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Listening to live jazz: an individual or social act?

This is a reserve item, to be considered only if the decision to double-weight Item 1 (Chances and Choices) is not upheld.

This article draws on research carried out with Dr Karen Burland at the University of Leeds, funded in part by a British Academy Small Grant and by research grants from our two institutions. We have presented this research at several international conferences, resulting in an invitation to submit a paper for a special issue of Social Semiotics (Burland & Pitts, 2012) edited by Simon Frith, to which this article is a companion piece.

Our empirical work with nearly 800 jazz listeners in a major festival and a highly regarded jazz club raises questions about the performer-audience interactions, addressed here and elsewhere, but also about the effect that audience members have upon one another - generating the focus for this paper on the tension between individual and collective experience in live music listening.

The paper contributes to understanding of jazz listening specifically, and more widely to knowledge of live listening experience, with relevance for arts marketing, psychology and sociology of music.