Jazz and the Material Turn

Abstract

Although discourse on jazz has often emphasized its elusiveness and intangibility, the field of material culture provides interesting new directions for jazz studies. With regard to genre, attention to material culture can offer new perspectives on how recordings actively participate in genre formation through their entanglement in practices of listening and collecting. With regard to performance, it can show how musicians develop their creative agency in embodied correspondence with instruments, recording studios, and repertoires. The chapter concludes that jazz scholars’ knowledge of improvisation can shed new light on how people negotiate the emergent properties of material objects more generally.