Photographic representations of jazz
Testimonial advertising in Down Beat, 1938–48
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.35812Keywords:
Down Beat, jazz photography, testimonial advertisingAbstract
Musical instrument makers were key suppliers to the jazz art world of the 1930s and '40s. They operated with well-developed ideas about musicians. As instrument manufacture moved to volume production, advertising spend rose significantly and manufacturers turned to the advertising industry to translate these conceptions into a selling vocabulary, or 'professional code'. Testimonial advertising incorporating photography became a preferred style and Down Beat emerged as an extremely important medium. Based on a survey of some 1,500 testimonial advertisements in Down Beat between 1938 and 1948, this article shows how assumptions about the nature of musicianship, the social and racial composition of jazz, the relationship between art and commerce and the lifestyle aspirations of working musicians were signed within these advertisements. The analysis traces their intertextual relationship with Down Beat editorial and broader impact through collateral print material. The analysis hopefully suggests further lines of enquiry as well as highlighting the benefits from study of jazz photography beyond the narrow canon of white art photographers.
References
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Williamson, Judith (1978) Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars.
Becker, Howard (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Berger, John (1972) ‘The Political Uses of Photo-Montage’. In Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, 183–89. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Bolton, Richard (1989) ‘Introduction’. In The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
Brown, Elspeth H. (2005) The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalisation of American Commercial Culture 1884–1929. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
——(2006) ‘Rationalizing Consumption: Lejaren à Hillier and the Origins of American Advertising Photography 1913–1924’. In Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture 1877–1960, ed. Elspeth Brown, Catherine Gudis and Marina Moskowitz, 75–90. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07182-8_5
Cohen, Lizabeth (2003) A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Cottrell, Stephen (2012) The Saxophone. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Down Beat (1936–48).
Down Beat (n.d.) ‘A History as Rich as Jazz Itself’. http://downbeat.com/site/about (accessed 19 February 2018).
Erenberg, Lewis (1998) Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Birth of American Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226215181.001.0001
Fox, Stephen (1990) The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. New York: Morrow.
Gendron, Bernard (1994) ‘A Short Stay in the Sun: The Reception of Bebop (1944–1950)’. In The Bebop Revolution in Words and Music, ed. Dave Oliphant, 137–59. Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre.
Gennari, John (2016) Blowin’ Hot and Cold: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Gibson, Orville (n.d.) ‘Gibson USA’. http://www.gibson.com/Gibson/History.aspx (accessed 11 October 2017).
Goldman, Robert (1992) Reading Ads Socially. London and New York: Routledge.
Gunther, Thomas Michael (1998) ‘The Spread of Photography’. In A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot, 555–80. Koln: Konemann.
Hall, Stuart (1999) ‘Encoding/Decoding’. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 507–517. London and New York: Routledge.
Hol, Jim (1980) Some Saxophone History: Its Origin and Early Use. London: Nominal Agency.
Jhally, Sut (1987) The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in Consumer Society. London: Francis Pinter.
Johnston, Patricia (2006) ‘Art and Commerce: The Challenge of Modernist Advertising Photography’. In Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture 1877–1960, ed. Elspeth Brown, Catherine Gudis and Marina Moskowitz, 91–113. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07182-8_6
Kraft, James P. (1996) Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution 1890–1950. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Laird, Pamela Walker (1998) Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Leach, William (1993) Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon.
Lears, T. Jackson (1987) ‘Uneasy Courtship: Modern Art and Modern Advertising’. American Quarterly 39/1: 133–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/2712634
——(1994) Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books.
Marchand, Roland (1985) Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morgan, Ralph (1994) ‘History of the H & A Selmer Company’. https://www.saxophone.org/museum/mouthpieces/manufacturer/1/history/02017-10-8 (accessed 8 October 2017).
Myers, Kathy (1983) ‘Understanding Advertisers’. In Language, Image, Media, ed. Howard Davis and Paul Walton, 205–223. London: Basil Blackwell.
Nurnberg, Walter (1940) The Science and Technique of Advertising Photography. London and New York: Studio Publications.
Nye, David E. (1985) Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Panzer, Mary (2012) ‘Shot out of the Canon: Advertising Photography in “Vogue” Magazine, 1930s–1950s’. Aperture 208: 62–65.
Pateman, Trevor (1983) ‘How is Understanding an Advertisement Possible?’ In Language, Image, Media, ed. Howard Davis and Paul Walton, 187–204. London: Basil Blackwell.
Pope, Daniel (1983) The Making of Modern Advertising. New York: Basic Books.
Pope, Daniel, and William Toll (1982) ‘We Tried Harder: Jews in American Advertising’. American Jewish History 72 (September): 26–51.
Presbrey, Frank (1968) The History and Development of Advertising. New York: Greenwood Press.
Raeburn, John (2006) A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography. Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Romer, Christina D. (1992) ‘What Ended the Great Depression?’ Journal of Economic History 52/4: 757–84. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002205070001189X
Schudson, Michael (1984) Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Effects on American Society. New York: Basic Books.
Segrave, Kerry (2005) Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Sivulka, Juliann (1998) Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Slater, D. R. (1983) ‘Marketing Mass Photography’. In Language, Image, Media, ed. H. Davis and P. Walton, 245–63. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sobieszek, Robert (1988) The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Twitchell, James B. (1996) Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wells, Liz (1992) ‘Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements’. In Reading into Cultural Studies, ed. Martin Barker and Anne Beezer, 165–80. London and New York: Routledge.
WFL Drum Company (n.d.) WFL Drummer’s Digest 1/1. Ray Bauduc Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
Wilkinson, Helen (1997) ‘“The New Heraldry”: Stock Photography, Visual Literacy and Advertising in 1930s Britain’. Journal of Design History 10/1: 23–38. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/10.1.23
Williams, Raymond (1980) ‘Advertising: The Magic System’. In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, 170–95. London: NLB.
Williamson, Judith (1978) Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars.
Published
2018-10-04
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Ainsworth, A. J. (2018). Photographic representations of jazz: Testimonial advertising in Down Beat, 1938–48. Jazz Research Journal, 11(2), 111-152. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.35812
