Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
This article is part of a larger attempt to map the movement of jazz within its cultural field, and as such is less concerned with its musicological properties than with the means of its production, consumption and the associated technology and rhetoric. It is the last of these that I am most interested in just here: the question of finding appropriate ways of talking about jazz. I want to suggest that certain kinds of commentary ostensibly dedicated to conferring artistic legitimacy on the music in effect reshape it so that it can be more easily fitted into a political economy.