for jazz, and only the oldest and most stable clubs survived. There would be other clubs coming along, but … most of the new ones were either supper clubs modeled on an old-time idea of social class, tourist sites aimed specifically at foreign clientele (and sometimes owned by foreign money), or eclectic new takes on ’60s-styled loft clubs” (Szwed 2000, 74–75; see also Deutsche and Ryan 1984). In such a climate, musicians increasingly turned to alternative ways of supporting themselves, including teaching in emerging jazz studies programs and competing for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a number of local and regional agencies (Anderson 2002).
Indeed, even the media channels that had provided one means for musicians, venues, and labels to promote jazz began to decline during this period. The recording industry, feeling the effects of the economic downturn, was in a slump toward the end of the 1970s, with the result that many labels, including CTI, Atlantic, Elektra, and Columbia trimmed their (jazz) artist rosters and laid off employees in an attempt to remain viable. To the degree that they managed to profit from sales of recordings, they did so largely with fusion-oriented releases rather than more traditional forms of acoustic jazz. As Ricky Schultz, the national promotion manager for Warner Brothers’ jazz and progressive music department, told one reporter, his label was being more cautious about investment and expenditures: “All areas are going to be scrutinized carefully … and areas like tour support and advertising are definitely going to be affected. Also, instead of an extensive marketing campaign up front, there will be more of a wait-and-see attitude” (Paikert 1979, 44–45).
Given such grim news from the labels, the demise in 1980 of WRVR (106.7 FM), New York City’s last commercial jazz radio station, should have come as no surprise. Originally established at the Riverside Church in 1961, the station had always presented an eclectic mix of music. In a move spearheaded by Robert A. Orenbach, WRVR switched in 1974 to an all-jazz format that was dependent on advertising revenue from labels and venues. After losing money for a couple of years, the station was sold to the Sonderling Broadcasting Corporation, which altered the format to include more fusion- and pop-oriented jazz (Gans and Tusiewicz 1978). Despite the changes initiated by Sonderling’s program directors and signs that the prospects for jazz were improving by 1979, the station, then owned by Viacom, was unable to generate either solid ratings or sufficient revenue and abruptly switched to a country music format on 8 September 1980 (“WRVR-FM Switches” 1980; Jeske 1980).
Although a number of noncommercial stations, like WNYU-FM and WEVD-FM, increased their jazz programming, and others, including WBGO-FM, lengthened their broadcast days, many musicians, record industry executives, music retailers, and event promoters presumed WRVR’s format switch would have a chilling effect on the economy of the jazz scene, predicting that, compensatory measures aside, the markets for jazz recordings and performance would suffer. Vernon Slaughter, then vice president for progressive/jazz marketing at CBS Records, was quoted in the New York Times saying, “The whole idea of WRVR … was that it was a commercial outlet that allowed us to sell jazz. The problem is that now we don’t have a target market that’s into jazz that we can direct our advertising to directly…. New York is the largest market for jazz in the United States and when you take away WRVR it hurts” (“Radio Tries” 1980).6 John F. Szwed confirms some of Slaughter’s fears: “Understanding the directions taken by jazz since the ’80s is not easy. The continued diffusion of various jazz styles, the disappearance of regular reviews in most newspapers and magazines, an economic slump in the record business, the shift of some of the most vital recording activity to small recording labels and to overseas, the confusion that followed the change in record formats from vinyl to CD, all contributed to the difficulty” (2000, 269). Indeed, over the next two decades even public radio stations, forced to get more of their operating revenue from listeners, joined the exodus, abandoning jazz (and classical music) in favor of the news, talk, and special interest programs that radio consultants such as David Giovannoni guaranteed would shore up their listener bases (Freedman 2001).7
In short, changes in international and municipal economic policy had long-lasting effects on the viability of jazz in American cities like New York. Although conventional wisdom says that the uprisings in urban African American neighborhoods in the late 1960s were largely responsible for so-called white flight, it should be clear that the conditions that made the uprisings possible had their roots in an earlier era (Sugrue 1996). The policies implemented by municipal authorities in the 1970s and 1980s, however, had that conventional wisdom as well as an economically changed world at their root. They invoked fears about safety as well as the need to attract tourist and corporate revenue (Warren 1993; Zukin 1995) to justify certain alterations of the spatial configuration of urban environments. As bars and clubs presenting live jazz in African American neighborhoods, unable to depend on the leisure dollars of industrial workers, grew less numerous, they were replaced by venues in whiter, more affluent areas, ones that could pay even poorly compensated musicians more money. Likewise, the media outlets that benefited from venues’ promotional needs had to find new ways to attract advertising revenue. As a result, record labels, promoters, and musicians all found themselves scrambling to adjust to a changed, less economically stable environment.
These examples show that the development of jazz in a particular locale is always and everywhere a story of a musical style’s dependence on the work of a number of individuals as well as their accommodation to the ways that space is transformed and controlled. A similar perspective emerges from Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life (1961b). He focuses attention on the jazz scene in the late 1950s. His collected essays take a wide view, offering in turn discussions of the motivations and backgrounds of audiences, the role of formal and informal education in musicians’ development, the benefits and disadvantages of membership in the music union, the economics and atmosphere of jazz clubs, the constraints imposed on performers by recording contracts, and the involvement of musicians with drugs and the underworld. Likewise, Martin Williams’s essays in Jazz Heritage (1985) and elsewhere bring the picture into sharper focus, providing glimpses of musicians at work, in the recording studio and at rehearsals. By concentrating his critical eye on the nature of jazz composition and improvisation, as well as the accommodations musicians necessarily make with performance venues and various other intermediaries, Williams implicitly suggests the importance of a scene-based perspective. The work of W. Royal Stokes (1991) and Stuart Nicholson (1990) helps to complete a picture of what has happened since the end of the 1960s. None of these works, however, explicitly takes the interconnected roles of a variety of actors and institutions as its subject.
Not surprisingly, some of the most insightful work on the constitution of jazz scenes has come from journalists employed by national newspapers and international jazz magazines. Because they are of necessity more concerned with the day-to-day and month-to-month functioning of the scene, their work can be useful in exploring present-day phenomena. Magazines like JazzTimes and Down Beat from time to time include issue-based articles (Jones 1995; Corbett 1995; Gavin 2001; Milkowski 2001)—alongside news items, artist features, record reviews, and advertisements for recordings and instruments. The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic, among others, also publish occasional articles, performance reviews, and artist features. There are, of course, easily discernible biases and distortions of fact in the press. Among musicians and the critical establishment, it is somewhat expected that national and international magazines, whose main advertisers are record companies, might shy away from being overly critical of the recording industry from which they receive a great deal of their advertising revenue.
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