Music Analysis and the Social Life of Jazz 
Recordings 

By Matthew W Butterfield 

Recorded music long ago relieved us of the hard labor of perform­
ing what we wanted to hear. It relieved us of the necessity of going to 
a concert hall. And now it has even relieved us of any need to listen. 
In the sound tracking of America-in the constantly segueing frag­
ments that fill our public and private spaces-music is merely the in­
escapable background, the relentless mood-setter, the arbiter and 
signal of proper behavior. 

-J. Bottum 

Elaine: But Jerry! I'll be ostracized from the community! 
Jerry: There's a community? All these years I've been living in a 

community and I never knew about it. 
-Seinfeld 

Music Analysis and Musical Community 
In recent years, music theorists have taken an increased interest in jazz 

and produced more and more analytical studies of improvised jazz solos. 1 

For many involved in jazz research, this has been an encouraging sign. 
Most obviously, it has signaled the respectability jazz has attained within 
the musicological disciplines since the mid-1980s as a music worthy of de­
tailed criticism. It has also expanded the range and depth of jazz scholar­
ship, providing new points of entry into the field for emerging scholars 
who may otherwise have pursued a different course. More importantly, 
however, the growing sophistication of contemporary analytical methods 
has enriched our understanding of the nature of jazz improvisation, 
enabling us to ask better questions about the music than in the past. 

The expanding repertory of analyses also reflects the increased pres­
ence of jazz scholars in academic music departments. Until fairly recently, 
analytical studies of jazz were relatively rare, and the possibility of making 
a career teaching and researching jazz from within the musicological disci­
plines was slim, at best. In the last twenty to thirty years, however, jazz edu­
cation has largely moved beyond the traditional community-based system 
of apprenticeship, documented in Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz 
(1994:36-59), and taken up residence inside the academy.2 Music theo-

Current Musicology, nos. 71-73 (Spring 200l-Spring 2002) 
© 2002 by the Tmstees of Columbia University in the City of New York 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 325 

rists who specialize in jazz, such as myself, are increasingly finding homes 
for themselves in music departments seeking either to develop a jazz stud­
ies curriculum or simply to diversifY their range of course offerings. Often 
working alongside jazz performance faculty, we now play an active role in 
training jazz musicians and in cultivating an audience for them among 
non-musicians. In this context, we have a better opportunity than ever be­
fore to affect the ongoing evolution of the jazz tradition, to influence its 
musical values, and thereby claim a position of greater relevance for local 
jazz communities.3 

Our involvement in those communities is paradoxical, however, for our 
analytical activities implicitly advance their dissolution. Musical perform­
ance involving two or more participants typically serves an integrative so­
cial function. It is a form of face-to-face social interaction, which is to say 
that musically interacting individuals negotiate social relationships 
through performance, just as they do in other social-interactive contexts. 
The social bonds emanating from musical interaction tend to be particu­
larly strong, however, because making music requires that performers co­
ordinate a host of temporal and acoustic processes seldom shared in non­
musical interactions. For example, locking into a rhythmic groove with 
others, participating with them in the mutual articulation of time, typically 
implies a profound interpersonal connection: we rarely share the experi­
ence or expression of specific temporal processes with others for they 
tend to be personal, bound up with intimate processes of the body such as 
breathing or the beating of one's heart. When we breach this rhythmic 
privacy and participate with others in the maintenance of an exacting 
rhythmic groove, we signal some sort of visceral social connection that 
often feels quite intimate.4 This connection can extend to listeners and 
dancers as well to the extent that they are cognitively and emotionally in­
volved in the musical event and open to the shared experience it projects.5 

Musical performance itself is thus an "erotic" social practice-an ex­
pression of eros, the principle of attraction, union, and involvement which 
binds together-because participation in musical activity tends to encour­
age the formation of particularly intense social bonds among participants, 
thereby favoring the development of community.6 This is especially true of 
jazz. More than just a musical style, jazz is also a system of values shared by 
members of a community brought together by the socially productive 
forces of its musical activities. Ideally, live jazz performance is social inter­
action par excellence: performers interact musically (and thus socially) with 
one another and with their audience, whose members participate in turn 
by evaluating the music and communicating their critical responses to one 
another and to the musicians as the music unfolds. The recurrence of this 



326 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

collective interactive process in a series of musical performances with the 
same participants consolidates social relationships and ultimately fosters 
the formation of community.7 

By contrast, analysis works against the erotic social function of music, 
for it is a solitary pursuit that privileges social isolation in listening: ana­
lysts work alone with scores, transcriptions, or sound recordings. The vari­
ous underlying musical processes and connections to which analysis typi­
cally addresses itself are accessible only through the elimination of 
face-to-face interactive contexts, which are distracting and inhibit the for­
mation of analytical insights. Hence, as a component of the professional 
activities of music theorists, the doing or reading of analysis advocates a 
solitary musical experience, ideally a private "performance" situation in 
which specifically "musical" values are held distinct from and privileged 
over social ones. 

I am not suggesting that analysis is entirely noninteractive. Mter all, an­
alysts do in some sense interact with composers or performers, as well as 
with their own readers. Such interactions are mediated, however, and not 
face-to-face; their erotic potential is therefore attenuated. On the other 
hand, one might argue that communities of scholars do emerge after the 
fact of analysis when analysts engage in face-to-face exchanges of ideas at 
conferences, symposiums, or in other less formal contexts, even online 
through special-interest discussion groups. But there is a qualitative differ­
ence between the erotic effects of social interaction about music and social 
interaction through music. The former is really not so different from con­
versation about other things, like sports or fine dining, with regard to its 
integrative social potential. By contrast, the latter is more visceral, more 
immediate and direct, more emotional, and ultimately more powerful in 
terms of its erotic effects. The crucial point here is the actual fact of being 
there, where music itself serves as an interactive medium through which 
strong social bonds are formed and collective experience is shared and af­
firmed. The solitary listening contexts privileged by analysis thus largely 
result in the loss of the integrative social function of jazz performance 
practice, and thereby imply the dissolution of local jazz communities. 

This may perhaps seem trivial. Mter all, what harm can mere music the­
orists do? Does anyone outside of our field actually read music analysis 
anyway? The density of analytical writing, the complexity of our tech­
niques, and the impenetrability of music-theoretical jargon have effec­
tively instituted a barrier, shrouding our activities in mystery, ensuring 
that no one without the proper credentials (not even our parents) will 
have any idea what we do, much less suffer the pernicious effects of our 
influence. But the power of music theorists to affect the social function of 
music on a large scale lies less in our published accounts of musical works 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 327 

than in the musical values we advance in the classroom for both under­
graduate music majors and non-majors. 

Analysis lies at the core of formal education in music. College and uni­
versity music departments generally require undergraduate majors to 
complete a more or less standard music theory sequence that incorporates 
some form of analysis, whether they intend to pursue a career in applied 
music or musicological research. Most students find analysis to be quite 
difficult, often even painful, but we make them suffer through it because 
we see it as an invaluable mode of inquiry, a practice that makes one a 
better listener and a better musician. If nothing else, through analysis stu­
dents acquire a deeper and more detailed understanding of a specific mu­
sical work. Ideally, however, they also learn the value of analytical think­
ing: they discover how the concepts of music theory can both illuminate 
and enliven their experience of music, and they learn to use the tools of 
analysis to enhance their skills at performing, composing, or just listening 
to music. 

In addition to theory courses for music majors, jazz theorists are often 
called upon to teach jazz history courses in order to accommodate the 
curricular multitasking needs of their departments. Such courses have be­
come increasingly popular as general education offerings, for they tend to 
attract substantial numbers of non-majors and thereby bring increased 
funding to the department.8 Students typically come to these classes with 
little or no background in music. Consequently, like musicologists and 
ethnomusicologists who also provide such courses, we typically teach ac­
tive listening skills through a kind of informal style analysis. At the most 
basic level, students learn to discern the distinct timbre of each instru­
ment and to identify the prevailing mode, meter, and tempo of a tune. 
They also learn to recognize rhythmic grooves, textural types, and styles of 
accompaniment; to distinguish solo choruses from ensemble passages; to 
differentiate between improvised and composed melodies; and eventually, 
even to identify the form of a given tune. More importantly, they learn to 
analyze the relationships between these parameters in order to draw con­
clusions about musical style, such that they can situate a performance in 
an appropriate historical or cultural context. Ideally, however, they move 
beyond simple categorization as they develop their listening skills and 
ultimately attain some degree of aptitude in evaluating the aesthetic quali­
ties of the music we ask them to listen to. 

Thus music majors and non-majors alike get practice doing some form 
of analysis in their music courses. The difference between them at the un­
dergraduate level is really a matter of degree, however, and not kind. It 
lies primarily in the purpose and scope of their analytical activities, the 
level of sophistication and detail their analyses attain, and the degree of 



328 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

formality each exhibits (music majors, after all, must actually write their 
analyses, while for non-majors analysis is primarily an aspect of listening). 
Whether or not students ever achieve a high level of proficiency, however, 
the lesson they learn in the classroom is clear: music itself rewards analysis. It 
merits close scrutiny, for there is more to it than first meets the ear. As a 
form of highly focused, rigorously organized, active listening, analysis pro­
vides the most direct and thorough access to all the layers of meaning and 
emotional expression found in a musical work. It leads to very deep and 
moving experiences with music. 

Analysis is thus positioned in both theory and history courses as a privi­
leged mode of listening, a highly valued way of experiencing music. If our 
teaching is successful, our students will continue to practice it in some 
form beyond the classroom. They may not actually write analyses or take 
any interest in reading them, but they may well find that doing a bit of 
analysis-however informally-helps them get to know individual pieces 
of music better and enhances their experience of them. This is surely a 
desirable outcome, but it carries with it significant social costs: we are 
training students today in ever greater numbers to deal with jazz in solitary 
analytical situations, but not in interactive performance situations. 

Moreover, we are fostering their dependence on and preference for 
recordings, for conventional analytical practice positively requires record­
ings for the analysis of jazz improvisation: they enable repeated listening, 
which favors the kind of in-depth exploration that characterizes analysis; 
they guarantee the potential for intersubjective corroboration of analytical 
insights; and their textualization through transcription facilitates the ap­
plication of common analytical tools. Indeed, from an analytical perspec­
tive, live performance can be quite maddening: the music simply flies by 
too quickly to grasp everything, such that the experience often feels in­
complete or inadequate, as though one has missed something important. 
Recordings, however, allow one to capture and fully experience an abun­
dance of musical relationships unavailable to perception in live music con­
texts; one gains a greater sense of awareness and control over detail, en­
hancing the depth of the experience. Thus recordings often seem more 
accessible and substantive, ironically more real than live performances. 

In this way, a music curriculum rooted in analysis tends to support and 
affirm a musical economy dominated by recordings. It does not cause that 
dominance, but it does not resist it either, and this has enormous implica­
tions for the well-being of local jazz communities, which depend on thriv­
ing live music scenes both for the financial survival of musicians and for 
the community-building function of their performance activities. The 
recording economy, like analysis, has tended increasingly of late to work 
against the erotic social potential of jazz performance practice for a variety 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 329 

of reasons: it transforms the social relations of jazz music-making activities; 
it has had a significant impact on the way Americans value jazz and relate 
to jazz musicians; and it has had far-reaching effects on the social life of 
jazz performance events. Accordingly, before examining how we might 
use analysis to challenge and subvert the implications of this economy 
rather than sustaining its dominance, we must evaluate the social life of 
recordings. 

Transfonnations: The Social, Economic, and Political Effects of Recording 
The history of jazz is coterminous with and inextricably linked to the 

history of radio and recording technology. Jazz musicians have always de­
pended to a greater or lesser extent on these media for their survival­
they have an obvious financial stake in the commodity market they sup­
port. Since radio stations adopted the disk jockey format in the late 1930s, 
airplay on jazz radio has served two interrelated economic functions for 
jazz musicians: (1) it advertises a performer's new and old recordings, 
thereby generating royalties for the artist and profits for the record label; 
and (2) it popularizes individual musicians and bands, thus maintaining 
their value and demand on the performance circuit. Conversely, live per­
formance events themselves advertise an artist's recordings. High sales 
then ensure further recording opportunities, and the cycle starts again 
when these recordings reach listeners through jazz radio. 

This economy has been present throughout much of the history of jazz; 
in fact, it has been largely constitutive of that history. But advancements in 
recording technology have ultimately transformed the social value of 
recorded music. Recordings of early jazz generated considerable excite­
ment as a result of their novelty and the increasingly wide range of music 
they made available to listeners. Because of their poor sound quality, how­
ever, they could only serve as an impoverished simulacrum of live per­
formance; they could not supplant the real thing.9 Today, on the other 
hand, modern digital recording technology and high-fidelity stereo play­
back systems make possible flawless performances with the most exquisite 
experience of musical sound imaginable. Due to the situational vagaries of 
live performance contexts and the fallibility of human performers (and 
sound technicians), recorded listening often offers a better acoustic experi­
ence of the music today; in this way, it is actually the performance that 
provides an imperfect simulacrum of the recording. In part for this rea­
son, recordings have become the dominant mode of reception for music 
in the United States; many people simply find them more fulfilling than 
live music. 

This state of affairs is extremely profitable to those on the production 
side of the recording business. When musicians compose or perform on 



330 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

commission, they typically receive income for their services only once, and 
from a single source: the individual or organization who commissioned 
the work or performance. The cost to this party is usually quite steep, of 
course. On the other hand, public concerts for which a fee can be charged 
to each individual in attendance enables musicians and others involved in 
the production of the concert to receive payment from a much larger 
pool of consumers (potentially hundreds or even thousands) for a single 
performance. The cost per consumer is thereby reduced, but the profits 
generated can be considerably higher. With recordings, however, each 
performance can be heard and purchased by an infinite number of con­
sumers at a relatively low cost. One performance then generates as many 
payments as there are consumers. Recordings thus have the potential to 
generate the maximum profits per performanceJo Costs of production are 
much higher and the financial risk is unquestionably greater, but the pos­
sible payoff makes it worthwhile. Most of the money goes to the record la­
bel, of course, for contracts in the music business are typically structured 
to exploit the performers. But musicians do at least gain notoriety from 
recordings, especially when they receive air time on jazz radio, and this es­
tablishes their marketability on the live performance circuit. Thus, as 
everyone in the music business knows, the real money ultimately lies in 
recordings, and the challenge for musicians is to land a recording con­
tract with a major label that has access to a national or international distri­
bution network. 

There are significant social implications to the dominance of recorded 
music today, however. To begin with, jazz musicians tend to take a more 
compositional approach to improvisation in the recording studio. They 
leave less to chance, for there is quite a lot at stake: recordings give a jazz 
musician's peers and other knowledgeable members of the jazz commu­
nity the opportunity for repeated listening and intense critical scrutiny; 
poorly received recordings can be very damaging to an artist's career. 
Consequently, in the studio, jazz musicians are more likely to plan their 
solos in terms of motivic development and broad dynamic, registral, tex­
tural, and rhythmic intensifications. Modern recording technology then 
allows them to edit errors or blemishes to ensure the highest quality for 
the product they will ultimately present to the jazz market. ll 

This has not always been the case, however. It took time for musicians 
to adjust to the situational particularity of the recording studio and the 
unique social and musical potentials it offered. According to Jody Ber­
land, this is the way new cultural technologies seem to work in general: 

[Marshall McLuhan] contends that each new medium adopts the 
"content" of its predecessor and thereby disguises its real historical 
efficacy. Another way of putting this is that cultural hardware pre-



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 331 

cedes the software that will constitute its content. As Brecht said of 
radio, it finds a market, and then looks for a reason to exist. The 
hardware is initially promoted through software appealing to a tar­
geted market on the basis of already-established tastes: early gramo­
phone records, for instance, were mainly recordings of classical 
music, because it was the middle class who could afford the gramo­
phones, and classical music made gramophones respectable .... 
Similarly early CDs were either classical music or re-releases from the 
1960s. As the hardware becomes more widely available, new software 
(radio programs, video games, CDs) emerges for a larger, more frag­
mented market. (Berland 1992:43-44) 

Berland speaks here in terms of the larger economy from the perspective 
of marketing and the technological development of new commodities. 
But we can adopt this framework to illuminate how musicians themselves 
approach working with new technologies. In the early days of sound 
recording, musicians initially treated the recording studio (i.e., the new 
"hardware") as they had always treated a conventional theater or concert 
hall: a microphone merely substituted for an actual audience. In other 
words, they brought the concert frame (i.e., the old "software") with them 
into the recording studio.12 Time in the studio was expensive, and record­
ing techniques were initially quite primitive, so the performers were under 
some pressure to make an adequate recording in just two or three takes; 
imperfections abounded, much as in live performance. As the technology 
developed, however, musicians and recording technicians became aware 
of new possibilities for ensuring high quality performances. Multi-track 
recording equipment made possible the recording, mixing, and mastering 
of a performance part by part, thereby eliminating the need to pretend in 
the "liveness" of the studio situation. A new framework (i.e., new "soft­
ware") has thus emerged governing musicians' understanding of perform­
ance activities in the studio. This has allowed new social patterns and com­
positional possibilities to arise, such that it is now feasible to record and 
release "performances" that never actually took place as performances.13 

This is a well-known aspect of pop music recording practices, but it has 
become increasingly common in jazz as well. For example, in recording 
his 1995 album MMTC (Monk, Miles, Trane & Cannon), Freddie Hubbard 
had saxophonist Vincent Herring and drummer Carl Allen "[lay] down 
many of the tracks so Hubbard could record his parts in various sessions 
over a ten-month period" (Shuster 1995:22). GuitaristJohn Scofield em­
ployed a similar procedure to accommodate Wayne Shorter on the for­
mer's 1996 CD Quiet. Scofield and most of his ensemble recorded their 
parts in February of that year and then sent the tapes to Shorter in Los 
Angeles, where he overdubbed his parts: "We just comped when there was • 



332 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

to be a solo, pretending Wayne was playing. Then, when he recorded, he 
responded to that" (quoted in Stewart 1996:26). What is telling here is 
that neither Scofield nor his Down Beat interviewer Zan Stewart express 
the slightest surprise or embarrassment that Shorter never actually played 
his part with the other performers-the practice of overdubbing has be­
come that mundane, even in jazz. Listeners, on the other hand, still expe­
rience the recording as though the musicians were all co-present during 
the recorded performance. The final product thus effectively masks from 
public view a radical transformation of the social relations of jazz perform­
ance practice. This is truly an extraordinary state of affairs: recording not 
only eliminates face-to-face interaction with an audience, but also absolves 
musicians of the need to interact with other live bodies while making mu­
sic, should such interaction prove to be inconvenient! Technological ad­
vancements have thus altered the social meaning of jazz performance as it 
takes place in the recording studio. Musical interaction there is largely 
mediated; as a result, it loses much of its erotic social potential. 

According to Richard Bauman, however, mediated communication 
does often serve one function that conventional dyadic, face-to-face social 
interaction does not: it tends to enact the authority of the "source utterance" 
-the original statement that is relayed through a mediator to a secondary 
target audience. That is, through mediation, the original speaker (or per­
former) acquires power and authority: 

[M]ediational routines ... play out the process of authorization in­
sofar as they demonstrate by their very design the dominance of the 
temporally prior source utterance over the target utterance [i.e., the 
relayed message]. The mediator's replication of the source utter­
ance, by preserving its integrity and displaying special care in its re­
production, amounts to an act of discursive submission, the subordi­
nation of present discourse to discourse that emanates from the past. 
Moreover, I would suggest, submission to the form of the source ut­
terance has a concomitant effect on the rhetorical power of the text: 
upholding the integrity of the form opens the way to acceptance of 
the validity of the message. In this way ... mediational routines ... 
are reflexive enactments of the process by which discourse is in­
vested with authority. (Bauman 2001) 

With recording, the source utterance takes place in the studio. It is repli­
cated and relayed to its ultimate target audience through LP, cassette, or 
compact disc via some playback device. This mediation invests the per­
former(s) and the performance with authority in several ways. First, the 
performance acquires significance as a message targeted not at a mere in­
dividual, but at millions of anonymous potential listeners. Second, the ab-



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 333 

sence of the musicians during the playback of recordings sets them apart 
socially, for they are unavailable for social interaction with ordinary listen­
ers. Instead, they are defined as a special class of people with social access 
to one another, but to whom the general public may not communicate di­
rectly. Third, the availability of the recorded performance in commodity 
form testifies that someone with some degree of control over the techno­
logical media of sound reproduction-i.e., someone with power-has al­
ready evaluated the performance and deemed it worthy of recording and 
distribution. Fourth, the performance carries a price tag: it is not just a val­
ued utterance, but one worthy of financial sacrifice on the part of the con­
sumer. Note that commodification here in no way undermines or contra­
dicts the authority or artistic value of the recorded performance, as Lewis 
Hyde (1979) would argue. Instead, commodification itself actually enacts 
the authority and value of this performance. 

Thus in addition to transforming the social relations of jazz perform­
ance, recording alters the social stature of musicians fortunate enough to 
obtain contracts with good record labels. They become "recording artists," 
celebrities within the larger jazz community. Their activities thus acquire a 
special significance beyond that of ordinary musicians, for it is these indi­
viduals who get interviews in jazz trade magazines like Down Beat or 
JazzTimes, whose music is played and discussed on jazz radio and is sub­
jected to critical review by music theorists and others who practice music 
analysis. More importantly, because recording invests jazz musicians with 
authority, it is generally only recording artists who play consequential 
roles in jazz history; other musicians participate in this history only insofar 
as their influence ultimately infiltrates the recording studio in some tangi­
ble form. Lastly, it is primarily recording artists whose activities are typi­
cally documented by historians, ethnomusicologists, and journalists, by 
whom they are thus understood and represented as the principal culture­
bearers of the jazz tradition. For these reasons, recording artists today 
comprise the core constituency of what is commonly understood as the 
jazz community; they are its honorary members, and their activities and 
practices define what it means to be a jazz musician. 

Oddly, then, it is the fact of recording that ultimately produces this 
community as a social group, and not necessarily active participation in 
musical activity-especially outside of New York. This has had profound 
social ramifications at the local level, however, for "local" musicians (i.e., 
those of limited renown without widely distributed recordings) have little 
cachet on the jazz market. They lack the authority of the recording artist, 
for as locals, they are too available to ordinary folk to be perceived as ex­
traordinary musicians; few people in general seem to go out of their way 
to hear them play. Instead, jazz fans are drawn increasingly to concert 



334 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

events featuring established recording artists from out of town in lieu of 
casual nights out at local jazz clubs. Those musicians with serious talent 
and ambition are usually forced to go to New York in pursuit of success, 
thus draining the local talent pool and diminishing the attractiveness of 
local jazz as a nightlife commodity. Fewer and fewer jazz clubs are then 
able to survive in this financial climate, so fewer employment opportuni­
ties remain available for local jazz musicians. The net result, I believe, has 
been a decline in participation at the local level and the steady dissolution 
of local jazz communities. 14 

There are further social effects of the dominance of recorded music in 
America today bearing more on the experience of listeners. As observed 
above, recordings are essential for the analytical practices commonly culti­
vated in college music courses, and they do offer the potential for very 
deep, emotional experiences with music. The more compositional ap­
proach taken by jazz musicians to improvisation in the recording studio 
is intended in part to accommodate the kind of focused, or "active," listen­
ing undertaken in these contexts. 

But we need not attend to music actively when listening to recorded 
music. Recordings free our musical experiences from performance events, 
such that we can listen to music anywhere at any time to supplement any 
conceivable activity. We might listen alone or in the company of others. 
Our attention may rest on the music itself, or on any number of extramu­
sical pursuits-after all, the performers cannot be offended if we ignore 
them for a while, or stop paying attention altogether. As a result, we begin 
to separate musical sound from the conventions of audience social behav­
ior traditionally associated with music of a given style. For example, we do 
not need to sit quietly in rapt attention while listening to a recording of a 
Brahms string quartet, nor is there any reason to applaud at the end of 
a fine improvised jazz solo on a CD. In fact, with recordings, listeners fre­
quently look to music not for the richly textured musical experience ac­
quired through analysis, but for the mood that it sets, the atmosphere it 
creates as accompaniment to our various nonmusical activities, such as ex­
ercising or cleaning one's dingy apartment. In this "muzakification" of our 
listening habits, music recedes rapidly into the background of our social 
experience of musical situations rather than constituting the main line of 
activity in the foreground of those circumstances. 

Record producers and radio station programming directors have taken 
note of this trend on the part of consumers and have begun building radio 
playlists around this mode of listening. They rely on the marketing re­
search of agencies like the New Jersey-based firm Broadcast Architecture 
(BA), founded in 1988. BA applies the "Mix-Master" test to new record­
ings to determine their potential to attract listeners and improve ratings. 
As reported in Down Beat, the test works as follows: 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 335 

About 100 people gather in a hotel ballroom. Each cradles a little 
remote control box in their hands with a dial. Music plays over a 
speaker system in 10-second sound bytes. Occasionally, it's longer-
12 seconds, maybe 15. The participants listen to about 600 sound 
bytes in two-and-a-half hours. They turn the dial one way if they like 
the song, the other way if they loathe it. The scores range from zero 
to 100. A score of 70 or better means airplay is likely. Below 70 and 
it's usually history. 

In a nearby room, station officials and BA consultants stare at a 
video monitor with lines that dance across its screen. Jokingly called 
the EKG, the lines show listeners' real-time reactions to the sound 
bytes as grouped by demographics: avid listeners, part-time listeners, 
men, women, age, ethnic groups. The lines also show when squeal­
ing saxophones break the mood, solos drone on too long and when 
listeners want to changes stations. 

Pass the test, you get on BA's recommended airplay list, delivered 
weekly to its 26 client stations, nine in the top 10 radio markets na­
tionwide. Weekly trade papers report BA's decisions, and non-client 
stations follow its lead. (BA isn't the only consultant on the scene but 
unquestionably the most successful.) 

To paraphrase one San Francisco Bay Area musician, if BA gives 
your song a thumbs up, nationwide airplay is guaranteed-thumbs 
down and it's time to take up plumbing. (Levin 1999a:38) 

Those BA client stations who have adopted the firm's "smooth jazz" 
playlist have witnessed a dramatic rise in their Arbitron ratings. As a result, 
this genre has emerged in the past ten years as one of the most successful 
programming formats in practically every radio market in the nation. In 
principle, this has brought more listeners to jazz than at any time since the 
Swing Era. But many well-known jazz musicians (including those who, like 
Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and the YelloV\jackets, originated the smooth 
jazz format in the late 1980s) have found their music increasingly left out 
in the cold. They fail the test and are then unable to get airplay. Dore 
Steinberg, a former music director at San Francisco's KKSF, explains why: 
"There is a formula, a real value system to what works .... If you go off on 
a synth guitar solo that rocks out or your saxophone bleeps or you punc­
ture that atmosphere for a moment, you either have to find an edit to get 
that out or it's not going to get play" (ibid.). The procedure described in 
the following anecdote is typical of the kind of on-air editing radio stations 
do today: 

Kenny Garrett's alto saxophone spills from the speakers inside the 
Sacramento, California, studios of KXJZ. Over a soothing Latin 



336 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

groove, Garrett caresses the Frank Sinatra classic "It Was a Very 
Good Year." Meanwhile, DJ Paul Conley, his right hand on a volume 
fader, keeps his eyes glued to a compact disc player's clock. At ex­
actly 3 minutes and 15 seconds, Conley slides the fader down, slowly 
taking Garrett to a whisper and then to nothing. 

The ending is premature. Garrett and his General Music Project 
II still had another 2 minutes and 13 seconds of blowing. Conley has 
left the sound of Garrett up in my headphones, while he brings up 
the next cut, Art Pepper's 1956 ballad, "Diane." As Pepper now 
booms out to thousands of listeners in the Sacramento Valley and 
Lake Tahoe, Garrett takes a sharp left from poetic tonality into more 
dissonant territory. 

"It becomes a little edgier," says Conley, an occasional producer 
of National Public Radio's 'Jazz Profiles." The fade was no accident. 
KXJZ Music Director Gary Vercelli designed it in advance, believing 
that a more frenetic solo might scare off listeners. In fact, Vercelli 
has marked the CD's jewel box with a small yellow post-it, noting the 
DJ should fade by exactly 3:42-the point at which Garrett takes his 
solo "out." (Levin 1999b:44) 

With much contemporary jazz today, however, such live in-studio edit­
ing is unnecessary. To survive, many musicians take it upon themselves to 
accommodate the stylistic demands of the market in advance. The enor­
mous popular success of smooth jazz suggests not only that a system of 
atmospheric or ambient values governs musical reception for a large por­
tion of today's jazz market, but that this aesthetic increasingly prevails in 
the domain of musical production. There is nothing unusual about this 
sort of self-censorship, of course, as Adorno suggests: 

The customary invectives against commercial mischief in music are 
superficial. They delude regarding the extent to which phenomena 
that presuppose commerce, the appeal to an audience already 
viewed as customers, can turn into compositorial qualities unleash­
ing and enhancing a composer's productive force. We may phrase 
this in the form of a more comprehensive legality: Social compulsions 
under which music seems to be placed from without are absorbed by its au­
tonomous logic and the need for compositorial expression, and are trans­
formed into an artistic necessity: into steps of the right consciousness. 
(Adorno 1976:208; emphasis added) 

Under present market circumstances, however, there is considerable 
cause for concern among mainstream traditional jazz musicians for whom 
smooth jazz carries little appeal, and who consequently resist "absorb [ing] 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 337 

... its autonomous logic." Since KJAZ of Alameda, California, went off the 
air in 1994, no single commercial, twenty-four hour, alljazz FM radio sta­
tion outside of the smooth jazz format has graced the airwaves anywhere 
in the United States. Furthermore, during the 1990s, most public radio 
stations significantly curtailed their jazz programming or eliminated it al­
together in favor of classical, folk, or talk-radio formats (Levin 1999b). 
There are thus fewer and fewer media outlets available to these musicians 
to get their music to the public. Meanwhile, the popularity of smooth jazz 
continues to rise, and its market power dictates an aesthetic in which 
many mainstream jazz musicians find no expressive potential. With few 
marketable alternatives available, their resistance to this aesthetic leaves 
them in an increasingly precarious financial position. 

The smooth jazz format has been so successful because it is designed to 
accommodate the passive listening practices fostered by recordings. As 
suggested by Dore Steinberg above, anything in this style that grabs a 
listener's attention and unsettles the soporific mood it sets must be assidu­
ously excised. The "Fusak" that emerges from this surgical "melodectomy" 
just barely distinguishes itself from traditional Muzak by cloaking itself in 
a pale fa<;ade of jazz style. Its social function is the same, however: it sets 
the mood for a particular activity or occasion without asserting itself as the 
main line of attention in that situation. But passive listening practices are 
possible (and increasingly common, it appears) with virtually any kind of 
music, no matter how interesting or exciting it may be. My jazz history stu­
dents, for example, often interpret moments when I play them recordings 
in class as opportunities to chat with their neighbors-I either have to re­
mind them to listen, or head off their disattention by giving them some­
thing specific to listen for. They have simply grown accustomed to the 
idea of music-especially instrumental music-as a "background" accom­
paniment to some other activity. 

This is not surprising, of course, for recorded music today saturates our 
lives: we hear it virtually everywhere we go, from the dentist's office to the 
mall to the bar or cafe. Its very omnipresence, according to J. Bottum, 
"has even relieved us of any need to listen" (2000:59). But beyond the 
financial implications for mainstream jazz musicians, this widespread 
muzakification of listener behavior has significant ramifications for the so­
cial life of live jazz performances: audiences today frequently bring con­
flicting social agendas, musical values, and behavioral framing practices to 
jazz clubs. A performance by the Wallace Roney Quintet I attended at 
Zanzibar Blue in Philadelphia will serve as an example. 

At the time of this show in late December 1996, Zanzibar Blue, 
Philadelphia's most prestigious jazz club, had just moved from its home of 
six years on 11 th Street in Center City to a new location at the Bellevue 
Hotel on Broad Street. The new space was larger, allowing Zanzibar to 



338 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

augment its patronage, and also more distinguished, for at the time, 
Broad Street just south of City Hall in Philadelphia was undergoing a cul­
tural renaissance as the "Avenue of the Arts." The Bellevue, a luxury hotel 
in the heart of Center City, sits next to the Academy of Music (home of 
the world famous Philadelphia Orchestra), the Merriam Theater of the 
University of the Arts, the Clef Club of Performing Arts, and the new 
Wilma Theater. 

Krin Gabbard has written of the elite stature that jazz has attained in re­
cent years. He observes its presence as background music for luxury car, 
credit card, and banking commercials: "Advertisers no longer use jazz to 
connote the nightlife and slumming that can be purchased along with 
their products-jazz can now signifY refinement and upper-class status, 
once the exclusive province of classical music" (Gabbard 1995:1-2). This 
lofty standing is certainly evident at the new Zanzibar, where the music 
complements the club's exquisite (and quite expensive) cuisine. Zanzibar's 
decor is elegant and plush, with fine wood paneling articulating the dark 
Oxford green color scheme. The management maintains a strict dress 
code: sneakers and athletic gear are forbidden, and blue jeans are offi­
cially "discouraged." Thus in contrast to nightspots like the very informal 
Ortlieb's Jazzhaus in North Philly, Zanzibar Blue clearly targets an upscale 
clientele. This is reflected in their hefty entertainment fee of fifteen dol­
lars per person per set-rather inexpensive compared to the thirty to forty 
dollar minimum one can expect to pay at some of the more prestigious 
New York clubs, but quite pricey for the Philadelphia market nonetheless. 

The stage at Zanzibar is elevated about one-and-a-half feet above the 
main floor of the dining area. A wall borders the stage on the right, oppo­
site a massive pillar that articulates the front left corner, and unfortunately 
blocks the view of those seated on that side. Several rows of tables line the 
main floor in front of the stage, arranged perpendicular to it such that pa­
trons on either side get a view of the musicians. To the left of these tables 
sits a row of booths separating the central dining room from the kitchen 
area. 

On the night of the Wallace Roney performance, my friends and I ar­
rived at Zanzibar about fifteen minutes before the set began. The six 
members of our party were seated in one of the booths to the left of the 
stage, three of us facing the musicians, the rest with our backs to them. We 
ordered drinks, but mostly passed on food since, as we were graduate stu­
dents at the time, we really could not afford it. At nine o'clock sharp, the 
band walked on stage, the emcee introduced them, and the music began. 

The ensuing set was remarkable not so much for the music that was 
performed, but for the sheer difficulty of attending to it amid a host of dis­
tractions. The band had to compete with waiters and waitresses who con-



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 339 

tinued serving dinners and cocktails to patrons shouting their orders 
above the music, as well as with kitchen sounds such as blenders, dish­
washers, and the occasional broken glass or plate. The audience itself dis­
played an almost complete indifference to the musical events taking place. 
Throughout the performance, they continued their dinner conversations, 
albeit at a higher volume to rise above the level of the music. The family 
on one side of us was consumed by a discussion of the Chicago Bears (who 
evidently were not very good at the time). On the other side, a group of 
three couples interrupted their conversation to clap politely only when 
they observed our enthusiastic applause at the conclusion of a good solo­
without our cues, I cannot imagine they would have taken any notice of 
the music whatsoever. In fact, more often than not, we found ourselves to 
be the only table in the restaurant actively attending to the music, and be­
cause of this the performance never really got off the ground. There was 
little interaction between the band and the audience, our table notwith­
standing, as we were not seated to advantage near the stage. 

Unfortunately, this was not the first time that the new Zanzibar had had 
problems with noise during a performance. In early December of that 
year, about three weeks prior to the Wallace Roney show, the legendary 
Abbey Lincoln was scheduled for a four-night stint there. She sang one set 
and was so appalled and offended at the inattentiveness and general lack 
of respect she received from the audience that she canceled the rest of 
her Philadelphia engagement. 

To its credit, the Zanzibar management was sensitive to the problem. 
Sometime after the Wallace Roney performance, they installed a wall clos­
ing the kitchen off from the main dining area in hope of reducing kitchen 
noise. And they began placing small placards on their tables requesting 
that their patrons remain quiet out of respect for the musicians and other 
customers. But beyond that, there was little they could do to control the 
behavior of their patrons. The fact of the matter is that Zanzibar Blue is a 
business whose ultimate goal is to make money. Their income derives pri­
marily from food and drink orders, and not from the entertainment fee. 
Thus, they can ill afford to discipline their customers for making dinner 
conversation at dinner. 

This tension between commerce and art is not unique to Zanzibar 
Blue, of course. It is an increasingly common feature of jazz club perform­
ance throughout America. Since the bebop era, jazz clubs have been the 
proper milieu of the music, where it is most at home. The informality of 
the setting and the availability of alcohol in particular have traditionally 
favored the erotic social potential of the music. But the noise associated 
with drinking and dining at Zanzibar and elsewhere has never been so 
great a problem for live jazz (which can actually accommodate a fair 



340 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

amount of audience clamor and extramusical activity) as the high degree 
of disattention from its patrons. Such disattention testifies to a new social 
function and aesthetic value for the music, and new patterns of audience 
social behavior. In such contexts, the principal focus of the evening for 
most of the customers-what they interpret as the main line of activity in 
the situation-is not the music at all, but the meal. Some treat the music 
as an aspect of the background decor that lends upper-class stature to the 
occasion. It is a piece of apparel, a fur coat in sound, clothing the meal and 
those partaking of it in elegance and refinement. Prestige arises not only 
from the fact that this "background" music is live, but also that it is per­
formed by world-class jazz musicians. For others, however, the music is 
supposed to set a relaxing mood conducive to dinner conversation with­
out drawing attention to itself. When the musicians challenge their defini­
tion of the situation by playing a louder, more assertive style of music, the 
diners respond by simply raising their voices. 

The frame confusion that has emerged at jazz clubs like Zanzibar Blue 
has led many jazz musicians to prefer concert performance over nightclub 
events. Their reasons may be both personal and economic, as suggested by 
pianist Keith Jarrett in explaining why his trio does not generally play 
small-room venues anymore: 

Unfortunately, there's much more than the setting itself. For exam­
ple, we can't go into a club and play one night. And we're not get­
ting younger, and we have other things we do. Plus, you don't want 
people tearing down the doors, and the socioeconomic implications 
of playing not enough nights for the amount of people, and the 
ticket prices go up-all that bunch of baloney. (quoted in Ephland 
1996:20) 

Sonny Rollins, on the other hand, makes more explicit his preference for 
the prestige of concert performance over the lack of dignity he associates 
with nightclub gigs: 

Jazz needs some dignity. It needs to be looked at as a serious, impor­
tant art form. And if you're going to be playing in nightclubs, I don't 
care what you say, you're not going to get that kind of respect for it. 
Not that the respect is even the thing that's going to put jazz over 
the top-I don't know. But it's just the idea that if you're just playing 
nightclubs, it just diminishes the music in some kind of way. At this 
time, 1997, I think it's just not enough to be playing nightclubs. It's 
just not enough, you know. It wasn't for me 20 years ago. It's not 
proper. If you want to do it, OK. But you shouldn't have to do it. 
(quoted in Belden 1997:25) 



MATTHEWW. BUTTERFIELD 341 

Jazz concerts do certainly provide professional jazz musicians with a better 
opportunity to display their craft to an appreciative, attentive audience­
one whose behavior is guided largely by the conventional social structure 
of concert events, and not by extramusical concerns. Thus for many jazz 
musicians and jazz fans, concerts have become the ideal format for live 
performances-one in which their music is properly evaluated and given 
the respect it deserves as an artistic achievement. 

The association of the concert hall with prestige has been an element 
of jazz history almost since its inception. Indeed, jazz musicians have al­
ways borne something of a chip on their collective shoulder, an inferiority 
complex vis-a-vis the cultural establishment of "legit" Western art music, 
and have always coveted the prestige associated with the concert hall. 
They typically perceive performances at prestigious venues like Carnegie 
Hall or Lincoln Center as milestones not just for themselves, but for the 
music in general. For example, Paul Whiteman, widely hailed as the "King 
of Jazz" in the 1920s, believed that the only way to prove the value of the 
new music he was performing was to present a concert at New York's 
Aeolian Hall: 

I believed that jazz was beginning a new movement in the world's 
art of music. I wanted it to be recognized as such. I knew it never 
would be in my lifetime until the recognized authorities on music 
gave it their approval. 

My idea for the concert was to show these skeptical people the ad­
vance which had been made in popular music from the day of the 
discordant early jazz to the melodious form of the present ... 

My task was to reveal the change and try to show that jazz had 
come to stay and deserved recognition. (Whiteman and McBride 
1974:94) 

Wynton Marsalis's acclaimed Jazz at Lincoln Center concert series is 
merely the latest (and evidently most successful) effort to date to establish 
jazz firmly as "America's classical music." The repertory jazz movement has 
emerged with considerable momentum in the past two decades in re­
sponse to this classicizing impulse; ensembles such as the Smithsonian Jazz 
Masterworks Orchestra are dedicated to performing note-for-note recre­
ations of the masterpieces of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and others. But 
the listening practices and social behaviors that emerge in the concert hall 
bear little resemblance to those described in much of the jazz literature or 
represented with such nostalgic yearning in films like Robert Altman's 
Kansas City-they lack the erotic social potential of traditional jazz night­
club performance. Historian Scott DeVeaux perhaps expresses it best: "As 



342 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

jazz acquires degree programs, piano competitions, repertory ensembles, 
institutes, and archives, it inevitably becomes a different kind of music­
gaining a certain solidity and political clout, but no longer participating 
in the ongoing formulation of meaning; no longer a popular music in the 
best sense of the word" (1991:553). 

Conclusion: New Roles for Analysis 
For a variety of reasons, then, recording and the music culture it has 

produced work against the integrative social function of jazz music-making 
activities. In the studio itself, recording has led to the compartmentalization 
of performance practice, such that jazz musicians no longer need to be co­
present during the recording process. The very act of recording then 
transforms the social stature of musicians, investing their activities with au­
thority as recording artists, thereby setting them apart from average citi­
zens while simultaneously devaluing the activities of "local" jazz musicians. 
Moreover, the omnipresence of recorded music in recent decades has 
pushed the role of music into the background "soundtrack" of our lives, 
where it frequently lends ambience to extramusical activities, much like 
Muzak. In this context, smooth jazz has come to dominate the jazz market, 
especially on radio, leaving fewer and fewer media outlets for mainstream 
-much less avant-garde-jazz musicians to get their music to the public. 
As a result, frame confusion abounds in jazz nightclubs today, as listeners 
accustomed to hearing jazz as background music on recordings fail to un­
derstand conventions of audience behavior at live performance events. 
This has led many prominent jazz musicians out of the nightclub and onto 
the concert stage, where a different economy and social architecture 
prevail, positioning the music itself as the main line of activity rather than 
as accompaniment to something else, but significantly curtailing its erotic 
efficacy. 

Because it cultivates active listening practices, training in analysis does 
offer a means for resisting the growing muzakification of our students' 
listening habits, thereby subverting the passive modes of listening so often 
elicited by recordings. But, as we have seen, both the social isolation re­
quired for analysis and its actual dependence on recordings work toward 
the dissolution of local jazz communities in a variety of ways. Instead of 
challenging the negative social implications of the recording economy for 
jazz musicians, analysis supports and affirms that economy by fostering 
a preference for CDs over live performance events. It is not that jazz as a 
musical tradition is in any danger of extinction from the effects of analysis 
and recording. Young musicians are still finding their ways to the music 
and succeeding, still attracting audiences and making a decent living at it. 
In fact, Down Beat magazine recently made a point of forecasting a bright 



MATTHEWW. BUTTERFIELD 343 

future for jazz by devoting their issue of June 1999 to a cast of twenty-five 
"rising jazz stars" all under forty years old. Their editorial motives were 
clear: "We feel the need to take stock and watch for those young players 
who not only ensure the music's survival, but promise to take it to the next 
level" (Enright 1999). But the social appeal and erotic efficacy oflive jazz 
performance events, especially at the local level, disappear within an ana­
lytical practice that can only accommodate recorded music. I have chosen 
to explore an essentially negative critique of the present jazz scene in or­
der to understand not how jazz seems tenaciously to survive against all 
odds, but why so many jazz performances today fail as integrative social 
events when evidently they were so successful in the past. 

We are thus confronted with a predicament: how can we analyze jazz 
without negating its social foundation? How can we avail ourselves of the 
insights gained from analysis and simultaneously advocate the erotic social 
power of the music? How can we use recordings in analysis to resist the 
negative social effects of the recording economy, and thereby support local 
jazz musicians and the communities their performance activities sustain? 

I believe that music theory can best promote the integrative social func­
tion of jazz by developing practical tools for the real-time analysis of music 
in the context of live performance events. The specific goal of such analy­
sis would be to reinvigorate the social life of musical events by cultivating strate­
gies for cognitive and social involvement. Listeners are "involved" in a per­
formance when the music sustains their attention as the main line of 
activity, leaving them open to its aesthetic and erotic effects (and in effec­
tive jazz performance, I believe these are inextricably related). Analysis 
would be a means of critical engagement with the event as a whole, elicit­
ing and maintaining involvement in the process. It would proceed by eval­
uating the contextual relationships between music perception, social be­
havior, and situational structure-a function of the social, economic, 
temporal, spatial, and acoustic organization of the event. The configura­
tion of these elements in a given musical situation sets the terms for analy­
sis, for it determines a social organization in which music functions a par­
ticular way, in which certain musical values are perceptually relevant and 
others not. Bound by situational constraints, analysis would then be 
geared toward criticism, as analysts would draw on an array of techniques 
and concepts to evaluate how effectively the musician(s) play the situation 
-i.e., how they respond to the situational constraints of the event both 
musically and socially. 

Ruth Stone's Let the Inside Be Sweet (1982), a music ethnography of the 
Kpelle people of Liberia, can be viewed as a precedent for the "situa­
tional" paradigm for analysis proposed here. 15 Stone sets out to develop a 
unitary approach to ethnography that will bridge the gap she perceives 



344 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

between those ethnomusicologists who study musical sound and those 
who focus on musical behavior. Her answer to this intradisciplinary schism 
is ethnography centered on the musical event itself, rather than on the ex­
plication of either musical or cultural systems. Event-centered ethno­
graphy, she contends, provides empirical grounding for statements about 
both musical sound and behavior, each of which is relevant for the pro­
duction and comprehension of musical meaning in a given situation. 

The analytical aims of Stone's event-centered ethnography differ from 
the situational approach I am proposing here, however. The goal of the 
former is to generalize from an analysis of a society's paradigmatic musical 
events to an understanding of its culture, where culture appears as the 
more or less stable set of practices and values embodied by that society. 
The particular musical event then constitutes an exemplary part or prod­
uct of broader musical and cultural systems. By contrast, the goal of a 
performance-centered music-analytical practice is less to read culture 
through the musical event (or even to uncover the production of culture as 
an outcome of the event) than to examine the perceptual and social possi­
bilities generated in specific musical situations: how the structure of the sit­
uation shapes the possibility for music perception and the emergence and 
maintenance of musical community. Culture functions in this approach not 
as the endpoint of analysis, but as a background context for the specific 
situation, a provisionally stable field of practices and values by which par­
ticipants infer musical meaning and adopt appropriate social behavior.16 

I am ultimately advocating an informal analytical practice-one that 
serves a practical purpose for listeners, but that need not be written up 
formally. In order for this mode of analysis to move beyond "active listen­
ing" on the one hand, or mere anecdotal accounts of performances on 
the other, however, we will need to develop analytical techniques by theo­
rizing about possibilities for musical experience in the context of live per­
formance situations. Preliminary written accounts, which will be experi­
mental in nature and undertaken after the event as a means of reflecting 
upon its success or failure as an integrative sociomusical occasion, will ad­
vance this purpose, illuminating aspects of experience that require more 
theorizing. 17 The goal, however, is to arrive at a cogent theoretical frame­
work with practical pedagogical applications. 

Because it seeks to integrate aspects of music perception and social be­
havior, a situational analytical paradigm requires an interdisciplinary ap­
proach. Music theory, of course, offers an array of practical techniques 
through aural skills training that can be cultivated to sustain cognitive in­
volvement in ongoing musical processes. Without scores or recordings, 
one loses access to a considerable volume of musical detail, for many of 
the pitch structures we commonly identify in analysis are not accessible in 
live performance contexts-this is not to say that they are inaudible, but 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 345 

that their audibility is a function of situational structure. Other musical 
parameters, however, are more cognitively available and socially relevant 
in performance. Listeners respond to mode, texture, timbre, tempo, regis­
ter, and rhythm in particular; they are also sensitive to dramatic shape, 
processes of intensification, as well as elements of continuity and disconti­
nuity. We need to develop practical tools to facilitate tracking such elements 
in real time and evaluating their effects. 

Theories of music perception could also be adapted for practical ana­
lytical applications, and concepts drawn from cognitive psychology, cogni­
tive semantics, and music semiotics, as well. Though developed and typi­
cally illustrated with reference to musical scores, such theories implicitly 
address real-time musical experience, and can be used to provide explana­
tory frameworks for understanding how music produces its aesthetic ef­
fects. IS Research in sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and per­
formance studies would provide theoretical grounding for analyzing the 
social organization and situational structure of performance events, illu­
minating their erotic potential, while also addressing rhetorical practices 
for writing about performance events.19 

There are, of course, significant consequences to a situational para­
digm for analysis. Most obviously, the object of analysis must change. Con­
ventional analytical practice typically concerns the illumination of a musi­
cal work that putatively exists in an objective sense, that is self-identical 
through time, independent of the contexts of its creation and continued 
reception-in a word, autonomous. Works are thus attributed a universal 
status above and beyond their specific realization in performance, such 
that what one says of a piece is said in a general sense, pertaining to all its 
potential performances at the cost of the particularity of any single per­
formance. Such reliance on the "work-concept" enables analysts to escape 
the dependence of a piece of music on the contexts in which it is encoun­
tered; it sustains a clear opposition between the musical and the extra­
musical, and thereby provides a way of rationalizing away the vagaries of 
particular performances.20 

However, from a situational perspective that emphasizes the interrelat­
edness of musical sound and situational structure, the formation of the 
musical! extramusical opposition is itself a contextual matter; understand­
ing of immanent context is then a precondition for an understanding of 
the notes and for evaluating the relationships among them. We cannot 
assume the objective existence of the work as such, but must explore the 
situational structure through which the work is presented as an object­
that is, through which the illusion of its autonomy is maintained and 
promulgated. This entails a fundamental shift in the underlying theoreti­
cal aims of analysis: instead of theorizing about pitch structures and ana­
lyzing particular musical works to illustrate our claims, we theorize about 



346 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

situational structures and use particular performances to illustrate them. 
For jazz analysis, this also implies a shift in the way we use recordings: in­
stead of treating the recording itself as a work, it becomes a vehicle for 
practicing the techniques of real-time analysis that will be employed in live 
performance events. 

A more important consequence of a performance-centered analytical 
paradigm is the loss of the potential for intersubjective corroboration. In 
analyzing works, theorists have access to scores, transcriptions, or record­
ings. In analyzing specific performance events, however, we often have 
none of these. Unless we take steps to document the event through audio 
or video recording-a complex process requiring considerable foresight 
and planning (not to mention securing permission from a number of 
parties)-nothing remains to enable the verification of our analytical 
claims or critical conclusions. 

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that such documentation 
would adequately solve the problem of intersubjective corroboration for 
the analysis of live performance events, for documentation is less signifi­
cant in this regard than the transformation of situational structure. Con­
ventional analytical practice treats listening as an experimental pursuit 
and sets up situational constraints to control musical experience, to de­
limit its focus and circumscribe the perspective from which the music is 
beheld. This enables us to isolate and magnify particular details in order 
to test their effects. The solitary listening contexts we adopt for analysis 
thus resemble artificially constructed lab situations; they promote the best 
conditions for intersubjective corroboration of analytical claims. 

By contrast, live performances typically offer an abundance of angles 
from which to approach the music. Perspectives vary according to the spa­
tial positioning of participants and their immediate acoustic environ­
ments, the background knowledge and experience they bring to the 
event, their individual social motivations for being there, and the availabil­
ity of side activities to occupy their attention. A video or audio recording 
can provide only a limited point of view that cannot adequately represent 
the range of possible perspectives. Thus even with recorded documenta­
tion, not only are the situational constraints of live performance events 
not conducive to intersubjective corroboration, the sheer diversity of 
perspectives available at such events renders it less meaningful. 

Under such conditions, analysis necessarily becomes a different kind 
of activity; no longer able to accommodate the requirements of a quasi­
scientific mode of inquiry, it becomes more of an ethnographic pursuit, a 
kind of music-theoretical fieldwork. Rather than falling back on a record­
ing and taking the performance event out of its context to consider it 
from an "armchair" analytical perspective, we bring analysis into live per-



MATTHEWW. BUTTERFIELD 347 

formance events, as something we can do while there, rather than some­
thing done after the fact. Analysis then becomes a form of participant ob­
servation, the ultimate practical application of the concepts and skills we 
develop in music theory and cultivate in our students. It relinquishes the 
kinds of claims that require intersubjective corroboration, and seeks in­
stead to advocate for the social life of musical events, to recapture the 
atmosphere of carnival that live jazz should possess, and thereby inspire 
participation and motivate listener involvement. In this way, it resists 
the domination of recordings, the social structures they produce, and the 
modes oflistener behavior they entail. 

A situational paradigm for analysis would broaden the scope of our in­
volvement with jazz and extend the relevance of music theory to others in 
jazz studies with less knowledge of our discipline. It would bring theory 
into interdisciplinary dialogue with fields such as ethnomusicology, sociol­
ogy, anthropology, and communication studies, which have not tradition­
ally held much relevance for music theorists. We could then enter into 
real discussions over the present and future state of jazz, and take a proac­
tive stance in ensuring not so much the preservation of the music as the 
continued health and viability of the musical situations in which it is en­
countered, thereby enablingjazz to grow both musically and socially. 

Notes 
1. Since 1990, these include, among others: Block (1993), Brownell (1994), 

Charry (1997-98), Folio (1995, 1997-98), Kurzdorfer (1996), Larson (1997-98, 
1998), Lindeman (1997-98), Martin (1996, 1997-98), Murphy (1998), Potter 
(1990), Smith (1991), Strunk (1996), Waters (1996), and Williams (1997-98). 

2. For an account of jazz education in colleges and universities, see Butterfield 
(2000:269-83) . 

3. There are, to be sure, many kinds of communities. Throughout this essay, 
however, I shall be concerned primarily with localized, "face-to-face" communities 
-communities whose members generally inhabit the same (relatively small) geo­
graphic area, and who, for the most part, know (or at least know of) one another. 
Such communities are to be distinguished from larger, more anonymous commu­
nities defined by, say, ethnicity (e.g., the African American community) or profes­
sion (e.g., the medical community). Hence, I am less concerned with the 'Jazz 
community" as a largely anonymous, global assemblage of jazz musicians and jazz 
fans defined by their love of and concern for this music than with more local com­
munities comprised of individuals who develop social relationships through the 
socially productive forces of jazz music-making activities. 

4. This interpersonal negotiation of groove and the social connection it im­
plies also underlies Charles Keil's theory of "participatory discrepancies." See Keil 
(1994a, 1994b). This, incidentally, explains why it is often so difficult to make 
good music with a person one does not like. 



348 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

5. For a detailed account of music as an agent of community formation, see 
Butterfield (2000:119-69). 

6. I derive this usage of "erotic" from Lewis Hyde, who views gift exchange as 
an "erotic commerce" opposed to commodity exchange, which derives from logos, 
the principle of differentiation (1979:xivn). Gift exchange, asserts Hyde, unites its 
participants in a social bond with one another, whereas commodity exchange 
draws a boundary between them. 

7. On musical interaction in jazz and its social implications, see Monson 
(1996:73-96) and Berliner (1994:416-46). 

8. Down Beat reported in 1995 that up to five hundred students per semester 
would typically take Gerald Wilson's jazz history course at UCLA (Helland 
1995:24). I have had similar enrollments in my courses at Eastern Illinois Univer­
sity and the University of Virginia between the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2002. 

9. To be sure, our perception and evaluation of these recordings must be rela­
tive, conditioned by the high-fidelity playback equipment available today, but I do 
not believe we should assume that they were easier on the ears back in the 1920s. 

10. This is true, of course, with printed music, which like recordings, is infi­
nitely reproducible and generates income with each sale. But the profits are on a 
lesser scale, for printed music appeals only to those with musical instruments who 
can read and play music; it takes work on the part of the consumer to realize the 
musical product. Recordings, on the other hand, require no musical skill. They of­
fer an instant visceral experience to anyone who purchases them, provided they 
have some kind of playback device (and most people in America today do). 

11. Sonny Rollins makes this explicit in an interview in Down Beat: 

I became very self-conscious about recording around the '70s. I wanted to 
do a lot of takes on everything and try to put out the best representation of 
what I could do. Of course, I was doing that in the '60s also, so I shouldn't 
say that. I mean, when I was with RCA, I had access to the RCA studios up on 
24th Street, and I used to go by there 24 hours a day, you know, whenever I 
wanted to, and practice. Then, I also was able to do a lot of different tracks. I 
remember I was up there with George Avakian, who was producing me at 
that time, and I had the option of doing as many tracks as I wanted to-he 
deferred to me. So that was something I started doing before. But in the 
'70s, I also wanted to have that kind of control. I always wanted to have con­
trol, of course, over what I did, for one thing because I wanted to make sure 
that what came out was the best representation of Sonny Rollins, and I 
thought I knew what that is. Now, I might not be perfect in that. Some peo­
ple hear things in my playing that I don't hear, you know. But nevertheless, I 
felt that I wanted to be able to have the final say in what came out. (quoted 
in Belden 1997:24-25) 

12. The same could be said of early cinema: actors, directors, and producers 
initially brought theatrical practices with them to the film studio. It took time for 
them to realize the distinctly cinematic possibilities the new medium had made 
available. 

13. Cf. Cook (2001:20): "But it is in the case of recordings that product and 
process have become most inextricably intertwined. The recording (a marketable 



MATTHEW W. BUTTERFIELD 349 

product) purports to be the trace of a performance (process), but is in reality usu­
ally the composite product of multiple takes and more or less elaborate sound 
processing-in other words, less a trace than the representation of a performance 
that never actually existed." See also Shumway (1999:192). 

14. Chicago is a case in point. In a 1996 interview in Down Beat, tenor players 
Fred Anderson and Von Freeman reminisced about the 1940s and '50s, when 
"63rd Street, 58th Street, 61st Street, 55th Street, 43rd Street, 47th Street, 38th 
Street-these South Side streets all had taverns and places with jam sessions." This 
thriving scene collapsed in the 1970s, and since then, as Freeman observes, "it's 
hard to find cats who can play" in Chicago. The "difference between New York and 
other places [is] the competition. And everybody migrates there who wants to 
make it." The interview, appropriately entitled "Tenacity," reflects Anderson and 
Freeman's continuing survival in Chicago, decades after the disintegration of its 
jazz scene, as the exception to the rule (Corbett 1996:29). For a discussion of Von 
Freeman's role in Chicago'S South Side jazz community during the 1970s and 
early '80s, see the article by T. M. Scruggs in this issue (pp. 179-99). 

15. Two other precedents worth noting here are Rose (1994) and Howard 
(1994). 

16. Although an account of the social production of culture is beyond the 
scope of the present argument, it is important here to acknowledge the potential 
for feedback from specific musical situations to the general level of culture: back­
ground cultural values can be generated and transformed by individual events in 
the social foreground. This is an underlying theme in the work of anthropologist 
Victor Turner. See, for example, the many fine essays in Turner (1986). 

17. For a preliminary example of situational analysis in this direction, see 
Butterfield (2000:247-63) where I provide an account of a live performance of 
Ron Carter's "Blues for D. P." and compare it to a recorded performance from his 
1994 CD Jazz, My Romance (Blue Note D106382). 

18. See, for example, Meyer (1956, 1973), Narmour (1990, 1992), Lerdahl and 
Jackendoff (1983), Rozin (2000), and Zbikowski (forthcoming). 

19. On the social organization of performance situations, see especially 
Goffman (1959, 1974), Harrison-Pepper (1990), Turner (1986), Schechner 
(1977), Schechner and Appel (1990), and Small (1998). For discussions of ethno­
graphic writing and strategies of presentation, see Van Maanen (1988) and Marcus 
and Fischer (1986). 

20. The "work-concept," according to Lydia Goehr (1992), is a "regulative 
idea" that has governed the production, commodification, and circulation of musi­
cal objects since the early nineteenth century. Goehr offers this view as a historical 
corrective to the analytic theories of Nelson Goodman (1969) and Jerrold 
Levinson (1980), both of whom she critiques at length (Goehr 1992:13-86). See 
pages 89-119 for a detailed account of the work-concept's op~ration. 

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