Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form by Damon J. Phillips (2013)

The majority of new books on jazz is concerned with a particular property of jazz music, be it a specific label, a cluster of years, a region or a part of the music that influenced another art form.
Damon J. Phillips’s study, however, concentrates on another “specialty” of recorded jazz music throughout the decades: out of the huge output of recorded tunes, only a few earned the title “standard” or “classic.”

Those tunes were recorded many, many times by different artists and bands throughout the years, sometimes rerecorded by the same artists decades later and hence, eventually, may have found their way into the “Good Book,” the collection of jazz tunes every able musician should know by heart before he dares to enter any jam session anywhere. These songs have a number of purposes, among other things they provide a common point of reference to musicians. But why is that so, or why did some songs make it, while others passed into oblivion?

Phillips, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, concentrates on tunes that were first recorded and published between 1917 and 1933, and then recorded repeatedly. On roughly 200 pages, he tries to identify the necessary ingredients that turn a genuine song into a standard. He gives specific emphasis to the narrative surrounding the title, more often than not a sort of marketing strategy conceived by the recording companies. Combining his initial sociological background and a passion for jazz, Phillips seeks out the many ways the recording industry employed devices of product placement and artist marketing successfully to convince buyers of the uniqueness of particular songs and labels. So he shows that individual companies could define what was to be labeled “jazz” in the first place and how this was done, while simultaneously the label was strongly associated with a jazz label by the consumer.

With place and originator of the tune as key information, since sometimes a certain recording location seemed to give the recording more credibility and “authenticity” as a jazz tune by adding a certain context of production; thus strongly influencing the way consumers experienced and purchased a new kind of music right from the start – no matter how much truth (e.g. explicit mention of New Orleans as recording location) was contained in such statements. As a result, his study “reframes current knowledge to yield new insights as a case study of market emergence, boundary dynamics, and evolution. As a consequence, this book speaks about how cultural markets emerge and evolve.”

And, indeed, the text is strongly centered on hard data and we find very few pictures of record covers or of artists playing their instruments, but many tables, figures and graphical renderings of information. But then this is the way some sociological and business studies work; they strip off the “aura” of an article and leave nothing but hard data. (In this case, the artificial addition of aura and authenticity is just the very topic of this study.)

So the reader should bring along a certain ability (and liking) for figures and other tools used in empirical approaches to situations or  studies. “Congruence” plays an important role in the survey, since it describes that data added to a narrative of the recording that fulfills the current expectations of the record buying public – that same public that was “led” to expect certain details about a real jazz recording like the place of recording, authorship, time and artists and record label. What may sound a bit dull or not exactly what one may expect to find in a book about jazz, can be of interest to the collector or the expert of early jazz.

Or did you expect to find out that more than 40% of all recorded jazz prior to 1929 was recorded outside the US? Or that in the early 1920s, there were more recording companies in Germany than in any other European country of the time? Or that band leader Sam Wooding toured Germany from 1925 to 1926 and at that time produced a whole of eighteen jazz sides, more than any other American jazz band up to that point?

Phillips digs up this kind of information (and many, many more details of interest) chiefly from recording catalogs, jazz discographies and by scanning thousands of old newspapers and trade magazines. This way, he turns up many more hidden shapers of jazz history throughout his study, for example, that jazz recordings from very distant and unconnected locations to the major jazz venues (the cities of Chicago, New York, Los Angels and London were all musically connected) were rather evaluated as important inputs. This was caused by their “otherness” which would seem unusual at first, since the jazz canon was thought to be concerned mainly with influences from within the same internal network of connected recording venues than being under the influence of “exotic” impulses from disconnected sources such as Oslo or Buenos Aires.

All this data in figures and tables finally paves the way to a number of significant details about the nature of jazz tunes, record labels and the important role of location and “markers of authenticity” that accompany this very special consumer product, the jazz record.
Unfortunately sometimes, Phillips does not elaborate on some of his findings, i.e. the reader is presented with a combination of facts derived from his survey, but it is left up to him to make sense of it. When Phillips does elaborate, however, we are presented with a kind of unique approach to jazz as a commercial product in the making, since some information about jazz and jazz artists (particularly information of who sold how many copies of this or that and thus influenced the style of so-and-so) that is quoted repeatedly is based on lore and substance not entirely reliable and thus may be inaccurate intelligence.

With respect to the origin of all the information gathered here and the form it is presented, it will not necessarily make it an easy book to read. However, jazz researchers and those interested in markets for products of popular culture will certainly be grateful for all the “hard facts” about labeling, sales figures and regional oddities that are revealed here.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2015

Damon J. Phillips. Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. Princeton University Press, 2013, 232 p.