From the Margins to the Mainstream: Jazz, Social Relations, and Discourses of Value
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the manner in which particular discourses have served to shape and influence broader social understandings of various forms of contemporary jazz and improvised music, exploring the somewhat conflicted relationship that these forms of music have had with both the mainstream and the margins, examining the value claims made on behalf of these forms from a cultural, social, and political perspective. In the post-World War II years, jazz occupied a curiously paradoxical discursive position within North American culture, combining its ‘outsider’ role with a significant degree of mainstream exposure – issues pursued in the first section of the paper. The second section of the paper addresses the manner in which, more recently, a populist conceptualization of the music, linked to a narrowly defined notion of the jazz canon, has functioned not only as a marketing category, but has also served to influence the increasingly mainstream positioning of a delimited, neo-traditionalist category of ‘jazz.’ Concurrent with these developments, and in sharp contrast to the discursive role of jazz as a marketing category or a historical style, some more contemporary and challenging forms of jazz and improvised music have exhibited a rather more conflicted relationship with the cultural mainstream, claiming – or having claimed on their behalf – an oppositional politics, linked to often romanticized notions of marginality. In some circles, these musical forms have been employed as the locus for discussions of the role that such forms might play as models for social change. In this case, significant rhetorical claims, linked to a wide range of socio-political benefits, are made on behalf of contemporary jazz and improvised music. The final sections of the paper engage critically with these discourses, situating them within broader debates regarding the social benefits and impacts of the arts. The paper concludes by arguing for a somewhat more realistic view of the socio-political potential of a wide range of contemporary forms of music-making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".