The creation of a jazz art world and the modern jazz renaissance

This dissertation examines the creation of a jazz art world over a forty year period beginning in the late nineteen thirties up to the early nineteen seventies. It shows how the organization of music production in the United States engendered the creation of a jazz art world and the transformation of jazz as a music genre. This study demonstrates that the evolution of the jazz art world and jazz music can be broken down into two phases that coincided with two distinct periods in the organization of music production in the United States. The first period ran from the nineteen thirties to the early nineteen fifties when a popular music oligopoly had effective control over the production of music. The second period began in the mid nineteen fifties with the collapse of the oligopoly and the rise of independent music production.;The popular music oligopoly excluded from popular performance jazz practices preferred by many popular musicians. This led musicians and others to create a jazz art world of live performance, recordings, and print media. This art world developed a jazz aesthetic that legitimized jazz against its commercial rejection by claiming a high art status. This independent art world, however, remained limited to an urban jazz scene. Only with the collapse of the oligopoly, did jazz become a nationally recognized art form. In this jazz renaissance, jazz musicians transformed jazz performance into a new fine art genre. The art world moved to new locations, new audiences, and eventually to a new generation of musicians, all with no connection to the original urban music scene where this art world first began.;This study shows how the organization of popular music production in the United States generated a third alternative to the popular aesthetic and the classical aesthetic in American music. Jazz became a hybrid of popular performance and high art aesthetics because of the constraints imposed by a popular music oligopoly. It was the collapse of this oligopoly, however, that allowed jazz to become a major art world that continues to enjoy large audiences at the national and international level.