ABSTRACT
Since its emergence at the dawn of the modern jazz era, the jazz festival has not only provided important sources of income and recognition for artists, but also has crowd-sourced, if industry-driven, operational definitions of both the jazz tradition as a whole and its featured constituent sub-genres and styles individually. An international institution from its earliest instances in Australia and France, as well as in its widely exported forms under the Newport/JVC brand names or US State Department aegis, the jazz festival expresses and occasionally manages to transcend, at least in part, the inherent tensions among the local, national, and global. Within this context, this chapter will examine the jazz festival as a site of semiotic and political-economic contestation among key stakeholders—including artists, audience members, journalists, and entrepreneurs—over the representation and meaning of the music.
