Selling London Jazz: Politics, Platforms and Performance in a Post-Digital Music Scene

This thesis analyses the circumstances surrounding the growth of the ‘new London jazz scene’ (LJS), from c.2016. The LJS stands out for its relative popularity, poly-generic influences, and young, multi-racial, mixed gender audiences and performers, which has seen the scene heralded as a novel ‘alternative’ within the British jazz art world. Through multimedia analysis and interview research, the thesis investigates the distinctive values, practices, and cultural products of the LJS.

By attending to British jazz education; the live performance ecology of jazz in London; practices of record production in the context of music streaming; and strategies of digital promotion and (self-)branding, I show how the LJS simultaneously engages and disavows the aesthetics, norms, and infrastructures of jazz as a genre. The scene is a ‘post-digital’ formation, whereby ubiquitous digitality is an ordinary, but ambiguous, feature of cultural production. I argue that during a societal turn against digital mediation, certain jazz principles - contingency, immediacy, and the value of ‘authentic’ live musicianship – underwrite the ‘scenic allure’ of London jazz. I also demonstrate how identity formation and promotional discourse in the LJS are grounded in ‘jazz populism’: a disavowal of jazz orthodoxy through stylistic hybridity and institutional critique.

Here, the multivalent politics of London jazz articulate with ongoing antiracist reckonings. While the scene has a rich, resistant potential as a form of critical multiculture, the LJS is a politically ambivalent formation. Symptomatic of wider tendencies in contemporary culture, this includes a fragmentary, individualised politics, and the recuperation of dissent by the cultural industries through an embrace of ‘diversity.’

The thesis updates music scenes scholarship and remedies the dearth of digitally-oriented jazz studies. It demonstrates how the study of contemporary scenes can further ongoing debates in popular music, media and cultural studies regarding platformisation, genre formation, the commodification of difference, and beyond.