeske 1980).

Although a number of noncommercial stations, like WNYU-FM and WEVD-FM, increased their jazz programming, and others, including WBGO-FM, lengthened their broadcast days, many musicians, record industry executives, music retailers, and event promoters presumed WRVR’s format switch would have a chilling effect on the economy of the jazz scene, predicting that, compensatory measures aside, the markets for jazz recordings and performance would suffer. Vernon Slaughter, then vice president for progressive/jazz marketing at CBS Records, was quoted in the New York Times saying, “The whole idea of WRVR … was that it was a commercial outlet that allowed us to sell jazz. The problem is that now we don’t have a target market that’s into jazz that we can direct our advertising to directly…. New York is the largest market for jazz in the United States and when you take away WRVR it hurts” (“Radio Tries” 1980).⁶ John F. Szwed confirms some of Slaughter’s fears: “Understanding the directions taken by jazz since the ’80s is not easy. The continued diffusion of various jazz styles, the disappearance of regular reviews in most newspapers and magazines, an economic slump in the record business, the shift of some of the most vital recording activity to small recording labels and to overseas, the confusion that followed the change in record formats from vinyl to CD, all contributed to the difficulty” (2000, 269). Indeed, over the next two decades even public radio stations, forced to get more of their operating revenue from listeners, joined the exodus, abandoning jazz (and classical music) in favor of the news, talk, and special interest programs that radio consultants such as David Giovannoni guaranteed would shore up their listener bases (Freedman 2001).⁷

In short, changes in international and municipal economic policy had long-lasting effects on the viability of jazz in American cities like New York. Although conventional wisdom says that the uprisings in urban African American neighborhoods in the late 1960s were largely responsible for so-called white flight, it should be clear that the conditions that made the uprisings possible had their roots in an earlier era (Sugrue 1996). The policies implemented by municipal authorities in the 1970s and 1980s, however, had that conventional wisdom as well as an economically changed world at their root. They invoked fears about safety as well as the need to attract tourist and corporate revenue (Warren 1993; Zukin 1995) to justify certain alterations of the spatial configuration of urban environments. As bars and clubs presenting live jazz in African American neighborhoods, unable to depend on the leisure dollars of industrial workers, grew less numerous, they were replaced by venues in whiter, more affluent areas, ones that could pay even poorly compensated musicians more money. Likewise, the media outlets that benefited from venues’ promotional needs had to find new ways to attract advertising revenue. As a result, record labels, promoters, and musicians all found themselves scrambling to adjust to a changed, less economically stable environment.

These examples show that the development of jazz in a particular locale is always and everywhere a story of a musical style’s dependence on the work of a number of individuals as well as their accommodation to the ways that space is transformed and controlled. A similar perspective emerges from Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life (1961b). He focuses attention on the jazz scene in the late 1950s. His collected essays take a wide view, offering in turn discussions of the motivations and backgrounds of audiences, the role of formal and informal education in musicians’ development, the benefits and disadvantages of membership in the music union, the economics and atmosphere of jazz clubs, the constraints imposed on performers by recording contracts, and the involvement of musicians with drugs and the underworld. Likewise, Martin Williams’s essays in Jazz Heritage (1985) and elsewhere bring the picture into sharper focus, providing glimpses of musicians at work, in the recording studio and at rehearsals. By concentrating his critical eye on the nature of jazz composition and improvisation, as well as the accommodations musicians necessarily make with performance venues and various other intermediaries, Williams implicitly suggests the importance of a scene-based perspective. The work of W. Royal Stokes (1991) and Stuart Nicholson (1990) helps to complete a picture of what has happened since the end of the 1960s. None of these works, however, explicitly takes the interconnected roles of a variety of actors and institutions as its subject.

Not surprisingly, some of the most insightful work on the constitution of jazz scenes has come from journalists employed by national newspapers and international jazz magazines. Because they are of necessity more concerned with the day-to-day and month-to-month functioning of the scene, their work can be useful in exploring present-day phenomena. Magazines like JazzTimes and Down Beat from time to time include issue-based articles (Jones 1995; Corbett 1995; Gavin 2001; Milkowski 2001)—alongside news items, artist features, record reviews, and advertisements for recordings and instruments. The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic, among others, also publish occasional articles, performance reviews, and artist features. There are, of course, easily discernible biases and distortions of fact in the press. Among musicians and the critical establishment, it is somewhat expected that national and international magazines, whose main advertisers are record companies, might shy away from being overly critical of the recording industry from which they receive a great deal of their advertising revenue.