While wandering around on the internet, I ended up reading the a chapter of Matthew Sam Neil’s 2018 thesis “Locating Jazz in 21st Century America” called BadBadNotGood and Jazz Blasphemy (Chapter 6). I thought it was a really interesting discussion of how and why Jazz has developed its reputation is a high-brow music, disconnected from time in a sense.

With jazz, sacralization has occurred via similar processes—the establishment of a canon of great artists, the separation of outsider from insider—though the motives for this process of sacralization have been different. For jazz, a tradition was viewed by musicians and critics as being in danger of being lost to a marketplace that was passing it by in favor of rock and pop (Prouty 2013). Jazz’s survival thus depended on its establishment as a high art form, especially as a uniquely American achievement. To do so necessitated following the norms of Western art music and similar processes of sacralization. This included viewing the cultural form of jazz as a tradition that must be treated with respect and not as mere entertainment (Levine 1988, 146).

The thesis is focused on Jazz as an American art form; given that a lot of the most interesting Jazz I’ve been hearing over the last few years is coming out of the UK (and in particular London), I’d be interested in analysis of that phenomena, and how non-American institutions see Jazz.