Damon J. Phillips, Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. xi + 217 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-15088-8 (hbk). $35.00/£24.95.

Abstract

Damon J. Phillips, Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. xi + 217 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-15088-8 (hbk). $35.00/£24.95.In this book, Damon Phillips deals with the circulation of jazz from its early recordings until 1933. Indeed, Phillips, who started his scholarly work in organizational theory on the consulting sector business models, has mobilized the exploratory power of network analysis in a creative manner within a conceptual framework inherited from the 'production of culture' perspective and sociological new institutionalism. As the author sums it up in the Acknowledgements section, this book represents a quite forceful and synoptic effort that synthesizes a number of years of thorough research.On the basis of the Lord discography, which served as a database for noting, through the recordings' personnel, the travels of bandleaders between different cities (New Orleans and New York to Paris, Stockholm or Calcutta, for example), he has constructed a network that illuminates the degree of connection between cities. This allows Phillips to draw an accurate map of the dissemination of jazz through the world's main cities through this first and crucial phase of cultural globalization (1917-1933). Developing an analysis centred on the original concept of 'sociological congruence' and the link between innovation and centrality, Phillips makes an original and rigorous contribution to the sociology of cultural globalization, while shedding light in an innovative way on the classical problem of the legitimation process of jazz within different national cultures. Without being exhaustive, his analysis of the case of jazz in the Weimar Republic is particularly illuminating.Phillips's ambition is not to define jazz per se. His approach is a historical analysis of the early days of the jazz recording industry and how its dynamics would enforce a definition of an art form that would soon become global. The value and meaning of jazz as a cultural product are socially constructed, at least in part, he modestly acknowledges. This well-known anthropological and sociological claim is grounded here in the sense that value and meaning only exist when there is a congruence between the product's characteristics-the traits of the work of art for musicologists or art historians-and the geographical location of the recording and organizational models involved in record production. In short, 'jazz was shaped by a drive toward congruity between songs and their sources' (7).Chapters 3 to 6 focus on this notion of sociological congruence. Chief among Phillips's insights is that,Victorian-era firms' recording decisions were motivated by a need for identity preservation and that this need drove decisions on the type of music that was made available on the marketplace as jazz. That is, individual firms chose recordings that aligned with their identities. (142)In these early days of jazz, stylistic diversity prevailed, with great variety in the combinations and number of instruments and musicians, and the racial composition of the bands, from the lone African American jazz singer to the all-white symphonic jazz orchestra. Phillips's analysis thus proves that jazz is a contingent category, as all social categories are. From this original diversity, selection, classification and legitimation processes took place in various places and gave birth to varying definitions of jazz over time and place. This particular consideration for social context and social networks, as well as for the salience of geography, allows Phillips to solve the puzzle of early German jazz. How does one explain why German symphonic jazz during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) would fail to attain canonization-in the sense William Weber (1992) applied the concept to classical music-while Berlin was one of the hippest places on earth at the time? The historical explanation based on the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis doesn't explain it all; symphonic jazz and swing rather flourished during the Reich, as Michael Kater (2003) showed, and Victorian-era firms tended to record white orchestras. …