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Duke Ellington, radio remotes, and the mediation of big city nightlife, 1927 to 1933

This article was a key part of our strategy to develop work outside the usual publishing domains of media and cultural studies, and especially to engage with scholars in jazz studies. I work with Barber and Dubber, along with colleagues in the Birmingham Conservatoire, on this wider project, and we recently appointed Gebhardt in 2013 to lead and develop this area significantly. Although most of the primary research was already in the public domain, this article brings often neglected information to the fore, and sets it in a much wider contexts than had usually been the case in jazz studies. Building on my analyses of mediated popular music histories I argued that, in jazz studies, such primary sources are usually organised by existing narratives about the genius of selected artists. Here I built an analysis of a historical moment up from the primary material treating Ellington as a cultural worker in a new media field of emerging institutions and a cultural field of modernism and racialised practice. I drew on a range of media and cultural theory approaches including political economy, cultural studies and ideas of music mediation to offer an alternative way to understand Ellington, his music and historically-located practices. The findings and argument was published in an article in a special ‘Rethinking Ellington’ issue of the US-based journal Jazz Perspectives on, edited by Ellington scholars.