Perpetuating the music

• Autor(a) principal: Pinheiro, Ricardo
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/11231
• topic: United States; Jazz musicians; Interviews

This book consists of a set of interviews about jazz jam sessions. It results from fieldwork (Burgess 1984) carried out between 2003 and 2005 in Manhattan, within the scope of the doctoral project in Musicology (Pinheiro 2008 and 2012). The testimonies presented emerge originally from semi-structured ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979) with jazz musicians and a club manager, having been complemented with observations made in five performance spaces located in three different Manhattan neighborhoods: Harlem (Lenox Lounge and St. Nick's Pub) Upper West Side (Cleopatra's Needle and Smoke) and Greenwich Village (Small's). With the publication of this book, I intend to highlight the perspectives of the musicians interviewed, seeking to contribute, from a “inside” view of the jazz scene (or emic), to further study the implications of this performative practice on the career of jazz musicians, namely in New York. The interviews took place in the U.S. and in Portugal with renowned musicians from the New York jazz scene, as well as with other regulars of jam sessions of various generations and races. Bearing in mind that the reality of jazz in New York is not limited only to the elite of famous musicians, but also shaped by the performance and relationships between hundreds of unknown musicians from the general public, I was concerned not only with interviewing musicians established in the jazz scene, but also others for whom the jam session represents an important performative practice. However, for this book I selected those made with established musicians.