ABSTRACT
Through involvement in a remote recording project with a collection of jazz musicians during the pandemic, the trials of musicians attempting to manage freelance careers became particularly apparent. Essentially, jazz players constantly sacrifice and self-exploit in order to maintain themselves within the genre. This much is already known but what emerged when examining this ongoing reality was the way in which the vocabulary of adaptation to working conditions beyond the control of individual players has become absorbed into discourses about changes in work systems and the experience of work, more widely. The notion of the ‘Gig Economy’ derives from the world of the jazz musician, while exhortations to freelance musicians that they should embrace ‘Portfolio careers’ and become more ‘entrepreneurial’ in their daily lives has become a staple of music education, notably (but not solely) in the rhetoric of private providers. Mapping the experience of the players involved in the lockdown recording project against these concepts helps to expose their limits.
