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