“Shaping Jazz combines a deep love for the music, a comprehensive historical understanding of what happened across two continents as it developed, and an inventive use of sociological ideas and tools, to shape a wonderful contribution to the story of jazz.”–Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds

“While there is abundant research on the innovation advantages of networks that bridge disconnections in organizations and markets, this book finally explains how the disconnections themselves are significant for innovation to take hold and emerge in the form it does. Phillips shows that network disconnections were key to the congruence between the product and market responsible for the evolution of jazz. The book is productive in theory and engaging–even magical–in substance.”–Ronald S. Burt, University of Chicago

“Offering a different approach to jazz history, Damon Phillips uses statistical data to ask questions, and ultimately find answers, about the music. Many of his arguments about the disconnectedness of jazz scenes, about marketing strategies, and about the highbrow and lowbrow perceptions of jazz intertwine and lead to even more questions. His book’s approach can teach a lot about the use of empirical data for any period in jazz history.”–Wolfram Knauer, director of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt

“Reading the history of jazz recording through perspectives from organizational science and economic theory, Damon Phillips investigates the complex interweaving of market forces, choice, genre, geography, and cultural production. This book combines rigorous and innovative methodologies with an engaging style that welcomes anyone who wants to know more about where great music comes from.”–George E. Lewis, Columbia University

“Shaping Jazz provides a rigorous and engaging look at the instrumental roles played by organizations, musicians, and regions in the evolution of jazz. It weaves historical sources with expertly executed analysis, and does an excellent job of addressing potential alternatives for the observed patterns of music popularity.”–Olav Sorenson, Yale University

“Shaping Jazz is a tour de force and invites the reader to explore how jazz might have diffused and cohered as music. This ambitious and historically informed consideration of the development of jazz offers answers to questions that readers of all types will find satisfying. A fine book indeed.”–Timothy J. Dowd, Emory University

Damon J. Phillips is the James P. Gorman Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies and the Center for Organizational Innovation.

SHAPING JAZZ

Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form

By Damon J. Phillips

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15088-8

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixIntroduction Sociological Congruence and the Shaping of Recorded Jazz…..1Chapter 1 The Puzzle of Geographical Disconnectedness…………………13Chapter 2 Further Exploring the Salience of Geography…………………40Chapter 3 Sociological Congruence and the Puzzle of Early German Jazz…..53Chapter 4 Sociological Congruence and Record Company Comparative
Advantage…………………………………………………………77Chapter 5 The Sociological Congruence of Record Company Deception………103Chapter 6 The Sociological Congruence of Identity Sequences and Adoption
Narratives………………………………………………………..120Chapter 7 Pulling It Together and Stretching It Beyond………………..137Appendix………………………………………………………….159Notes…………………………………………………………….169References………………………………………………………..187Index…………………………………………………………….203

CHAPTER 1

THE PUZZLE OF GEOGRAPHICALDISCONNECTEDNESS

I managed to play a couple of compositions together with Bud Shankat one of the festivals. He invited me because I was one of the bestplayers, and an exotic stranger from remote Russia…. At the end,the people applauded to the strange Russian on foot.

—OLEG KIREYEV, PROFESSIONAL SAXOPHONEPLAYER AND COMPOSER, 2010

As they chant esoteric Arabic words, the lute, a sitar likeinstrument, begins slowly and deliberately into the next song….This is the nature of Arabic music. Intoxicating, spiritually savageand untamed. A far Eastern form of jazz that requires not only alot of talent to play but a strong unquenchable love.

—ROSIE FAULKNER, REVIEW OF “HOUSE OF TARAB,” SeattleUniversity Spectator, OCTOBER 9, 2011

As these epigraphs illustrate, we tend to reserve a special type of appeal for musicthat is from locations that are far away or disconnected from us. Of course, one ofthe questions is whether that appeal is based on the inherent uniqueness or qualitiesof the music or whether our interpretation of the music alters its appeal giventhat we know the music’s source is foreign to us. Our biases and understandingsabout the source of a cultural object often inform our evaluations. For me, theimplications of this are powerful as they point to the fact that to study how jazzwas shaped one needs to integrate thinking about both the production and thereception of music. And as I learned over the course of writing this book, the integrationof production and reception matters a great deal when trying to understandthe emergence of the market for recorded jazz.

My investigation into jazz begins with a focus on jazz recordings before 1934,with the closest attention paid to recordings in the 1920s when the market forcommercialized recorded jazz became robustly competitive for the first time.There were several features of these data that I found quite interesting, especiallywhen looking at the social structural aspects of how musicians traveled, how firmswere positioned economically as well as socially, and how these factors seemed toaffect the production and reception of music in ways that depended on the geographicalorigins of jazz recordings.

For example, I was fascinated by the fact that before 1934 jazz was recorded insixty-seven cities according to the discographical data (see Table 1.1). Over 40% ofthese cities were outside the United States, spanning five continents and oftendisconnected from major markets such as Chicago, London, or New York. Thatwas interesting, but for me there were more interesting follow-up questions, suchas, “Does it matter that jazz was recorded in so many cities, and if so, how can thisbe understood?” “Is it necessary to consider jazz recordings from Minneapolis,Hilversum, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Calcutta when understanding the emergingmarket for recorded jazz?” and “Do we learn all we need to know about theemergence of the discographical canon by just considering cities like New Yorkand Chicago that were at the nexus of musician mobility and recording activity?”

Two additional facts made these questions even more compelling. First, as Ibegan to rank jazz titles by the number of times they have been re-recorded overthe years—a measure I call long-run appeal—it appeared that there were a disproportionatelyhigh number of songs and tunes that emerged from these more disconnectedcities than when compared to those that came from Chicago and NewYork. Many of the top recorded tunes and songs that constitute the discographicaljazz canon were originally recorded in Chicago and New York, but much ofthis music was also originally recorded outside these cities.

The second fact emerged when I examined the mobility of musicians acrossthese cities up to 1934; I tracked them through the discography according towhere they made recordings. Figure 1.1 is a network diagram of the flows of jazzmusic bandleaders across cities. For example, the top of the diagram shows thatduring the window of 1930–32, musical groups first recorded in Memphis, Tennessee,then traveled to Atlanta, Georgia. Not surprisingly, cities like Chicago andNew York are highly central in the network.

I will explore many features of this network throughout this book, but whatinitially drew my attention was that there were cities that were actively participatingin the production of recorded jazz but lacked the mobility ties to the core ofactivity in Chicago and New York. The most obvious examples were Milan, Moscow,Oslo, Stockholm, and Sydney (see Figure 1.1), but Gent and Brussels can alsobe included, as well as cities on the periphery of the main set of connected citiessuch as Amsterdam and Atlanta. Do these cities matter in understanding theemergence of the discographical canon of jazz? If so, what role do they play?

DEVELOPING A THEORY OF DISCONNECTEDNESSAND SHAPING JAZZ

It turns out that answering what I thought were simple questions involved a processthat was richer and more nuanced than I had initially imagined. Answeringthese questions has sparked several qualitative and quantitative analyses, readingsof hundreds of books and articles, and traveling to several archives in the UnitedStates and Europe. One reason that these were not easily answered questions isthat although there are many scholars who have contributed monumentally to theunderstanding of cultural markets in general and jazz in particular, there were twocritical but underaddressed issues.

First, within the study of innovation-based markets, socially distant or disconnectedsources of innovation (whether they be people, organizations, or locations)are often recognized as relevant, but there is not much theory to support thisrecognition. That is, scholars have developed theory on how accumulated advantagesfrom highly connected sources can occur independently of the intentions ofthose highly connected sources. Disconnected sources, however, lack a comparablelevel of theoretical development, especially where meaning and value aredriven by the interpretation of actions, rather than the intention of thoseactions.

Second, the present state of mainstream network analysis falls short in studyingsocial systems such as those represented in Figure 1.1. That is, if there is a socialsystem that has (cultural) producers who are active but disconnected to varyingdegrees, there are very few methodological tools that can be employed for thepurpose of analysis. In fact, most studies of networks disregard isolated actors, andthis neglect too often lacks theoretical justification. Looking at Figure 1.1, attemptingto understand the emergence for the market for jazz and the rise of adiscographical canon without Brussels, Gent, Milan, Moscow, Oslo, Stockholm,and Sydney would represent not only poor empiricism but also a poor understandingof history. Thus to answer my questions I needed to develop a way toconsider cities as they vary in the degree that they are disconnected from others.

In this chapter I focus on how disconnectedness—a term I will define morecleanly in the next section—can have a unique role in social systems, particularlyin innovation-based social systems familiar to scholars of organizations and markets(e.g., cultural markets, technological systems). Despite the explicit role thatstructural perspectives have played in organizational and economic sociology, toolittle of this work has engaged the role of disconnected sources. At the same time,there is much evidence to suggest that disconnectedness plays a critical role whensuch sources are seen as socially distant or dissimilar, such as members of subcultures,those considered exotic and foreign, or artists who are economically andpsychologically disadvantaged.

What is missing, however, is a structural account that brings the role of theexotic, foreign, and “authentic outsider” under a single concept—what I refer toas disconnectedness. To develop this concept I expand a structuralist approach onsocial network positions using scholarship on the reception of cultural objects(products) to show that objects from disconnected sources can be more appealing,particularly when the outputs in question are difficult to categorize. This congruentmatch between (disconnected) sources and (difficult-to-categorize) outputs isthe key mechanism that underlies my theoretical framework.

Disconnectedness: Setting the Stage

Georg Simmel’s theory on the “tertius” and Ronald Burt’s studies on structuralautonomy present atypical structural positions that act independently of structuraland normative constraints. Subsequent work has often emphasized the strategicintentions of focal actors; however, both Simmel and Burt point out thatoften it is the interpretation of actions and not necessarily intentions that drivedifferences in influence and attainment. Indeed, more recently sociologists havefound that when considering everything from the social position of Florentineleaders to that of government agencies, there is ample evidence that the influenceof central actors is partially due to the imputed meaning of their actions.

As a complement to these insights, I call attention to the fact that the value ofa source’s output is also imputed when that source is socially dissimilar (or disconnected).I believe that this argument, bolstered with well-rooted scholarship byWendy Griswold and others within cultural sociology, allows us to consider thevalue of disconnected sources’ outputs. This literature draws attention to actorswho are defined by the structure of relationships that they lack rather than therelationships they have. In settings that reward novelty, dissimilar, distant, anddistinct sources are more likely to have outputs successfully labeled as exotic andmore highly valued precisely because they are removed and “free” from connectionsto others. For example, Gary Alan Fine (2003) draws out the implicationsfor being disconnected when understanding authenticity within the world of self-taught(“outsider”) art. In his rich ethnographic study, he finds that self-taughtartists represent a social position and identity defined by the lack of connections:”Within the art market, they [self-taught artists] lack social capital, ties to elitecommunities, and are not fully integrated professionals in this mainstream artworld. It is their lack of, rather than their attributes, that defines them … theirreputation to be established by others” (2003, 156; emphasis original). The combinationof a structural view of an artistic source outside a social system with researchon how value and meaning of such an actor can be constructed independentof that source’s intentions forms the foundation of my answer to the questionsof this chapter. That is, I suggest that disconnectedness, as a social network characteristic,positively affects others’ interpretation of a source’s cultural outputs independentof that source’s intentions.

A Motivating Example: Jazz and the Disconnected

Figure 1.2 is a simplification of the problem I highlighted in Figure 1.1 and is presentedas a motivation for us to consider disconnectedness as a distinct sociologicalconstruct. The figure displays two network structures, A and B. They share incommon an isolate (the larger unconnected circle with the gray center). In Figure1.1 this might be a city like Oslo or Sydney. It turns out that most theoretical andempirical approaches treat the two isolates similarly, where each is a network isolateto the larger component of three connected actors. As I noted, many scholars,when seeking to understand the network structure of a social system, disregardisolates altogether.

However, the two isolates are not similarly situated, and this difference is importantwhen we are interested in evaluating a source’s actions and outputs. Weshould not assume the same association between social structure, action, andevaluation for the two isolates in Networks A and B. The isolate in Network A ison the outside of an interconnected group and is likely viewed as having an identitydistinct from members of that group in at least one of two ways. First, its socialposition and role identity may be due to conflict between the isolate and thegroup, as Simmel might note, where the isolate is defined explicitly in oppositionto the interconnected group. In this case music from the isolate would be seen asexplicitly opposing music from the interconnected groups. Second, the disconnectedactor may have a distinct and independent identity orthogonal to themembers of the clique. In this case, the identity of the isolate is interpreted byother members of the social system as a distinct “other”—not oppositional to theclique but also not similar to any of the connected members of the social system.I focus on this second case; not only does it more closely capture the epigraphs atthe beginning of this chapter (where the Russian and “Arab” musicians are seen asa foreign “other” rather than oppositional), but it also more closely corresponds tothe context of early jazz where global social organization was still emergent andfew fixed identities had evolved sufficiently for oppositional identities to form.

Returning to Network B on the right side of Figure 1.2, we observe a networkwith an isolate as in Network A. However, here the other three nodes are not theinterconnected triad observed in Network A. Indeed, Simmel would suggest thatNetwork B features two types of actors: tertius gaudens and the “isolated individual.”The tertius gaudens reflects the position of the node that serves as an intermediarybetween two disparate nodes. Both Simmel and Burt suggest that thisintermediary is unencumbered by constraints associated with network closure andhas the capability of innovating through the unique integration of knowledge. Inmy study, some cities (New York, Chicago, and London) serve as central intermediariesbetween other cities, and I will examine their influence on the evolution ofjazz.

The isolate in B (referred to as Isolate B), as in Network A (referred to IsolateA), is unencumbered as well from Simmel’s standpoint. But we cannot expect thatthe resulting social action and evaluation in Network B would be equivalent tothat in Network A. Isolate B is less disconnected than Isolate A. Its isolation is lessstriking, and with it there is a reduced likelihood that its identity is equally distinctfrom the other nodes in Network B. In other words, Isolate B is less structurallydisconnected than Isolate A. Consider once again the intercity network in Figure1.1. How music from a city like Oslo or Sydney is understood and evaluated bythose in other cities depends in part on how interconnected all of the other citiesare. That is, whether the music an isolated city produces is distinct is not my primaryconcern here. I instead place greater emphasis on the variance in receptionof (cultural) outputs from sources rather than their production. The more interconnectedthe core of the intercity network is, the more places like Oslo andSydney will be viewed as distinct “others” by that core. The implication for shapingjazz is that music that came from disconnected sources had a particular appealto those in the core of the social system because of the distinctiveness of thosedisconnected sources.

With this in mind, I articulate my answer to the central puzzle of the role ofdisconnectedness in three parts. First, conditional on the production of a newoutput, its appeal to a particular audience (peers, critics, or consumers) is drivenby how they impute value and meaning from the source’s level of disconnectedness.In markets where uniqueness is given salience, disconnected sources have anovelty, foreignness, or exoticism advantage. To the extent that outputs withappeal influence the emergence of a genre’s canon, disconnected producers alsohave a disproportionate influence on that emergence. Second, I argue that disconnectednessis associated with one’s membership within a social system but outsideinterconnected alters. High disconnectedness means being clearly outside a set ofinterconnected alters, even if locally central. Third, I claim that the appeal for theoutputs of disconnected producers is greater when the outputs are also difficult tocategorize since they are more congruent with disconnectedness. We expectsomeone who is unique to produce something that is unusual (e.g., “Arab” jazzmusic), and this congruence increases the salience and appeal of difficult-to-categorizeoutputs.
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