Selling the Songbook

Chapter 3 addresses the corporate history of Verve Records, the erstwhile independent label founded by Norman Granz and subsequently acquired by PolyGram. The revitalization of the Verve legacy under the stewardship of PolyGram A&R executive Richard Seidel, beginning in the early 1980s, provides us with an intriguing window onto corporate strategy in the music industry at the height of the neoclassical jazz “boomlet”: what began as the jazz division’s effort to take advantage of PolyGram’s strengths in the marketing of classical records and back catalog soon expanded into a more ambitious strategy of new artist development, as Seidel sought to cultivate what Verve saw as the commercial viability of the “young lions” movement.

The “Yoshi’s Effect”

In a bid to atone for its midcentury actions, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, beginning in the 1980s, set about planning a “jazz preservation district” to be located in the Fillmore neighborhood. Along with a program for small-business loans, the SFRA initiative originally took the form of a combined multiplex and jazz venue, pairing AMC Theaters with an outpost of the New York-based Blue Note club. While this first proposal was never realized, the SFRA did later succeed in launching a different mixed-use project that mixed affordable and market-rate housing with a branch of the Oakland-based Yoshi’s jazz club. Chapter 6 examines the economic and cultural challenges facing the Fillmore redevelopment district at the turn of the millennium.

Bronfman’s Bauble

The experience of Verve Records during the PolyGram-Universal merger of 1998, engineered by Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., demonstrates how the implications of neoliberal financialization were translated into the conditions of possibility for jazz recording on the major labels between 1980 and the turn of the millennium. The merger imposed dramatic cuts upon the company’s artist roster and workforce, and, as such, it telegraphed Bronfman’s privileging of the company’s publicly traded stock over existing stakeholders in the company. Alongside its analysis of the PolyGram-Universal merger and its implications for the Verve Music Group, chapter 4 also examines Richard Seidel’s cultivation of Verve’s roster of instrumental “young lions,” and their subsequent displacement in the wake of the merger.

“Homecoming”

The ecstatic reception that greeted Dexter Gordon upon his return to New York in 1976 stood in contrast to the air of pessimism that befell the city as it confronted the decade’s fiscal crisis. Many of the city’s problems derived from a systemic disinvestment in those communities made most vulnerable by the specter of municipal default. Nevertheless, during this period, New Yorkers viewed their city’s failings largely through the lens of cultural crisis. In this context, chapter 2 situates Gordon’s return in relation to more negative discourses about punk, disco, and contemporary popular music. The period provides us with a useful case study for understanding how arguments waged on the terrain of culture provide cover for strategies of fiscal austerity.

Jazz and the Right to the City

Chapter 5 takes up the case of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) and its tumultuous relationship with San Francisco’s jazz community. In the late 1950s, under the pretext of urban renewal, the SFRA embarked upon a destructive three-decade initiative in the city’s Fillmore district that displaced tens of thousands of local residents, decimated the area’s small businesses, and dismantled the neighborhood’s cultural ecology. Proceeding from an analysis of California’s community redevelopment agencies, chapter 5 profiles the musical life of the Fillmore in the postwar era and chronicles the experience of those affected by urban redevelopment, including such figures as John “Jimbo” Edwards, owner of Jimbo’s Bop City, and Leola King, proprietor of numerous venues in the Fillmore.

Introduction

The Jazz Bubble proceeds from the idea that there is a story to be told about the relationship between jazz, culture, and contemporary financial capitalism. I argue that jazz may provide us with an unexpected avenue of approach as we seek to understand the cultural dynamics of neoliberal ideologies and institutions, in an era in which the volatility of the financial markets has come to inform the texture of everyday life. As a window onto the complex issues I aim to tackle here, I would like to begin here with a case study that in my view shows us, rather than telling us, why this line of inquiry is an important one....

“Controlled Freedom”

Chapter 1 approaches managerial theory as an entry point for examining the relationship between jazz and risk. If management theorists have looked to jazz practice as an analogy for risk-taking, jazz affords us with a powerful window onto a more complex narrative of risk in American life. This chapter develops a distinction between risk and uncertainty crafted by economic theorist Frank Knight, where uncertainty implies a conception of risk in which the parameters of risk are impossible to quantify. Chapter 1 culminates with an examination of postbop, as it was realized by the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet and subsequent artists: the embrace of “controlled freedom” by the Davis Quintet brought an unprecedented level of virtuosity to bear upon improvisatory risk-taking.