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