[JRJ 11.

1 (2017) 62-79] (print) ISSN 1753-8637

https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.33273 (online) ISSN 1753-8645

Place and imagined

community in jazz
Elina Hytönen-Ng1
University Researcher, School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland
elina.hytonen@uef.fi

Abstract
This article investigates the concept of imagined community amongst professional jazz
musicians; more closely the way that this imagined community functions within the
scene. Through the focusing on the imagined community, the article extends the exami-
nation into the performance venues, the movement between venues and the meanings
attached to them, revealing the reasons why an imagined community is beneficial for the
musician. The research data are composed of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in jazz
circles in the United Kingdom between 2006 and 2012. Through the exploration of the
places occupied by the musicians, the article reveals how the community becomes con-
crete through the musicians’ movements. The article examines what added value it might
hold for them. All in all, the investigation makes sense of the social conditions that create
the need for such a community.

Keywords: community; jazz; mobility; musicians; venue

Introduction
Jazz musicians represent a professional group moving between venues.
Their profession is defined by instability, similar to individual entrepreneurs
where the work community is largely lacking. The musicians nonetheless
have a wide network created within the venues while they themselves move
between them. As these encounters between individual musicians can be
random, in this article it is my aim to demonstrate that the musicians over-
come this instability by creating an ‘imagined community’, a group where
they feel they belong while the closer ties with the community are loose.
In this article, I propose that instead of talking about work community it
is clearer to talk about imagined community as the connection between

1. Elina Hytönen-Ng is an ethnomusicologist and a cultural researcher working as

a university researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. Her PhD, finished in 2010,
focused on jazz musicians’ peak experiences and the study was published by Ashgate in
2013. Her recent studies have focused on contemporary British jazz musicians and their
working environment and mobility.

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Place and imagined community in jazz 63

individual members are not very tight or regular. My argument is that the
word community does not always work very well when viewing the jazz
musicians’ working environment. Therefore, I propose that certain aspects
of the jazz world are better understood if viewed through the concept of
‘imagined community’.
The term community was developed in social theory already at the
turn of the twentieth century and was largely influenced by Durkheim’s
thoughts. Since then the term has been widely used and community has
also been adopted into jazz research. However, the community’s relation-
ship to the places it occupies, or the disconnection from them, has received
little attention within jazz studies. It is nonetheless the jazz musicians’ rela-
tionship with a place and their movement from one place to another that
distinguishes them from other occupations and thus defines the musicians’
profession.
This article investigates the concept of imagined community amongst
professional jazz musicians; more closely the way that this imagined com-
munity functions within the scene and within the venues where the musi-
cians perform. Through the focusing on the imagined community, the
article extends the examination into the performance venues, the move-
ment between venues and the meanings attached to them, revealing how
the imagined community appears and the reasons why it is useful or ben-
eficial for the musician.
Through the exploration of the places occupied by the musicians, the
article reveals how the community becomes concrete through the musi-
cians’ movements. The aim is also to examine the reasons why the musi-
cians need the imagined community and what added value it might hold for
them. All in all, the investigation makes sense of the social conditions that
create the need for such a community.

Research methods and analysis of the data

The research data are composed of ethnographic fieldwork conducted
in jazz circles in the United Kingdom—mainly around London—between
2006 and 2012. As the jazz musicians’ relationship with places is visible
in the way that they talk about the venues, the primary data in this article
have been gathered through interviews. Altogether eleven professional
jazz musicians were interviewed. The interviews were semi-structured
themed interviews with a specific focus on the way that the musicians
perceive venues. During the fieldwork 36 performance venues were also
observed.

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The interviews were analysed using discursive psychology, a form of

discourse analysis, which pays attention to the interaction and the way that
experiences are being reproduced in speech. When using discursive psy-
chology, the focus is on the action orientation of talk and writing. The key
point of the analysis method can be found from Edwards and Potter’s state-
ment that both for the participants and analysts ‘the primary issue is the
social actions, or interactional work, being done in the discourse’ (Edwards
and Potter 1992: 2).
The discursive model suggests that discourse motivation and causa-
tion are bound together (Edwards and Potter 1992; Potter and Wetherell
1987). Discursive psychology, like other discourse analysis approaches,
is interested in the role that language has in constructing our social reality.
Researchers using discursive psychology look at what people are doing
with their speech. At the same time the speaker is seen as an active agent,
who utilizes discourse as tools (Willig 2003: 159–64, 172, 182).
The article focuses on the musicians. Lack of data on the audience is
a limiting factor, and criticism can be presented by pointing out that musi-
cians’ work cannot be discussed without the audience. As the gathered
data focused on the musicians, and their way of talking, the audience is
present here only through the musicians’ stories. Wider conclusions on
the audience’s part cannot therefore be made. It must also be noted that
the aim of this article is not to make claims that are valid for all jazz scenes
around the world. The data are limited mainly to the scene in London so
these limitations must also be taken into account when considering the
generalizability of the results.
The article will begin with the presentation of the concepts of imagined
community and place, and the way that these concepts are used in this
article. Once these central concepts are clear the article moves on to look-
ing at the jazz club as the musicians’ work environment and the musicians’
relationship with the venues. This section is followed by another that high-
lights the musicians’ social networks within the venues. The conclusions
draw together the threads represented in the previous sections represent-
ing the musicians’ imagined community as well as providing some reasons
why such a construction might be necessary for the musicians.

Imagined community and place as concepts

Community has been used extensively in jazz research from the 1960s and
in Alan Merriam and Raymond Mack’s (1960) work onwards. Paul Berliner
notes that the jazz community is created by ‘professional musicians and

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Place and imagined community in jazz 65

aspirants for whom jazz is the central focus of their career’ while it sur-
passes boundaries created by age, class and ethnicity (Berliner 1994: 36).
It is a community created by mutual passion.
Ken Prouty (2012) has criticized jazz scholars for using the term com-
munity often without genuine understanding of the term or a clear definition
of what it means. Even Ingrid Monson (1996) uses the idea of community
in her investigation of the jazz ensemble and improvisation, but does not
really explain in her work how she defines it. Most of the scholarly work
does not focus much on the larger community which is at the heart of this
article. As Prouty has extensively listed the authors studying jazz commu-
nity, I will not go into too many details about these studies. Instead, I will
focus on the concept of imagined community, while some definitions about
the use of the community are nonetheless needed.
In this article, I will use the word community in a limited fashion and in
reference only to professional jazz musicians. In a comparable way to other
professional groups, the musicians have a work community. This commu-
nity nonetheless differentiates from other such communities, due to the
absence of stable work space.
The term communality also raises the question of how one becomes a
member. For the musicians, the membership is based on the demonstra-
tion of the individual’s competence. The same procedure has been in prac-
tice ever since the early years of jazz and the birth of jam sessions, where
the upcoming and rising musicians’ skills were tested.2 These events were
and still are an important way to make necessary contacts and to ensure
future gigs. For example, the Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London still hosts
late-night jam sessions.
The musician’s status and value within the community of musicians is
not primarily created by the level of education that the individual musician
has had. A completely self-educated musician can also be accepted as
part of the community if his or her skills correspond with the expectations.
After the initial entrance to the scene has been made the professional com-
munity becomes, as this article demonstrates, largely imaginary. That is,
some aspects of the community can be better understood as an imagina-
tive community, a point that I will return to later.
But how does the imagined community differentiate from the normal
community? Benedict Anderson launched the concept of imagined commu-
nity in the early 1980s when studying nationalism and nations. He pointed

2. For more in-depth discussion on jam sessions see Berliner 1994.

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out that nations were socially constructed communities and imagined as

the members of a nation could never know or meet most of the other mem-
bers of this community. The members, nonetheless, felt that they were part
of the same community. Membership with the community was constructed
through mediation, such as print-media (Anderson 2006).
Finlayson, following Anderson, defines imagined community as a ‘group
of people who not only draw on the same set of symbolic resources when
articulating their sense of identity but, additionally, recognize and value that
commonality which they regard not as an outcome of certain social facts
but as their cause’ (Finlayson 2012: 273). Since Anderson’s initiative and
the work around nationalism, the term has also been used widely outside
the context of nation and nationalism.
In the twenty-first century the term ‘imagined community’ has been
used, for example, when studying bilingual students within the Japanese
educational system (Kanno 2003), the American Jews’ diaspora tourism
to Israel (Powers 2011) and lifestyle magazines aimed to create imagined
communities of readers (Jenkins 2016). Kanno has studied language learn-
ers and the way that these learners have images of the communities in
which they want to take part in the future. These imagined communities
have an impact on the learning process (Kanno 2003).
Kanno’s studies highlight the way that the term can be used in another
context than the nation state. In the later definitions imagined community
has been used to refer to groups of people that are not concrete or attain-
able, but whose members are linked to each other through the power
of imagination in such a way that surpasses time and place (Kanno and
Norton 2012). In a similar way to Kanno’s findings, the musicians become
part of the community through a learning process. Music students, whether
academic learners or self-taught, have images of the communities in which
they want to participate in the future. They attend performances and listen
to recordings by professional musicians to learn the music, the appropriate
behaviour and to envision themselves as part of the community.
Within popular music studies or musicology studies the term imag-
ined communities has rarely been used. Within popular music studies the
concept has been used, for example, to describe the feeling of belonging
(McGrath 2010). Prouty uses it in a critical sense. While Anderson’s idea
of imagined community was based on the idea of print-capitalism making
a distinction between oral and literate cultures, Prouty has proposed that
within music scenes print-capitalism should perhaps be replaced with
‘record-capitalism’ (Prouty 2012), referring to the way that the imagined

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community is created by listening to records and purchasing them. But

as the last decade has demonstrated, with the drop in record sales and
the growing number of free music distributed online, this is perhaps not
the case anymore. Music scenes have become more and more frag-
mented while musicians can produce high-quality music in home stu-
dios and music is distributed for free online. However, when we focus on
jazz, where the emphasis has always been on the live performance, it
could be stated that the live performance has long since replaced record-
capitalism. It could also be noted that within jazz the imagined community
takes place within the venues and therefore is based on venue-capitalism.
Even though the concept of imagined community has not been widely
used in popular music studies or jazz studies, in recent years some pass-
ing references to the concept have been made (Johnson 2017). None-
theless, no further developments of the concept within the cultural field of
popular music or jazz studies have come to my attention. It is perhaps the
overtly general definitions and contexts of the term that have limited its use.
It could be argued that a concept developed to be used for larger units,
such as nations, is not usable for smaller scales created within nations and
small scenes. Within this article my aim is to nonetheless demonstrate that
the use of the term ‘imagined community’ highlights the added value that
the idea of community has in jazz circles, and it allows us to understand
the musicians’ community better, to see its multi-layered structure as well
as multiple meanings.
The article has also another central concept, the ‘place’. Within place
studies the main problem has often been that the place is taken for granted.
Even though in our day-to-day life we situate ourselves into the world and
then make sense of the world through the places that we are based in, we
rarely stop to think about the importance of the experience of place. Ques-
tions about the factors in the construction of these experiences and how
they are created often remain unanswered (Casey 2013; Relph 2008).
The construction of place is influenced by the way that experiences
and intentions are framed within a place. This means that we experience
and do things in a place that has set limits, which then also influence our
experience. Places can also be considered as meaningful sites which are
essential for the identities of individuals and communities (Relph 2008).
Places mould us at the same time as we are physically in them. It can
therefore be stated that the experience of the place is also an embod-
ied experience (Casey 2013). We define ourselves and our relationship to
the world when we are within a place. It has been said that the feeling that

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one belongs somewhere is important for the construction of the individual’s

identity (Ashworth and Graham 2005). Whether we are outsiders or part of
the inner circle, it is indeed our relationship to a certain place that makes
us what we are.

Jazz club as a work environment

Jazz musicians work primarily within jazz clubs or other venues. Berliner
has noted that musicians form their relationships ‘through a complex net-
work of interrelated music centres that form the institutional infrastructure
of the jazz community’ (Berliner 1994: 36–37). The infrastructure is created
by record shops, social clubs, performance venues and other such places.
I nonetheless argue that it is the performance venues that are of primary
importance for the community particularly when we take into account that
the live performance is often preferred over the recorded.
Within these venues, the musicians make their living by performing to
an audience and occasionally selling their records. Within these places
the musicians encounter the audience, construct their identity and dem-
onstrate their skills to other musicians. Based on these tasks the musician
constructs his or her reputation, strengthens the membership with the
community and ensures future work. Public performances are therefore
loaded with expectations about the quality of the performance as well as
expectations about how things are to go and encounters taking place at
the venue.
Through their acoustics, the clubs and other performance venues create
an important operational environment, within which the musicians seek and
construct a meaningful relationship to their work. Playing in a noisy place in
front of an uninterested audience makes the musician sometimes question
the meaningfulness and value of his or her work. At the same time, a work-
ing relationship with a supportive audience will motivate the musician for a
long time (Hytönen-Ng 2015; 2017).
The performances are also restricted and controlled by a set of prac-
tical issues. The organizers have their own expectations and limitations
to the performance, while they also need to fulfil their own tasks for the
event to be successful (see Becker 1984). The musician is therefore shar-
ing the place with other employees. The doorman, booking clerk, waiters,
bartender, kitchen staff, promoters, sound and light technicians, cleaners
and other professionals move within the same environment influencing the
musicians’ experiences.

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It is quite often noticeable that the musicians want to create a division

between themselves as an independent group and the other professional
groups sharing the venue. The creation of separation can be detected,
for example, in the way that the musicians talk about sound technicians,
whose work quality is often criticized.

P: When I’m doing theatres with my band I do need a fair number of

microphones on the band to pick the soloist out and also if there’s
like woodwind doubling, like flute and stuff, it’s important that that’s
over carrying. What I don’t need is some fool3 on the desk who’s kind
of pulling the faders the whole time and believe me I have had prob-
lems. I have almost stopped a band falling out once or twice on the
account of… But I think that for most musicians to say that it’s a bit
of a red herring, to be honest…

Elina: And I was thinking also that in respect that it takes away some
of the control that you have over the music when there’s somebody
actually…

P: Oh, I believe so, yeah! Yep. Yeah. As I said, if you’ve got some-
one lunatic in front who’s, who’s thinking that, you know, he’s not a
sound engineer, he’s a performance artist. Then it really, really can
be, it really can be quite a negative [experience]. So yeah, that is
important (P3 2010).4

In the passage above the musician confirms that the sound technician takes
away some of the control of the performance. The sound is the most impor-
tant part of the musical performance and the musician’s work is evaluated
based on this. It is therefore understandable that the disruptions caused
by external people create tension. This particular musician had solved the
conflict by having his tour manager look over things when performing with
his band. The tour manager then acts as a buffer between the musician and
technician ensuring the quality is maintained.
It is not just the sound technicians, but the musicians are also creat-
ing an opposition between the performers on stage and the other off-stage
groups. The separation is highlighted by the fact that the musicians are a
free professional group working within a single club. They are untethered
from the daily running of the club and will be moving onto another venue
the next day unlike the other professionals within a venue. This freedom
might lead us to believe that musicians as a professional group do not

3. Emphasis in the original interview.

4. P3 refers to participant and the year of the interview. Names have been anony-
mized.

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get attached to the performance venues. Closer examination nonetheless

reveals that the performance venues have multi-layered meanings for the
musicians.
When looking at the jazz scene it is obvious that jazz clubs represent
a place that demonstrates a certain level of stability whereas festivals are,
for example, marked primarily by temporality even though they might take
place every year. Temporality becomes apparent as the event venues
cannot necessarily be found a few weeks after the festival has ended.
Clubs on the other hand can be found at the same locations sometimes for
decades and the musicians working on the scene will keep on returning to
them time after time.
The interview data show that returning to a good venue can remind the
musician of returning home or ‘feeling at home’ (P2 2011), as one partici-
pant noted. Another musician described the relationship with the venues in
the following way:

The venues are our homes. We are wandering, we are gypsies. We

move from venue to venue to venue, that’s what we are doing. This
is our home. Now I am making a living being a musician. I don’t
teach for living. I would be bored with it. I’m playing music because
I love to perform. There are not many people in Britain who do what
I do. Most musicians teach. So yes, the venues are our homes, our
selves. You know, the punters are our family and there is a very close
relationship here between us and them (P1 2012).

What is essential in this is the knowledge of the place, knowing one’s place
within the venue where one is always welcome as well as the musician
being known within the place. It is within these venues that the musicians
strengthen their feeling of belonging and their identity as musician. The
performance venue, similarly to home, is marked by stability and mutual
feeling of familiarity with staff and audience as well as physical structures
allowing long-term and multi-layered meanings to be created. This famil-
iarity and stability can be threatened, for example, by the refurbishment or
relocation of the club, even though these changes might be caused by the
need to renovate an old, rundown venue.
Tuan (2006) has argued that we expect our home to stay the same
whenever we return to it and we rely on this stability. People need a place
or places that form a wholeness or that strengthen their inner experience
through their genuine nature. These places are often associated with the
feeling of time standing still, allowing us to know that the place is still the
same even though the world is changing. Changes in the home—or in an
important venue—seem to erase something of the person’s sense of self.

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Tuan points out that humanity requires stability to strengthen our inner
experience. We need to freeze time so that we can reflect on who we are or
who we think we are. The feeling of wholeness can be a very healing expe-
rience (Tuan 2006: 18–20; see also Hytönen-Ng 2013: 127–28).
Tuan compares home to love that builds up slowly and notes that cer-
tain places can cause the feeling of ‘love at first sight’. Even places that
we visit only once can invoke as strong an effect on us as a home. While
home involves multiple layers of meaning, the ‘love at first sight’ places
have fewer layers and therefore the emotions that we have towards them
are easier to articulate (Tuan 2006: 19). The meanings that the musicians
associate with a particular venue can also have a long history built up along
the years of still being an outsider to the community, a student learning the
trade.
The importance of stability becomes evident when we perceive venues
that have been running in a particular location for decades. The familiarity is
partly then constructed by the knowledge that the venue is there and stays
the same even though the surroundings, the buildings around it, might
change. This might also be linked with the knowledge of performers who
have played at the club before. The musician might feel connected to the
venue through the deceased performers who used to perform at the same
venue. The imagined community therefore stretches over time, as Ander-
son (2006) and Finlayson (2012) suggest.
Sometimes the connection is even strengthened by the fact that the
same instruments played by the long-gone musician might still be circling
amongst the musicians. It could therefore be possible that the musician
performing at a certain club could be playing the same instruments as the
deceased musicians who performed there years before. During fieldwork,
I heard discussions about the saxophone that belonged to Ronnie Scott,
and what it would feel like to play that instrument at the Ronnie Scott’s
Jazz Club. The instrument could then strengthen the musician’s feeling of
belonging into the community and the scene, and even belonging into a
certain club. This is an example of how the musician’s sense of community,
operating through the power of imagination, can surpass time and place
(see Kanno and Norton 2012).
The musicians’ work also involves the spaces in between the venues.
Touring means moving from venue to venue, sometimes hundreds of miles
apart. This extends the musicians’ work to non-places, relating to the idea
of minimizing place and the idea of the installations that the transporta-
tion of humans and commodities demands. Airports, stations as well as

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commercial spaces are examples of non-places (Augé 1995). Non-places

can be an important part of the musicians’ work, too, as they also are at
times shared with fellow musicians travelling to the same performance. It is
within these non-places that the community is strengthened as it demands
the shared dislocation between the musicians creating mutual memories
of travel.

Inside knowledge and social networks within

the performance venue
Within the venues, the musicians are also distributing inside knowledge
of the community that they are part of. Before the performance, during the
breaks or after it the musicians might be sharing a beer or a coffee and talk-
ing about the latest developments on the scene. Discussions about how
someone has been treated within a certain venue or what kind of audience
attends a particular club usually take place within the venues.
Good experiences and treatment are shared to colleagues at the same
time as negative experiences are verbally mediated knowledge within the
community. The decisions of where and how often the musician performs
in a venue are then partly made based on this verbally transmitted knowl-
edge as well as first-hand experiences. Musicians are therefore creating
a mental map of performance venues and ‘marking’ or reviewing these
places based on their own previous experience and stories told by other
musicians. It is unlikely that the musicians themselves would talk about
their actions as intentional reviewing, but the knowledge of the policies and
practices of individual venues is shared to other musicians through shared
stories. The community’s field of action is a mental map that functions and
is constructed at the communal as well as individual level.
The venues are also places where the musician interacts with other
musicians. Within these encounters, the musician is constructing both pro-
fessional and personal networks that are essential, for example, for future
employment (Tsioulakis 2011). Coulson has similarly pointed out that ‘net-
working is a proactive strategy commonly used for getting work in a labour
market such as music’ (Coulson 2012: 247). The musicians can be com-
pared to entrepreneurs, who in their daily life are very independent and
unattached from others. The individual musician does not necessarily col-
laborate with the same group of people every day, but can work with sev-
eral ensembles at the same time as well as substituting colleagues who
cannot make a single performance with their regular group. Some musi-
cians are working mainly by themselves, performing around the country as

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visiting soloists for house bands of jazz clubs. The work of visiting soloists
is based on the standard repertoire. It is this shared language that strength-
ens the feeling of community and connection.5
The work is defined by the movement from one place and ensemble to
another, making daily life a fragmented puzzle. Daily mobility, for example
within the British jazz scene, creates a situation where the individual ses-
sion musicians do not necessarily meet each other on a regular basis. This
instability makes it hard for the musicians to maintain close friendships.
The situation is overcome by the expectation that the other musicians will
understand the temporary and hectic nature of the profession. Interactions
with other musicians are limited mainly to the encounters that take place
within the venues thus highlighting the nature and the importance of these
meetings.
The fieldwork observations and musicians’ comments suggest that the
time that has passed since the last meeting with a particular musician does
not seem to be significant. One participant explained the relationship with
fellow musicians in the following way:

And musicians also have a skill, which I think is quite unique, which
is… if you don’t see someone sometimes for years, and then you work
together, you carry on as if it was the day after the last time you saw
them. So it’s, there’s absolutely none of that [formal small talk]… So
you walk in straight away and say the first rude thing to each other,
you know, straight away. ‘Oh, you is it!’ You know. And they respond
with some and that’s it for the day, you know. And then maybe it’s
another year [before you meet them again]… But, but you have that
sort of warm memory of a great time (P2 2011).

The relationship with other musicians reminds us of a relationship with

friends. The assumption is that the interaction with a familiar musician will
carry on from where it was left during the previous meeting. The sense
of community and its meaningfulness are emphasized partly because of
the temporal and fragmented nature of the job, but also because the job
description is so distinctly different from other professions. The musician is
always working when other people are off: evenings, weekends and holi-
day seasons.
This unique community and the shared experience that it involves make
the musicians often state that a musician, or his life, can only be understood
by another musician. Within club encounters the musicians share personal

5. On the importance of standard repertoire see Berliner 1994: 63–64; see also Mon-
son 1996: 183–84.

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and communal knowledge about their work as well as silent knowledge

about the profession and the experiences it involves—where everyone has
been playing at recently, what kinds of experiences they had, what new has
happened on the scene and so forth.

The places for different sub-genres

Belonging into a place—or not belonging—is largely defined by our actions
and our possibilities within this place. This is very much true in the musi-
cians’ case both in a concrete sense as well as at the level of the imagined
community. The entrance to certain places, for example the possibility to
perform at an internationally respected jazz club, raises the musicians’ rec-
ognizability and status within the community. Being left outside of these
invites pushes the musician towards a marginal status.
Performance opportunities define the musicians’ status as well as their
performance style within the scene. The club managers and bookers are
making daily decisions based on what they consider to be good jazz and
what suits the profile of the club and the audience attending. Once the audi-
ence has started to trust the quality of the venue’s programme, they can
make their decision to attend without necessarily knowing the particular
musician performing. The venue is therefore more likely to book specific
musicians based on their style while at the same time the musician can
adjust—possibly partly unconsciously—their style towards the preferred
style of the venue.
Once these preferences become clear, some subgenres not fitting in will
start to seek their own performance venues from other places. An example
of this is the Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London situated in Soho within
close proximity of the shopping districts and theatres. The club does not
book free jazz ensembles, which are at the margins of the British jazz scene.
The affluent environment and the vicinity of cultural commodities invite tour-
ists. It could therefore be expected that some people attend the venue as
tourists not knowing what band is performing. This limits the choices that
the bookers of the venue have as they need to attend to the expectations of
what kind of jazz is being played at Ronnie Scott’s. Musicians also recog-
nize that some audience members at the venue attend to be seen to spend
a lot of money and do not care so much what music is played.
Free jazz, on the other hand, can be found further outside of the city
in Hackney, where public transportation connections are not as good as
in the city centre. The audience therefore really has to make an effort to
attend the performance. As the venue is further away from other cultural

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places, such as theatres, it is perhaps a place where the audience would

not be expected to show up in order to ‘spend money’. Tourists are also
not expected to find the place unless they are avid free-jazz fans. The per-
formance at this venue is a social event but not so straightforwardly a con-
sumer’s event.
Adapting Howard Becker’s thoughts, it can be said that musicians are
dependent and constrained by cooperative links, such as technical sup-
port and sound production, club organizations and venue. These coopera-
tive links influence the kind of art and music that the musician can produce.
Musicians also learn to live without suitable venues, equipment or respect,
and will surpass the deficiencies or simulate the necessary means by them-
selves. When the art forms are such that the clubs don’t want to assimilate—
for example free jazz—the music will not be performed. The musicians are
likely to adapt to the styles that are accepted by the existing institutions.
The acceptance is often dictated by conventions which also regulate the
relationship between audiences and musicians (Becker 1984: 26–29).
The minority-genre communities can become underground scenes and
produce their own performance venues. These venues are not always open
to the general public. They can become private jam sessions or events
targeted to a selected group; the larger public then misses the chance to
enjoy this art form and the overall variability of the scene is left hidden.
Historical factors and stories add into the layers of meaning of the clubs
even though the musician might not have visited the place more than once.
The meanings about what places will become central and how one should
relate to these places when entering them are defined within the internal dis-
courses of the community. The venues reserved for particular activities are
also very revealing in terms of the societal status that these activities have.

Conclusions
Within London, jazz musicians are performing a lot of one-off gigs and the
assembly of an ensemble can change from one day to the next. Regular
interactions with colleagues are therefore often a mere impossibility. The
musicians nonetheless recognize that they are part of the same scene and
treat each other as if the last meeting happened quite recently despite the
time in between. The connections are thus imagined to be more solid than
what they actually are. The individual musician’s movements within the
scene is often just the mobility of a single person, which occurs in a similar
fashion to a ping-pong ball bouncing off the walls of a glass cube. While all
the other musicians are also moving in a similar manner, the picture of the

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scene becomes very fragmented. It is nonetheless the venues that tie the
fragmented movements together. The venues are the points that bring the
musicians together and create the community.
While the somewhat ‘random’ movements of the individual musician
are happening, it is the imagined community that keeps up the idea of still
being part of something, even when the musicians’ ties to the actual com-
munity—where regular meetings are a norm—are loose. It is this feeling of
belonging where the musicians’ work identity is constructed and motivation
is maintained. Despite the randomness of the meetings and their tempo-
rary nature, the imagined community keeps up the musicians’ links to the
scene and to the people he or she might not meet for years or who have
died years ago. The cultural norms and values maintained within the jazz
scene strengthen the feeling of community.
The knowledge of shared social place, shared venues, makes it possible
for the interaction to continue seamlessly. All the parties know the internal
etiquette and values of the community. The community, even if imagined,
becomes concrete within the shared performance venues. The musi-
cians realize the community in their speech. They created it with a group of
musicians who move within the same scene and use the same clubs even
though they might not meet each other within these venues. The knowl-
edge of the others’ movements within the scene creates the feeling of com-
munity. The musicians working in the same scene know each other or know
of each other even though they might not have played together, as might
be the case for example for two saxophonists. The stronger sense of com-
munality is created within speech, by sharing knowledge about venues,
genre values and aesthetics.
Clearly the clubs are essential in maintaining musicians’ sense of be-
longing and the feeling of community. The imagined community provides
the musicians with the tools to stay connected to the scene throughout,
or despite, the travelling. The meaningfulness of these places highlights
the fact that all forms of art must belong somewhere, preferably in a place
where the audience will find it (Becker 1984). Those venues where art is
being presented are important for the development of the surrounding
community.
For the musicians, the feeling that one belongs somewhere can
strengthen the musicians’ professional identity. In addition, the perfor-
mance venues and the interaction that take place there will connect the
musician into the larger community of musicians. The performance venues
therefore have a more profound meaning to the musicians than to a random

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audience member. Through the musical interaction with the venue the
musicians are strengthening the feeling of continuity. The music played at
a certain club will create for both the musicians and the audience a feel-
ing that things are in place and that places will stay the same even though
a practical approach demonstrates that they are constantly changing. The
music strengthens the feeling of continuity as well as allowing the creation
of mutual belonging and connection to a place (see Holt and Wergin 2013).
The communities live in relation to the surrounding society and the
historical developments of the larger society. Musical cultures and their
development can be understood only in relation to the surrounding com-
munities, their histories and the discourses surrounding them (see Holt and
Wergin 2013). Societal and historical discourses will have an impact on
what venues are being offered to a particular genre, what places are seen
as worth saving, as well as what is the cultural heritage that is seen worth
treasuring. It is the community, not the outsiders, who determine what
venues the members of a particular genre will make their own and what
venues will become culturally significant for that genre. These decisions are
always linked to the definitions and evaluations made by the community.
The places influence our experiences and intentions, as Relph (2008)
has pointed out. For the musicians, the performance venues as places are
essential for their identities and the community of the musicians. But in a
similar way the movement between the venues—the temporary placeless-
ness—is essential for this identity. It is the experience of touring that makes
the professional musician and unites him or her with the community and its
history. It is nonetheless the movement in between venues that creates the
need for the imagined community as the more stable community cannot be
formed. The imaginary community does not replace the existing ‘real’ com-
munity that resides in a venue, but is perhaps parallel to it. It is this imag-
ined community that reminds the musicians of the ‘real’ community and it
is the imaginary aspects of the community that strengthens the musicians’
feeling of belonging even when regular meetings with other community
members are not taking place.

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