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