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SURVEY BACKGROUND ANDMETHODHave you performed in/with a jazz band at least10 times in the last year?Have you performed with or without a jazzband for pay at least 10 times during the last year?Have you produced a documented body of work(documented output performances, compositions,collaborations, arrangements, recordings) that isconsidered (self or externally) jazz?We also asked several different definitionalquestions in the body of the survey.We used a method called respondent-drivensampling (RDS), which was created by sociologistDouglas Heckathorn from Cornell University toidentify hard-to-find populations. Our study samplewas composed of 733 musicians in Detroit, NewOrleans, New York and San Francisco. This methodrequires a high contact pattern among participants,and offered a modest financial incentive for jazzmusicians to recruit each other for personal, one-toone interviews. City coordinators and their staff inthe four study cities spent eight months interviewingjazz musicians, recording their answers ontoquestionnaires, and entering the data into aspecially-created computer program. Both thequestions and the survey design allowed us to learnabout the network patterns of jazz musicians andanswer questions about their social relationshipswith each other.How to identify jazz musicians?There are a wide variety of interpretations as towhat constitutes a jazz artist. Stanley Crouch in“Blues to Be Constitutional” defined jazz artists thisway:No matter what class or sex or religion or race orshape or height, if you can cut the mustard you shouldbe up there playing or singing or having yourcompositions performed. (In O’Meally, R., The JazzCadence of American Culture, 164-5.)Researchers who study artists, as much as theymight enjoy it, would be hard pressed to locate andidentify them by the criterion of cutting themustard. And indeed, as Paul Berliner tells us inThinking in Jazz:Art worlds consist not only of their most seasonedand single-minded members, but of a large supportsystem made up of individuals with different interestsand varying degrees of talent and knowledge.(p. 7)Normally, independent studies of artists rely oninformation from the U.S.Census or organizationallists. The census, while it provides systematicinformation over time, has limitations on the ways itdefines artists and, thus, is often not useful for thearts community. Neither the census nor the CurrentPopulation Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics) canprovide any breakdown of the broad category of“musicians and composers.”Organizational lists were seen as unrealistic forthe most part, since large numbers of jazz musiciansdo not tend to join organizations. Additionally, jazzmusicians perform substantial work in the for-profitsector, perhaps more than the non-profit sector, fororganizations not often willing or able to generatelists of artists.With the help of a focus group of jazz artists,educators and managers, we created this set ofdefinitional criteria:Do you consider yourself a jazz musician?Did you earn more than 50 percent of yourpersonal income in the last six months as a jazzmusician or in jazz-related activities?Have you been engaged in your art/jazz morethan 50 percent of the time during the last year?Respondent Driven SamplingRespondent driven Sampling (RDS) is a newform of chain-referral sampling developed toovercome the biases traditionally associated withthis method. It has also served as the recruitmentmechanism for an intervention that targets activeinjection drug users for HIV prevention andservices, and has been adapted to a variety of otherpopulations including young gay Latinos in Chicagoand Vietnam draft dodgers in Canada. This is thefirst time it has been used for artists. Perhaps thegreatest benefit of this method is that instead ofreaching only the most visible, vocal, loudest artists,RDS gets deep into the community, like thespreading roots of a tree.Also, RDS, by following the pattern of couponredemption, can discover the networking aspects ofjazz musicians—who hangs out with whom, andwhether they do so by musical type, geography,3

training, family dynasties, etc. Finally, for the firsttime in artist surveys, using the capture-recapturestatistical analysis, we have been able to answer thequestion “How many artists?” in three of the fourstudy cities. (See Appendix for the capture-recapturemethod used to achieve this.)RDS is a method based on peer recruitment. Ineach of the four metropolitan areas. (See Appendixfor metro areas), a city coordinator began the studyby inviting six to eight jazz musicians to help startthe project. These musicians were well-connected inthe community, not necessarily famous or veryvisible, but with many contacts since RDS dependson a high contact pattern of the subjects studied.Each of these musicians was interviewed in personwith questions on an identification sheet whichincluded the selection criteria mentioned above,followed by a 116-question questionnaire. Theinterviews took place in a friendly environmentsometimes donated by a jazz venue (in New York,interviews were held at Sam Ash Music; in SanFrancisco at SF JAZZ; in Detroit and New Orleans,at university facilities). Following the interview, eachof these six to eight “seeds” was given four couponswith which to recruit additional jazz musicians.Three coupons (colored green) could be used forany jazz musician; one of the four coupons (pink)was to be used only for a female jazz musician. (Wetook this approach because we were concerned thattoo few women would be represented in the study.Any skewing was accounted for in statisticalweighting when the data were analyzed.Interestingly, in New York, an organization calledInternational Women in Jazz took advantage of thisopportunity and championed the study and itsrecruitment efforts.)We paid the initial “seeds” a modest 10 and foreach coupon the seed gave out, another 15 eachtime one of the four coupons was redeemed. Anysingle jazz musician had the possibility to earn atotal of 70. This limit on both coupons andpayment incentives was to avoid over-representingone particular group of musicians to the exclusionof others. This incentive had two purposes: first, torecruit other musicians and, second, as anindication to the subjects that their time and theirstories were valued.Traditionally in RDS studies, it takes only four“waves” of coupons to reach deep into thecommunity. In this study, we found some behaviorunique to jazz musicians and to each community.First, our assumption that jazz musicians have ahigh contact pattern because they “hang outtogether” is only partially true—they DO hang outtogether, but as the data show, it is often by musicalstyle that they do so. This pattern was also revealedin a study from the mid-1990s in France called, LesMusiciens de Jazz en France by Philippe Coulangeon(L’Harmattan), which showed that both geographyand differences in style tended to separate Frenchjazz musicians.Second, the “lone wolf ” syndrome often adoptedby jazz musicians makes them somewhat leery ofcollaboration since it is such a hard scramble fortheir next gig. Some of our city coordinators wereextremely inventive in this regard—-going to jazzclubs, festivals and events, speaking about the studyat jazz gatherings, instrument and record stores, atjazz schools and programs—and were vigilant atreminding subjects about interview appointments,rescheduling people who had out-of-town gigs, etc.Third, some reacted negatively to the small paymentincentives. Fourth, coupons were sometimes lost orforgotten, often despite the best intentions of themusicians. But perhaps the most interesting findingwas the musicians’ deep desire to tell their storiesand to be heard.Organization of ReportThe report is organized in five sections,presenting findings on demographics, employmentand income, a variety of professional issues, andsocial networks. It also contains a summary, withconclusions and recommendations. Appendicesinclude definitions and contexts for each metro areastudied, a distribution of responses, the respondentidentification form, an explanation of the methodused to estimate the number of jazz musicians and adirectory of resources for jazz musicians in eachmetro area.4

Chapter I. Demographics*Gender, Age, RaceBoomers.Forty-two percent are single; 26 percent aremarried. In San Francisco over half (51 percent) aresingle.Eighty percent of jazz musicians are male and20 percent are female. The m4ean total age is 43; themedian is 42. New York musicians are a little older:46 is the mean and 47 the median. Surprisingly, inNew Orleans 73 percent of the jazz musicians arewhite.The racial breakdown for jazz musicians in thethree cities is 60 percent white, 28 percent black, 3percent Latino and 3 percent Asian. In New Orleans,the findings are a bit surprising with 73 percentwhite, 23 percent black, 3 percent Asian and noLatino jazz musicians in this study. In New York, 55percent are white, 33 percent are black, 3 percentLatino and 1 percent Asian; and in San Francisco, 59percent are white, 25 percent are black, 3 percent areLatino and 4 percent are Asian.When age is broken out by groups, both the 2534 age group and the 45-54 age group seem toaccount for about half the musicians in total,corresponding mostly to Gen-X-ers and BabyEducationTo help us follow the early musical developmentof survey respondents, a number of questionsregarding their early education and training wereasked. When asked where they were first inspired bymusic, 37 percent of total musicians said theyreceived their initial inspiration at home. Thisreached a high of 47 percent for New Yorkmusicians. Forty-one percent of the totalrespondents received most of their encouragementfrom their families. This was true of 35 percent inNew York, possibly indicating the commonality ofextended families. While 38 percent of the totalrespondents received encouragement from othermusicians, 50 percent of New Orleans areamusicians did.Where did you first get inspired by music?TotalChurchCommunity centerFestivalFilmFriendsHomeNew OrleansNew YorkSan 29.1%47.1%31.2%*The confidence level for this survey is 95 percent with a 5

NEA publication,American Jazz Masters Fellowships 1982-2002, jazz was “built on the discipline of collective improvisation which allowed for maximum expression of the individual within the context of the group.” The group, however, is often an ever-changing one. Unlike classical music,