Networks, Creativity and the Finest in Jazz 1939-1979

Networks, Creativity and the Finest in Jazz 1939-1979 David Grandadam* BETA, Université de Strasbourg, France Abstract Creativity is commonly viewed as a collective process involving the coordination of a variety of individuals who interact in a dense network and influence one another through time. In this paper, the evolution of the network of collaboration among artists in the particular case of the Blue Note jazz label is studied. By analyzing the extent to which the collaboration structure relies on a star production model and the extent to which it relies on integrated and cohesive groups, the question raised is how the label has matched its artistic efforts with its commercial preoccupations. The results show that, over time, the Blue Note label has been able to ideally combine creative talents as well as established stars, by relying on an important “family” of musicians. These artists have all played a major role in connecting the Blue Note network, and have all widely contributed to shape the evolution of jazz. * Direct correspondence to David Grandadam, BETA, Université de Strasbourg, 61 Avenue de la Forêt Noire, F-67085 Strasbourg Cedex. Email: [email protected] An earlier draft of this paper has been presented in London and in Paris to members of the DIME network. The author would like to thank all those who contributed to enhance this paper with their helpful comments. I'm gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old, I'm gonna get me some younger ones… Keeps the mind active. Art Blakey, A Night at Birdland, Blue Note, 1954. INTRODUCTION Jazz, maybe more than any other musical genre, is characterized by a wide diversity of styles.1 Swing, bebop, cool, free, funk-soul, or fusion, are just a few of them, among many others. Famous pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane have played an important part in changing the trajectories of jazz. However, they could not have fully succeeded without the efforts of many fellow musicians, and without the support of labels such as Riverside, Prestige or Savoy, which have all contributed to the expansive institutionalization of the various jazz styles. As it is the case for most art forms, the ongoing creativity characterizing jazz is truly the result of a collective process involving the coordination of many different entities (Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1993; White, 1993). One label in particular stands out in jazz history: the well-known Blue Note label – with its wide range of talented musicians, its genuine and influential cover art, and, most importantly, with its beloved and characteristic sound. The Blue Note story ideally illustrates how a label has been able to successfully promote many different styles and significantly change jazz music, by bringing together, in a broad network of collaboration, many of the most creative musicians of the post-war jazz scene. This network directly reflects the label’s musical endeavors, and, therefore, can serve as an example to better understand the general mechanisms of cultural production.2 We analyze this network throughout this study. Labels play a major role in defining the evolutionary paths of music genres and styles, throughout the artists they represent (Peterson, 1997; Dowd, 2003; Lena, 2006; Negus, 1999; Tschmuck, 2006). On one hand, they enable these artists to connect to each other, share their ideas, influence each other and perform together in sessions, and therefore are main repositories for the accumulation, combination, enrichment, and renewal of creative expression. On the other hand, because they are responsible for the creations launched on the market, labels behave as traditional profit-oriented organizations and will therefore try to benefit from the work of the most prolific artists. In this perspective, understanding how artists are pooled together in time, as well as the mechanisms driving the creation of links, is the key to understanding the extent to which the label is driven by the artistic exploration of 1 In reference to the work of Neale (1980) on the film industry, we use the word genre to refer to distinctive categories of music, such as rock, rap, dance, world music, jazz and so on. We use the term style to describe different subgenres. 2 Systems of cultural production have been studied by several authors, who propose to view these systems as driven by symbolic representations, in which innovative forms progressively replace the older ones, therefore leading to cycles of creation (Hirsch, 1972; Peterson and Berger, 1975; DiMaggio, 1987; Lena and Peterson, 2008). 1 new talents, and the extent to which it is driven by the commercial exploitation of existing stars.3 In this study, we analyze the evolution of the Blue Note collaboration network among artists, by focusing on how the label has been able to overcome the problem of balancing both artistic and economic logics of practice. In order to do so, we examine how the different artists were combined in time, by testing two different models of network evolution, which each rely on different structures of interaction. Our aim is not to solely test the efficiency of specific network architectures in an industry, but rather to study how individual prestige and collective behavior can be blended in order to ensure the successful exploration and exploitation of creative ideas. In other words, using the example of the Blue Note label, we focus on the structural processes allowing for common understandings as well as creative sparks to emerge within a competitive context. The evolving topology resulting from the multiple interactions among these individuals points out to several mechanisms that may explain the emergence of specific patterns of collaboration in the world of music. The network structure directly reflects the label’s attempts to promote a large number of artists with very different musical expressions, which all remain, however, very much linked to each other. Over time, the Blue Note network exhibits higher levels of relative cohesiveness and integration, with the progressive rise of highly connected artists. These stars occupy a central position in the network, and have played a major role in the creation, diffusion and success of jazz. We discuss their structural characteristics throughout this work. COLLABORATION AND CREATIVITY Since the seminal work of Granovetter (1973, 1985), social embeddedness is considered as a major driving force of economic action. This assumption has led to an important body of theoretical and empirical research, which has helped uncover steady generic properties of real networks, and which has contributed to show the importance of social structure on the acquisition and allocation of resources (see Feld, 1981; DeNora, 1991; Padgett and Ansell, 1993 for examples). Several researchers have studied art worlds using social network analysis. In their work, Gleiser and Danon (2003) for example, who focus on the collaborations among artists during the swing era, observe significant correlations between recording locations, racial segregation and community structure. Smith (2006), who analyzes the collaboration network for rap music, finds evidence of rivalry among the highly connected (and most popular) artists, in contrast to most social networks. These art worlds share strong similarities with the scientific networks of collaboration, as portrayed by Newman (2001) in physics, Moody (2004) in sociology, Powell et al. (2005) in the life sciences, and Goyal et al. (2006) in economics.4 We 3 The tension existing between the world of art and the world of commerce, as well as the role of labels as intermediate structures linking the artists to the market for creative goods and services, are described by Caves (2000). 4 Creativity in the worlds of art and science share strong similarities one with another, as depicted, for example, in the works of Koestler (1964), Rothenberg (1979), or Sawyer (2006). 2 rely on their findings in order to carry out our analysis. Drawing more specifically on the work of Moody (2004), we expect two major mechanisms to drive the evolution of networks of collaboration in the particular case of jazz labels. The first mechanism driving this evolution is related to the label’s economic and commercial motivations, while the second mechanism is related to its artistic motivations. Some individuals are generally much more favored than others. Art worlds, and labels in particular, commonly rely on major ‘stars’ with a considerable reputation. In most cases, these artists appear on more sessions, sell more records, and therefore are relatively advantaged in terms of revenue (Rosen, 1981; MacDonald, 1988; Anderson, 2006). These stars would be expected to occupy a central position in the collaboration network, which would allow them to be much more influential than their poorly connected counterparts. Through time, more and more artists would be expected to collaborate with these high status artists in order to increase their own status, as it is the case for academic researchers (Merton, 1973; Allison et al., 1982). The connected stars should therefore progressively reinforce their position, leading to important inequalities among the different individuals. This mechanism, also known as preferential attachment, is the main feature of scale-free networks (Barabasi and Albert, 1999). If the label relied exclusively on a star system, the resulting network would be expected to behave as a scale-free network, favoring a small number of artists responsible for connecting the network and guaranteeing the economic viability of the label with their success. By contrast, as artists gradually contribute to create new styles, they often turn to fellow musicians who share similar tastes and expressions. Artists should therefore be expected to have strong links with a small group of individuals, with whom they share the same desire to pusjh the boundaries of their art, while keeping weak links with more distant individuals in order to stay connexcted to what is done on the outside.

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