Matt Brennan

There has been a notable resurgence in the phenomenon of the one-man band in the past ten years, as documented by Adam Clitheroe’s film, One Man In The Band (2008), BBC Radio 4’s “One Man Band” (2013), and Dave Harris’s enthusiast compendium, Head, Hands, and Feet (2012). Music festivals exclusively featuring one-man bands have also recently been curated in London and Montreal. The reasons for such renewed interest are complex, but include concerns ranging from the aesthetic (total creative autonomy), the romantic (the image of the lone troubadour), the technological (the mass production of looping software and pedals), to the economic (no bandmates with whom to split income at a time when traditional revenue streams, especially recording sales, have dwindled). This article examines the one-man band resurgence and the themes above from an auto-ethnographic perspective, using the author’s own experience as a one man band performer as a case study.

This article examines the policies of the British Musicians' Union towards the employment of musicians who were not UK citizens in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, with particular emphasis on an alleged ban on American musicians entering the country. Drawing on a number of hitherto largely ignored and/or unavailable sources, it argues that many previous accounts of these policies have simplified a more complex picture. We illustrate that complexity and suggest that the issues surrounding the ban are ones which continue to resonate.

Jazz and rock and roll have been historically treated as separate musical traditions, despite sharing many socio-musical characteristics. The roots of the divide between the two genres can be partially traced through the history of music journalism. This article examines how jazz critics writing for Down Beat, the most influential of the American jazz publications, constructed rock and roll in opposition to jazz in the 1950s, providing one of the earliest instances of a discursive tension which survives to the present day. It shows how the commercial decisions music publications need to make can influence the formation of musical genre boundaries.

The social history of music in Britain since 1950 has long been the subject of nostalgic articles in newspapers and magazines, nostalgic programmes on radio and television and collective memories on music websites, but to date there has been no proper scholarly study. The three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain address this gap, and do so from the unique perspective of the music promoter: the key theme is the changing nature of the live music industry. The books are focused upon popular music but cover all musical genres and the authors offer new insights into a variety of issues, including changes in musical fashions and tastes; the impact of developing technologies; the balance of power between live and recorded music businesses; the role of the state as regulator and promoter; the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture; and the continuing importance of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Drawing on archival research, a wide range of academic and non-academic secondary sources, participant observation and industry interviews, the books are likely to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history.

This series of articles presents the findings of a research team who are one year into a three-year project investigating the social, cultural and economic impact of live music in the UK over the past 50 years. The project is funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, and rather than focusing on a particular musical genre, it concentrates instead on understanding live music from the perspective of the live music promoter. The project aims to fill a significant gap in the scholarly knowledge and understanding of contemporary British musical culture, and to challenge and refine existing record-industry based accounts of music as a creative industry. The articles cover the team's progress in the following areas: the creation of an analytical framework to explore the historical, cultural, and institutional aspects of live music promotion; the development and professionalisation of the British live music industry over the past 50 years, and its changing relationship with the recording industry over the same period; the role of the state in the regulation of live music in the UK; and ethnographic research investigating how live music scenes operate in specific British localities.

"Forming a companion piece to Frith’s 2007 article on why live music matters, this paper argues that there is a need to refine accounts of the music industries to reflect live music’s growing dominance. It does so by focusing on the rock/ pop concert promoter and posits that in contrast to traditional definitions, the role of the promoter is astonishingly flexible and adaptable. The authors argue that the promoter necessarily ‘wears many hats’ and offer three promotional models to understand the work that promoters do. To illustrate this and to understand the development of live music promotion in the UK from 1955 onwards, the article compares and contrasts historical research with contemporary ethnography.
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Jazz and rock have been historically treated as separate musical traditions, despite having many similar musical and cultural characteristics, as well as sharing significant periods of interaction and overlap throughout popular music history. The rift between jazz and rock, and jazz and rock scholarship, is based on a set of received assumptions as to why jazz and rock are different. However, these assumptions are not naturally inherent to the two genres, but are instead the result of a discursive construction that defines them in contrast to one another. Furthermore, the roots of this discursive divide are to be found in the history of popular music journalism. In this thesis I challenge the traditional divide between jazz and rock by examining five historical case studies in American jazz and rock journalism. My underlying argument is that we cannot take for granted the fact that jazz and rock would ultimately become separate discourses: what are now represented as inevitable musical and cultural divergences between the two genres were actually constructed under very particular institutional and historical forces. There are other ways popular music history could have been written (and has been written) that call the oppositional representation of jazz and rock into question. The case studies focus on the two oldest surviving and most influential jazz and rock periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. I examine the role of critics in developing a distinction between the two genres that would eventually be reproduced in the academic scholarship of jazz and rock. I also demonstrate how the formation of jazz and rock as genres has been influenced by non-musicological factors, not least of all by music magazines as commercial institutions trying to survive and compete in the American press industry.

Festivals play a central role in popular music mythology. In 1969, the Newport Jazz Festival made headlines when producer George Wein controversially announced his intention to openly incorporate rock acts, including Sly and the Family Stone and Led Zeppelin, into the jazz festival. Newport 1969 is retrospectively represented as a symbol of the problems of integrating jazz and rock, but a critical examination of the festival and its coverage clearly illustrates how distinctions between jazz and rock—and jazz and rock audiences, for that matter—are socially constructed. This article will reconsider the importance of Newport 1969 by revisiting debates occurring in the pages of Down Beat, Rolling Stone, Jazz and Pop, and other music journalism during 1969 which discussed the merits of a merger between jazz and rock, and proposes that Newport 1969 was a watershed that exposed the key tensions in the emerging culture war between the two genres.

This article explores the relationship between jazz and rock criticism in 1967, and in particular, the relationship between the American publications Down Beat and Rolling Stone. It examines the motivations of jazz publications like Down Beat and Jazz to start covering rock music in the summer of 1967, and how such coverage worked in practice. It then focuses on Jann Wenner and the birth of Rolling Stone, taking into account how other magazines, both music-focused and otherwise, influenced Wenner’s conception of what would eventually become the most authoritative rock magazine in the world.

This article explores the relationship between musicians and the music press from the musicians' point of view, based on a collection of recent interviews with musicians working in the pop and jazz fields. It will expose some of the concrete effects of the music press using examples from the everyday experiences of musicians, which include the influence of the press in record retail, genre labelling, and creating industry buzz. But while musicians may have a pragmatic understanding of the role of music criticism, their perspectives are emotionally heated in direct proportion to the influence the press holds over their own livelihoods. The interests of the working music critic often conflict with the interests of the working musician, and this article will conclude with a discussion of how the practical conflict of interests between musicians and critics is reflected in ideological differences between the two groups.

When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock ‘n’ roll “is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt.” So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres? The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences, but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow.