COVID-19 and British Jazz Musicians
From Preliminal to a Postliminal World
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.23355Keywords:
jazz, COVID-19, live music, musicians, lockdownAbstract
Jazz is a genre that relies heavily on live performance. It is therefore understandable that the COVID-19 related lockdown greatly affected jazz musicians. In this article, I reflect on London-based jazz musicians’ stories by using the idea of “liminal state”, as conceptualized by Arnold van Gennep (1960) and Victor Turner (1982), examining how they described the lockdown, in particular the financial and emotional impacts it had on them. Between spring 2020 and spring 2021, ten structured theme interviews with jazz musicians were conducted. The article commences by overviewing the data gathered and the ethical procedures adopted, after which I examine the overall emotional and psychological effects that COVID-19 had on jazz musicians who participate in live music. After reflecting on the support that the musicians have received during the pandemic, the article proceeds to outline the new skills that the musicians learned during lockdown.
References
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Becker, Howard. 1961. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Becker, Howard. 1984. Art Worlds. Berkley: University of California Press.
Daskalaki, Maria and Maria Simosi. 2017. “Unemployment as a Liminoid Phenomenon: Identity Trajectories in Times of Crisis”. Human Relations 71/9: 1153–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726717737824
Gennep, Arnold van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Holt, Fabian. 2020. Everybody Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Hytönen-Ng, Elina. 2013. Experiencing ‘Flow’ in Jazz Performance. Farnham: Ashgate.
Hytönen-Ng, Elina. 2017. “Place and Imagined Community in Jazz”. Jazz Research Journal 11/1: 62–79. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.33273
Kwon, Jong Bum and Carrie M. Lane. 2016. “Introduction”. In Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, edited by Carrie M. Lane and Jong Bum Kwon
Lane, Carrie M. 2016. “Limits of Liminality: Anthropological Approaches to Unemployment in the United States”. In Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, edited by Carrie M. Lane and Jong Bum Kwon, 1–17. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lane, Carrie M. and Jong Bum Kwon, eds. 2016. Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. New York: Routledge.
Norris, Dawn R. 2016. Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Potter, Jonathan and Margaret Wetherell. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.
Turner, Victor. 1982. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine.
Wiggins, Sally. 2017. Discursive Psychology: Theory, Method and Application. London: Sage Publications.
Williamson, John and Martin Cloonan. 2016. Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893–2013. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
