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The Collective Organization of Contemporary Jazz Musicians in the UK

This work came out of a long collaboration with Professor Tim Wall around local jazz scenes, as part of work in the research centre, to produce significant studies of music mediation and professional cultures in jazz. The research emerged from a series of external engagement activities, including a number of public events. Two of these focused on the jazz music industries, and one included a presentation from Chris Mapp, a jazz musician and member of the Birmingham-based jazz collective Cobweb, stimulating our interest in this area. (Other speakers included the producer/director and researcher of the BBC TV documentary Jazz Britannia, itself an object of research for colleagues in our centre). Our first draft of this article informed two conference papers, including one at the Rhythm Changes European Jazz conference, and one at Live Music Exchange Conference in Leeds in May 2012. Feedback from these presentations encouraged us to extend the piece, and we produced a final draft which built on Wall’s work on the professional practices of jazz musician and Professor Andrew Dubber’s research into mapping the jazz scenes in New Zealand cities. Such collaborations have been a significant way in which I have established my post-doctoral career, and through this work I have established strong links with the jazz programme at the Birmingham Conservatoire and regional and national jazz promoters. This article presented the first detailed academic analysis of UK-based contemporary jazz collectives, and examined how collective practice allowed them to create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries. I’ve since extended this work with projects on the late British jazz drummer Tony Levin and with UK jazz label Edition Records, and Wall and I intend to publish further work on jazz collectives in 2014.