The Outside of ‘Sitting In’: Jazz jam sessions and the politics of participation

Abstract

Jazz jam sessions project an aura of open participation by allowing musicians to “sit in” and through a general relaxation of formal performance constraints. This essay examines the jam session historically, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s, to demonstrate how it was also informed by an ethic of exclusion. Professional jazz musicians, working in a highly commercialized entertainment business, consistently prized jam sessions as events where they felt liberated from the demands of the public--whether conceived as a live audience or as the potential body of consumers of recordings--and where they could play “for musicians only.” The allure of freedom and spontaneous interaction that marked the jam session, however, proved irresistible to club owners, who sought to stage jam sessions for paying audiences. Impresario Norman Granz strove to realize their promise of democratic participation by promoting a new kind of concert in which audiences were encouraged to participate actively with voice and body. Most efforts to stage jam sessions provoked defensive responses from professional musicians, as though the image of participation offered within the performance frame had to be carefully maintained by protecting it from potential intrusions by the public.

Notes

¹ On the Rhythm Club and other centres of jam session activity, see Scott DeVeaux (1997: 202–35).

² Quoted from a recorded interview in the archives of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University (see Ogren 1989: 53).

³ The lore on jam sessions thrives on stories charged rivalries and ‘cutting’, such as Jelly Roll Morton challenging the Harlem stride pianists on their turf, or Coleman Hawkins ‘defending his title’ when he returned to New York from a five-year period in Europe. Ralph Ellison celebrated the manner in which sessions opened the jazzman to ritual debasement: ‘there is always someone waiting in a jam session to blow him literally, not only down, but into shame and discouragement’ (2001 [1958]: 61).

⁴ Although any number of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ performances can serve as examples, I recommend the extended ‘Perdido’ from the 27 September 1949 concert at Carnegie Hall, where the personnel are Howard McGhee, Bill Harris, Illinois Jacquet, Flip Phillips, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, and Jo Jones.

⁵ I would like to thank Tad Hershorn of the Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, for sharing with me his forthcoming biography of Norman Granz, in which he explores Granz's relationship to the Communist Party. On leftist politics and jazz, see Chapter 1 in John Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool (2006: esp. 25–53) and Chapter 5 in Lewis A. Erenberg's Swingin' the Dream (1998).

⁶ See also the damning article reproduced from a Chicago newspaper on page 65 (McDonough 1998).