An intimate account of jazz and community

UNIVERSITY of ILLINOIS PRESS

How do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Thomas H. Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. 

Jazzing shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawing on rich ethnographic research, interviews, and long-term participant observation, Jazzingcharts the ways New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, Greenland offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meaning.

An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, Jazzing is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.

"A probing, fascinating, and sensitive portrait of a community of 'jazz people,' Tom Greenland's Jazzing reminds us that jazz is not simply sound, but is a way of life that impacts us in profound and different ways."--Ken Prouty, author of Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age

Publication of this book was supported by a grant from the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thomas H. Greenland is a New York City–based guitarist, pianist, vocalist, composer, arranger, journalist, photographer, and educator.

from: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/45nyw3ap9780252040115.html