Blowin' the Blues Away. Travis A. Jackson

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.