ABSTRACT
Jazz has always relied on a pool of skilled musicians combining flexibly depending on the nature of the work at hand. They share tacit knowledge regarding musical and performance conventions so that they can adapt to the occasion, relying on standards particularly when rehearsal time is limited. Furthermore, jazz is very difficult to learn through formal study alone. Skills are developed through absorbing an aural tradition and playing with others: musicians must be able to adapt to the harmonic and rhythmic context in which they are working, and learn how to make the right choices about their place within a wider ensemble, skills best learned through doing. Accordingly, jazz musicians and bands create music within communities and music worlds which are ‘essentially reticulate in structure’, and therefore can be explained using the concepts and tools of social network analysis (Krinsky and Crossley 2014). Because of the importance of connections and groups in jazz, social network analysis offers a promising set of concepts and methods which we use here to look at the case of British jazz. Our aim here is to examine how British jazz networks are structured, using a rich resource covering British jazz musicians who are or have been established in the jazz world. Outside a select few, many work as teachers, jobbing musicians and recording session musicians capable of playing across a number of genres. Faulkner and Becker describe the
semi-professional and professional musicians in their study as ‘ordinary musicians’ (Faulkner and Becker 2009, 29). The group analysed here generally work as full-time musicians, and among their cohort tended to be exceptional; however, the temporal focus in this chapter is broad enough that among their peers and set against the long-run context most do appear ‘ordinary’. Because of the scope of the data and our interest in relationships, we analyse these musicians and their careers less as cases of individual talents and occasional geniuses working in isolation, and more as the product of musical ecologies and sets of relationships. This is consistent with the work of psychologist and jazz pianist Keith Sawyer, who has written of how ‘in jazz the group has the ideas, not the individual musicians’ (Sawyer 2008: x).
