Looking for the Band: Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproduction of Jazz
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as a template, this paper examines the impact of recording technology and the recording industry on the development and dissemination of jazz and on past and present popular perceptions of this musical form. For an unwritten and improvisatory art form such as jazz, the implications of the mass distribution of recordings become particularly significant, as one cannot, as with sculptures or paintings, compare the reproductions with the original work. This condition raises significant questions concerning the concept of original versus copy and whether it is really possible, in the case of performance art like jazz, to identify an “original.”
 
 Listening to a live performance of jazz is a very different experience from hearing it on a recording, which is a medium that is filled with numerous, often questionable, degrees of mediation. There are many elements, including racial prejudices, corporate and advertising interests, and the ambitions of individual musicians and producers, that have affected and structured many of the recordings that we now regard as “classic” jazz. The recording industry was also responsible for the vast proliferation of jazz across North America and eventually around the globe, however, introducing jazz recordings to scores of listeners, as well as many future jazz musicians who made significant contributions to the development of this art form, and who might otherwise have never even encountered this style of music. The music that we now know as jazz has been the product of a complex developmental process that flows freely between the media of live performance and sound recordings. As such, one should be wary of dismissing the role of recording technology in the development of jazz as being inherently corrupt and of regarding the sound recording as a fixed text.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".