Wall of Sound

David Murray Trio: Live At The Peace Church
Danola DA001

David Murray (ts);
Fred Hopkins (b);
Stanley Crouch (d)

1. Beauty from Elsewhere 23:26 (David Murray)
2. Future Sally’s Time* 8:21 (David Murray)
3. Low Class Conspiracy / Turquoise Cement Flower 14:42 (David Murray)

*Future Sally’s Time was originally presented over two sides of the vinyl LP, and so there is an abrupt stop and start in the middle of the track exactly as it appeared.

Recorded live in concert at St Mark’s Church NY 1976

This LP has been a rather illusive David Murray recording for me. In fact adding it to my collection (as far as I am aware) now completes a set of commercial recordings by Murray as leader or co-leader. This is certainly his rarest release. It has been long out of print, second hand copies hardly ever come up for sale, and dealer prices are some what inflated. But thanks to the generosity of a fellow Murray fan I now own the final piece of my Murray odyssey. Thank you so much, Dale.

The record was also worth the wait, because Murray’s performance does not disappoint. This was a trio of musicians that played together, but not what one could consider a stable band. The recording is one of the few to feature jazz and cultural critic Stanley Crouch on drums soon after his arrival in New York. He was to make a much bigger name for himself as a rather opinionated journalist, but he has always been rather self-effacing about his drumming skills. I think he acquits himself perfectly well here. Although Murray is the strongest player, with Fred Hopkins in rather more subdued mood than usual, Crouch gives interesting percussion fills, and a clear grasp of the music. He had been a mentor and teacher to Murray in California, and his role is equally supportive here.

Although the sleeve notes make the point that the approach of musicians on what the writer calls “the New Jazz, Avant Guard Jazz, or Free Jazz” scene was away from the traditional role of leader and sidemen, Murray is credited as author of all the themes here, and dominates throughout. There are no alternating solos here, with Murray improvising strongly throughout a number supported by Hopkins on plucked and bowed bass and Crouch’s fills. Hopkins does have some solo space on ‘Future Sally’s Time’ but he remains uncharacteristically introverted. His playing circles downwards like water running out of a plug hole.

The statement of themes is far more diffuse when compared with recordings of the same pieces made within a few months of this date, but his often plaintive playing dominates. I struggle with musicological comparisons, but just jumping between different sections of different tracks suggests that they are more part of one approach to improvising ideas than distinct as themes.

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, Low Class Conspiracy was an oft used phrase in the Murray lexicon at the time, and it seems particularly associated with projects involving Crouch, so I’m guessing he coined the phrase. Here it is used for the name of one theme in a longer improvisation, is a very different performance from that on the LP of the same name, and is run into ‘Turquoise Cement Flower’. I can’t actually tell off my first few listens through where one stops and the other starts. The surreal title of the latter part wasn’t used again, and the style of titling is notably different from the far more personalised approach Murray usually took, even within the titles on this LP. Does that suggest the name didn’t come from Murray?

‘Future Sally’s Time’ is somewhat closer to his usual personalising approach, but still has that sense of abstraction. I’m not aware of another recording of ‘Beauty from Elsewhere’, and again there doesn’t seem to be the strong writing common to almost all the rest of his work.

This is a far more pensive performance than his other records of the time, with far fewer of the usual gospel ecstatic moments that Murray would become associated with, and far less of the flash than one finds on contemporary concerts made in Europe.

The title of the album is significant, not simply because it indicates that the music was recorded at St Mark’s Church in Manhattan, but that this fact reveals something interesting and significant about the jazz scene in New York at that time. During this period Murray and his fellow musicians are often referred to as members of the ‘loft scene’, and music like this termed ‘loft jazz’. The term, of course, referrers to the reuse of industrial spaces as domestic residences and artistic venues outside the mainstream of commercial live music. Murray played extensively in these venues, and a number of his early releases were recorded at places like Ladies Fort and Rivbae, and Crouch ran his own venue from the loft he lived in. Many musicians, though, have expressed their annoyance at the term ‘loft scene’ because they felt it inaccurately limited an understanding of the spaces in which the new music was made; and fighting against limitations on understanding were a central tenant of musical practice of this time.

The Peace Church, though, was one of a whole series of equally important venues outside the lofts where musicians played. While the postwar jazz clubs may have had very little space for the new jazz, these venues were integrated into other cultural activities and neighbourhood politics. The Peace Church had been a significant location for anti-Vietnam war activity and other radical political causes in the 1960s, and these ideas are embedded in the notion that it was also host to creative musicians in the 1970s.

David Murray Solo: Organic Saxophone
Palm 31

David Murray tenor saxophone

1. Body And Soul (dedicated to Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster) (Johnny Green)
2. Chan Pour Une Nouvelle Afrique Du Sud (David Murray)
3. Ballad For Matthew and Maia Garrison (David Murray)
4. Hope/Scope (dedicated to Mary Hope Lee) (David Murray)
5. All The Things You Are (dedicated to Ntazake Shange) (Jerome Kern)
6. The Prominade Never Stops (dedicated to George Brown) (David Murray)
7. Monica In Monk’s Window (Stanley Crouch)

Recorded February 6 & 7, 1978 live at the Theatre Mouffetard, Paris

Recorded by Jef Gilson

This recording is one third of a concert recorded in Paris in 1978. The other two parts were released on the Italian Red and British Cadillac labels. The Cadillac Conceptual Saxophone is, amazingly, still available commercially from the label. When you order you’ll get a vinyl copy from the original pressing. Let me know if you’d like one.

Organic Saxophone was released by Jef Gilson – who also recorded the concert – on his Paris-based Palm label. I’m guessing Gilson selected from the takes at the concert because this is the best programmed of the three LPs. Romantic ballads intersperse with sharper, wilder, performances, and the whole is very satisfying indeed. The recording is excellent for a live performance, although there is a very strong pre-echo of the sound explosions to come in each of the quiet moments in Murray’s solos. This is most likely the result of ‘print-through’ where the magnetic signal encoded on the tape is passed on to the next layer of the tape wound on the reel. I must try and see if I can find out the full running order of the concert. I did try and see if there were any aural clues to the order, but it defeated me. It would be marvellous to have the whole two days of recordings featured on the three LPs made available as one release in performance order. I know that at least one of the masters still exists.

It’s the music that makes this recording, though:

This is the first time on record that Murray tackles a standard (well two, actually). ‘Body and Soul’ is dedicated to Hawkins and Webster, indicating the importance Murray placed on investigating the saxophone techniques of the masters of the instrument. Murray plays the theme with all the romanticism that made the Hawkins’ rendition a jukebox hit forty years before. From that point on, though, it’s an exploration of both the musical possibilities of the piece and the saxophone. Just as Hawkins had transformed what was possible on a tenor, Murray looks to go beyond even that. However, this is a lovely, tender, rendition which would set a pattern for his later exploration of the ballad in the jazz tradition.

‘Chant for a New South Africa’ is a wonderful, well titled, piece. He seems to be exploring the sort of counter-point used so effectively in the World Saxophone Quartet, but here from one soloist. Quite remarkable. It is both a meditative chant and a blow of frustration, punctuated with saxophone and verbal cries. He was seldom as overtly political in the naming, or playing, of a composition.

It is interesting how many of Murray’s recordings have dedications. His music always sounds very personal to me, and the dedications tend to suggest the relationship between his selection of music, his playing, and his personal relationships. I tend to a degree of speculation when trying to map out the dedications, and I’d be very interested to hear if I’ve got any of these right (or wrong), but they suggest a network of fellow musicians and friends who stimulated and supported his work. Ballad for Matthew and Maia Garrison feels a very personal piece, and I’m guessing that it’s named after the bass player and dancer siblings born to Coltrane’s bassist, Jimmy Garrison, and his wife, the dancer Roberta Garrison. The younger Garrison’s would have been ten and seven at the time of the recording, and the dedication suggests something of the creative world in which Murray operated at the time.

Hope/Scope is a much tarter piece featuring lots of Murray’s squeals and low to high leaps and runs, and the fast alterations between quiet and high volume. It feels right that this would be for the poet and writer Mary Hope Lee, whose poem “on not bein” is often a part of compilations of African American women’s writing. I’d like to think her ‘A Song for David’ from the following year was a reciprocal dedication. Murray reused the theme a further seven times on record in a variety of settings for quartet, octet and duo’s with piano players Dave Burrell and then Donald Fox. Murray’s later playing is even more ecstatic than it is here, and usually set against piano clustered discords. Such an observation rather undermines the view that Murray became more mainstream as his career progressed.

The treatment of ‘All the Things You Are’ mirrors that of Body and Soul. A romantic statement of the theme and some lovely flights of playing that bring out the edge of a standard that’s often given a saccharin treatment. It’s dedicated to Murray’s then partner, poet Ntazake Shange, with whom Murray had been performing in New York for much of the previous year, and there are suggestions that they worked together in Europe during June 1977 (West 1977). I don’t know of any recordings of these performances, but I’d sure like to hear them if they exist. It’s pretty much an avant-lovesong.

Murray’s own ‘Promenade’ and Stanley Crouch’s ‘Monica In Monk’s Window’ finish off the LP. The latter has a jolly theme which I think is pretty good writing from the EngLit-teacher-turned-drummer-turned-cultural-critic. Murray certainly does an excellent job with it in this five minute or so performance. As far as I am aware this is the only recording of both pieces. The earlier number is dedicated to George Brown, who I assume is the same GB who plays drums on the January Quartet Paris concert that appears on Last of The Hipman and Let the Music Take You [I featured Hipman in an earlier post here]. If you know anything more about George Brown I’d be very interested to hear.

References:

Mary Hope Lee (1979): ‘A Song for David’. Callaloo, No. 5, Women Poets: A Special Issue (Feb., 1979), p. 89

Mary Hope Lee ‘on not bein’ collected in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) (1981): The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Women of Color Press.

Hollie I West (1977): ‘The Development of a Bright Star’ Washington Post 12th June 1977.

Here’s another instalment in my ongoing examination of Murray’s recorded output.

Red Records VPA129

David Murray Tenor Saxophone
Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris Trumpet
Johnny Dyani (spelt Dyiani on record sleeve) Bass
George Brown Drums, percussion

Monk’s Notice (James Newton) (21, 41)
Patricia (David Murray) (13, 17)
Last Of The Hipmen (David Murray) (10, 34)

Recorded in concert in Rouen on January 30th 1978

Produced by Alberto Alberti and Sergio Veschi

Mixed at Studio 67 Bologna March 1978

This is another very early recording from Murray, this time with a full quartet. It’s one of a number released on European labels, and recorded in France or Italy during 1978. Five LPs were produced out of two concerts: one on the 30th January at Rouen University, and one over two nights on 6th and 7th February at the Theatre Mouffetard, Paris. There’s some evidence that Murray’s manager at the time, Kunle Mwanga, arranged for the recordings, and then sold tapes to different independent jazz labels. The 30th January date resulted in Let The Music Take You (released on [and still available from] Marge Records in France) and this record, released on Red Record based in Milan and currently not available commercially. The February solo performances were released on three vinyl LPs on different labels.

The record gets its title from one of the tracks, although the track’s called ‘Last of the Hipmen’, the album sold as Last of the Hipman. As the album title doesn’t seem to make much sense (it certainly wasn’t the last that we heard of Murray), and only appears on the album sleeve, I’ve always wondered if it was a typo. They mis-spelt Dyani anyway.

During this time there was no real stability to Murray’s bands. Butch Morris was clearly in Europe with Murray at this time because he appears on the February Milan Studio recording that was released by Black Saint as Interboogieology and an August live recording in London (released as The London Concert). Expatriate South African Johnny Dyani was heavily involved in the London new jazz scene at the time, and he appears on this date, The London Conference and the recording for 3D Family on September 3, 1978 live in concert at Willisau Jazz Festival (available on hatArt). Dyani seems to have made a big impression on Murray, and he dedicated recordings to him over the years using Dyani’s African name of M’Bizo. I know nothing about George Brown, and it seems unlikely from his playing here that he was the same G Brown who played Bop drums in the 1960s in the US.

As I noted in an earlier post ‘Monk’s Notice’ is a James Newton composition also recorded for Solomon’s Sons almost exactly a year before, and the two Murray compositions were often featured in other recordings (’Hipmen’ in 1981 and 1987; ‘Patricia’ in 1977, and 1986).

The record company is also worthy of some note. Red Record was (and still is) run by Sergio Veschi in Milan, and started recording and / or releasing free jazz as part of the Italian left cultural movement. It’s likely that the red in question was therfore the symbol of left-wing politics in Europe. Better known today for musicians like Bobby Watson, the label is a key institution of Italian and European jazz, and supporter of the American avant-garde (more details at www.ijm.it/wp/whos-who/sergio-veschi).

I rate this as one of Murray’s most interesting records of the 1970s.

The completist’s dream is now within reach. Over Christmas I managed to not only track down Solomon’s Sons, but also Sur-Real Saxophone. I must thank Quibbler for his generosity in doing a swap for a vinyl copy of one of the two missing records in my David Murray collection. One of the really great things about collecting jazz records is the number of marvelous people who really care about the music, and who willingly share their collection so others can discover more terrific records. So while I try and find a good copy of Live at Peace Church at a reasonable price here’s the low-down on my latest acquisition. With some careful button pushing you will be able to hear this for yourself.

David Murray solo: Sur-Real Saxophone
HORO HZ09
HORO Records, Via Asiago 2, 000195 Rome

David Murray tenor saxophone

Invocation To Past Souls (David Murray) 1:58 [actually 1:36]
The Cats (David Murray) 8:09 [actually 8:27]
Plastic/Drastic (David Murray) 6:04 [actually 8:48]
Noteworthy Lady (Stanley Crouch) 6:42 [actually 6:48]

Low Class Conspiracy (David Murray) 11:01 [actually 11:20]
After All This (David Murray) 7:21 [actually 7:36].　

Recorded live at the Theatre Mouffetard, Paris on 6th February 1978

Recorded by Jef Gilson
Produced by Aldo Sinesio

This is one of three LPs which were created out of Murray solo performances in Paris in early 1978. This is the point in Murray’s career that his reputation in the New York jazz lofts was extended to the European concert and festival circuit, and then to recordings available in Europe. The concert was recorded by Jef Gilson and part of it was released by him on his Palm record label as Organic Saxophone. This segment was most likely sold to the Italian HORO label. Certainly the remaining third was sold to British record company owner John Jack, and released as Conceptual Saxophone on Jack’s Cadillac label. Interestingly, for students of record company economics for this release the Italian publishing rights of all the compositions bar ‘Low Class Conspiracy’ were also ascribed to FLY records.

I’ve included the timings listed on the LP sleeve, although in some cases they have no relationship to the actual length of the tracks, and I’ve added my reckoning of the timings.

‘The Cats’ is a suitably titled dedication to Ellington saxophonists Carney, Hodges and Gonsalves. The title reveals Murray’s interest in the history of jazz saxophone playing (he originally came to New York from California in 1975 to research a college assignment on the subject) and the playing an interesting exploration of the saxophone as a musical machine and the styles of playing it. Low Class Conspiracy was a popular term in the early Murray titling vocabulary he used it to name an LP and a track in 1976, and he again played the latter on the 1977 Peace Church live recording and here. In 1977 he also took it for the name of his then current band featuring future notables Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Don Pullen and Fred Hopkins, as well as Stanley Crouch on drums. I love ‘Plastic / Drastic’ which reveals something of Murray’s love of music’s theatrics. It’s nearly three minutes longer than the cover detail suggests, and features Murray alternating between vocal poetic declarations, frantic explorations of the extremes of the tenor, and swinging echoes of the saxophones ability to tell a story. The audience lap it up. Murray was no stuffed shirt avant-ist.

His debt to Crouch is signalled at another level by the inclusion of one of the drummer-cum-journalist’s themes ‘Noteworthy Lady’. ‘After All This’ was possibly a staple of Murray’s work at this time as it is reprised from the 1976 recordings of Flowers For Albert (India Navigation 1026). The short ‘Invocation’ that starts the record feels like a mainly improvised piece, and this is supported by the fact that (unlike most of his pieces from this time) it does not appeared on another Murray recording.

Record collectors can become quite completist. I know that’s not really a word, but the obsession to complete one part of a collection is strong when you’ve made so much of an effort to get the rest. I started the Christmas holiday three records short of a complete set of David Murray’s recordings as leader or joint leader, and a few days ago I managed to add another of the missing records to my collection thanks to a friendly ebay seller in Italy. (I’m still missing Live at Peace Church and Sur-Real Saxophone, if anyone has copies they want to sell at a reasonable price).

Just for the hell of it (and it’ll make Andrew happy that I’m doing a ‘proper’ blog post) I thought I’d document the final three recordings as I get them. To start us off here’s:

James Newton and David Murray Solomon’s Sons,

Circle Records RK 16177/5
Circle Records, Aachener Str 60/62, 5000 Koln, Germany

Dedicated to Martin Luther King

James Newton Flute
David Murray Alto and Tenor Saxophone

Monk’s Notice (James Newton) duo 13:29
The Dean (James Newton) flute solo 6:47
Theme For The Kidd (David Murray) duo 9:05
3D Family (David Murray) sax solo 7:09
Solomon’s Sons (James Newton) duo 9:05

Recorded in live at the Smudge Pot, Claremont, California on January 16th 1977

Recorded by Bruce Bidlack
Produced by Rudolf Kreis

The album presents recordings of three duo performances and a solo each for two reunited musicians back where they started playing: Claremont, California. By this point Murray had become the darling of the loft jazz scene in New York, as well as a regular feature on the European festival circuit. Murray tended to work in a quartet setting in the late 1970s, and so along with a couple of solo recordings, it’s interesting to hear Murray work in such a challenging context.

The album is credited to Newton and Murray, and the inverse alphabetical order suggests Newton had the key role here. Nevertheless Murray plays an equal role in the playing and composition stakes. Murray worked with Newton on three further recordings that I am aware of: a 1995 release of recordings made under Jon Jang’s leadership (Two Flowers on Stem); a jointly led quintet CD released in 1996; and a1998 work with Guadeloupian musicians (Creole)

Two note-worthy asides of interest to Murray fans. First, the album credits suggest he plays both alto and tenor on this recording. I haven’t found another example of the alto on any recording. Although I think I’ll need a couple more listens to spot where he uses the smaller horn, it’s most likely his solo track, 3D Family. I still can’t decide for sure because he plays in the same ‘beyond the instrument’ style he uses on tenor. The the back cover photo shows both horns in evidence, though. I should note that he was experimenting with different horns at this time. He plays soprano on ‘Bechet’s Bounce’ on Live at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club Vol 1, and introduced bass clarinet into his performances on Jack DeJohnette’s 1979 recording of Special Edition. He carried on with the bass clarinet at regular intervals but the other saxes seemed to be one-offs. None of the press coverage I’ve tracked down from this time talks about his use of alto or soprano, so I don’t know if they got used in unrecorded live performances. Was anyone reading this at any of his gigs during these years?

Second, although not noted on the cover, Newton’s ‘The Dean’ is dedicated in the live announcement to Stanley Crouch. It’s certainly possible to draw the conclusion that ‘The Dean’ was a the affectionate name for Crouch who, as a staff member at Pomona College (where Murray studied), became a mentor for many black musicians involved in the local black arts movement.

The associations of this recording with Murray’s past and future resonate particularly strongly in one track. This was also the first time ‘3D Family’ was recorded; although he returned to the theme on three further occasions in 1978, ‘81 and ‘90. The importance of the composition to Murray is apparent in the 1978 release where he makes it the title track and dedicates it to (I think) his father Walter P Murray. When Murray Jnr moved to Paris he took the title as the name for his production company. Murray also recorded Newton’s ‘Monk’s Notice’ almost exactly a year later on Last of the Hipman.

Here’s some more of my writing on Northern Soul. This time I am posting an extract from some work analysing dance styles on the Northern Soul dancefloor.

Style refers to the manner of expression; it is the particular way certain actions are performed. In his semiotic investigation of style, Dick Hebdige (1979) suggests that style is the active use of available materials, in which each use is interconnected with other uses, to produce a meaningful whole. As such I want to explore dance style as a process of meaning-construction, distinct in its usage of available moves, and linked to other practices that make it meaningful. It is, therefore, far more important to understand how and in what context dancers dance than simply what they dance or how it feels.

I start by identifying a central set of practices which were established in the early 1970s, and (mainly because of the continuity of many of the participants) have remained the predominant way in which dance is organised within the scene. These aspects of style constitute a narrow definition of how music can be danced to, expressed by the scene’s participants as a shared set of competencies or dance techniques and an associated notion of competence.

Competence and dance technique

Ben Malbon, in his analysis of post-House club culture, argues that part of the sociability of dance is the ability of the dancer to demonstrate a number of competencies which, drawing on Goffman (1959), he suggests aim to ‘successfully negotiating the trials of ‘impression management’’ (p. 97). That is to say, it matters what you look like when you move, and it matters what spatial relationships you produce in relation to other dancers. In fact, as I will show, on the Northern scene the idea of competence orders the spacing of dancers and variation in style in a way that it does not seem to in the post-House club culture Malbon investigates.

We will not find an understanding of dance within the scene if we concentrate on the ‘gymnastics’ of back drops, spins and dives that impress the on-looker at a Northern night. They are the most obviously distinctive features, and certainly they give a heroic appellation to the exponents, and a sense of the extraordinary to these dance floors. However, even when (30 years ago) we were younger, fitter and more practiced, only a minority of dancers used these moves, and only at set places in certain records. Today it tends to be the older male dancers who execute them, rather than the large number of younger dancers. I would suggest that it is through this relationship that a sense of the heroic has been established.

Cosgrove tried to put his finger on Northern style by noting that the dancer ‘glides from side to side’ and ‘predict almost every beat and soul clap’ (1982, 38). The predominant ‘glide’ style is achieved through some core characteristics of posture and movement: rigid upper torso, eyes up and looking forward; weight back and pushing down through the hips on to the heels; moving mostly with feet, with fairly straight legs, to propel oneself across the floor (almost always sideways); arms and hands tend to follow the shifting weight of the dancer, or push against it for expressive counter-point. It is this core competency that signals you as an insider, and not a dance tourist. Many – and at an increasing number of Northern nights, most – dancers limit their dance to these core postures and movements. There are some who do not adopt this predominant style, and I will return to them later in this section.

There are also a series of elaborations to the core style that are available to the competent dancer. The most common are to do with the dance steps. The standard steps of the side-to-side dance movement count out the four beats of each bar of the music as a basic repetition: four beats to the right, four beats to the left. This seems to be the easiest way to interpret the steady, even, lightly syncopated beat of the up-town sixties Soul records that characterises the music played at Northern venues. This beat is the main drive of the dancing style because it determines the even time marking which underlies Northern dance style. However, by shifting weight across two beats from the heel to the toe the dancer can momentarily keep their balance on one foot. This allows dancers to undertake steps characteristic of a more practiced participant. Primarily it allows a heavy use of the ankle, rather than leg, to propel the dancer, and to use their other foot for an action that does not require carrying their weight. It is this movement, which makes the dancer seem to glide, while at the same time as allowing leg, and foot movements that counter-point the main beat. This puts considerable stress on the ankles and this is the reason Northern dancefloors are lubricated with talcum powder by the dancers.

It is from these pieces of footstep improvisation and elaboration that the other bodily movements are built. They mostly cover a range of small shifts which within the scene have significance. These would include changes of direction, the interspersing of short and longer sideways strides, twisting the body in a counter direction to the movement of the feet, and shifting the weight around the centre of the hips. These moves are paralleled by hand and arm gestures which play with other aspects of the song, or emphasise them, most notably with the soul clap – an exaggerated wide armed communally-executed clap – which marks out certain beats usually in the bridge of the record. These relatively simple moves are then sometimes built up into more dramatic moves that produce the acrobatic activities of spinning, falling backwards, or diving forwards. At its most elaborated these would be combined so that, for instance, a spin ends in a backdrop, which merges into a kick from the prone position, and a return the vertical ends with a spin to hit the first beat of a new stanza of the music.

However physically demanding such elaborated moves are they are not in themselves valued. There are dancers who can do the gymnastic techniques, but do not dance with competency. Along with all movements, the judgement of competency is applied to the way they are executed. While dancers are allowed quite a degree of variation in the moves that are executed – in fact it is greatly valued – the times when they can be executed is strongly delineated. These structures of what is possible when are related to the musical and performance structure of the recordings themselves. Knowledge of the structure of individual records is therefore central, and thus unites two forms of competence: the ability to do the moves; and the knowledge of when, in a particular record, certain types of moves can be executed.

Competency and scene knowledge

Records have been, and are, valued on the scene because they provide opportunities for the competencies of style to be enacted. Dobie Gray’s ‘Out on the Floor’ is a classic for analysing how musical and dancing competence relate. In many ways it is a basic song form, but not one strong on lyrical content. The introduction is based on a transposition of the lyrical and musical material of the song’s chorus cut down to four three-bar stanzas. ‘Hey, hey, hey’, sing the backing vocalists twice; ‘yeah! yeah! yeah!, everything is out of sight!’ replies Dobie, as we are called to the floor. This is followed by the first verse (four eight bar stanzas), then the chorus (one eight-bar stanzas), the second verse, chorus again (this time two eight-bar stanzas), an extended bridge section built on multiple phrases of eight bars. Moving to the fade out the verse and one stanza chorus are repeated and then the lines of the extended bridge are used with new lyrics.

Dancers use the core techniques described above during the verse, a flourish of extended techniques in the chorus, and quite developed versions of the extended techniques in the elongated bridge. We can start to understand the popularity of the record with dancers for over three decades by relating the playfulness of the musicians and singers with the song structure, with the possibilities for competence they provide. Most of the song is taken at a very brisk tempo, and at key points the tempo is intensified by the drums dramatically increasing the time over the basic beat. The tempo of the backing track contrasts with the generally unhurried nature of the lead singing, which on occasions uses melisima to spread a note over one or two bars. At other times, especially at the start of a verse, Gray is singing ahead of the beat. Even given the overall structure no two stanzas are organised in the same way. Most significant in these variations are the instrumental roles of drums and acoustic piano. The drums (with the other rhythm instruments) keep steady time in the verse, and then break into double time for the last two bars of the final stanza, while the vocal holds one word, pushing us into the chorus. The piano is used for a short motif, which constitutes the song’s secondary hook and is played towards the end of each stanza of verse, usually in the last bar. In the first three lines the motif is played softly and with some improvisation against the vocal. It is not used in the chorus. At other points, notably the answer section of the extended bridge, the motif is played with full attack on the keys. This all creates shifting textures, a playfulness with time, and shifts of emotional intensity in which dancers demonstrate their simultaneous competencies of dance technique as style, knowledge of the recorded music, and the rules of the scene.

If competency in the Northern scene can be understood as relating to stylised movement and knowledge of particular records and how they can be danced to, it is played out in the space of the dance floor. Dance is more than a combination of posture and steps, it obviously also involves moving in a space used by other dancers and marked out for different activities. This constitutes Malbon’s second ‘situation’ of dance: the physical geography, ambience and spacing and orientation of dancers. Given what has preceded it will come as no surprise to learn that the scene has a strong set of rules about how one moves in this space.

Moving in space

The dance spaces of the Northern Soul scene are not the mainstream clubs of youth nightlife, and they have never been so. They are a mixture of old ballrooms, pub function rooms, halls, and social clubs in communities which were increasingly marginalised by the shifting economics of post-war wealth creation. Many early venues did not even have a licenced bar. The most important element was a large wooden dance floor, and contemporary Northern nights are in venues dominated by the dance floor. Bar and sitting areas usually surround the dance space on two or more sides and there is usually a space set aside for selling records and memorabilia, as watching the dancers and buying records and CDs are important secondary activities at Northern nights. The DJ desk is usually raised on a stage at the other end of the room, and all these activities are orientated to the dance floor and the dancers.

Few present day venues have the scale of attendance of Wigan Casino or Blackpool Mecca in the 1970s, and usually will be in the low hundreds, with less than a hundred on the dancefloor at any one time. Even so, so many enthusiastic dancers in a confined space demands some form of regulation. An etiquette of the dancefloor has developed to try and deal with the danger of clashing with another dancer. While some dancers will operate in an area as large as one or two square meters, this space will overlap with other dancers who seek to negotiate the use of the space through some sort of order to their dancing and a high degree of control over their techniques. Dancers with a developed technique and a high degree of competence hardly ever come into contact, and such incidents are usually followed by fulsome apologies. The sorts of orientations apparent in Malbon’s account of ‘post-House club cultures’ are not present on Northern dance floors. Dancers do not face the DJ, or any other common part of the space. Dancers on the outer edges of the floor almost always face inwards, but on the inside of the dance space different dancers face different ways. Although friends often dance in a broadly similar part of the floor, they do not normally form a distinctive group, and dancing between couples is very unusual (and often a subject of comment by on-lookers).

There is a continual churning of dancers, usually based upon preferences for certain records over others. A particularly popular record will quickly fill the floor, but the relatively short length of the records means that there is a change in those dancing every three minutes or so. Dancing is therefore an activity defined not just by the physical relationship to the music, but to the other dancers, and to the wider space through which the dancers shift their activity from dancing, sitting, watching and offering comment. I estimate that dancers today spend far less time on the dance floor than they would have in the 1970s – probably the product of our increasing age – and the composition and operation of the floor has shifted far more than the basic dance itself.

The most notable change is the role that women occupy. Once a minority of dancers, they now constitute a majority. Although one must be careful as the 1970s published photographic records of dancers tend to focus on the acrobatic dancing performed by men, the distribution of the dancing crowd supports the claim that it was men who predominate in numbers, in occupancy of space, and in the spectacle of dance. At a number of present day venues I visited a high proportion of the men occupying the floor kept to the outer edge, and women out numbered men in the centre. Although men tended to be the ones who used the acrobatic elements in their dances, some women included spins, and elaborated dance steps. Secondly, there is far less cohesion to the dancefloor than there used to be. This is most obvious in the division between dancers in their twenties – who construct their dance identities around a revival of the dress and dance of the late 1960 Mod scene – and those in their late thirties, forties (and sometimes fifties) who link themselves much more to the Northern Scene of the late 1970s. The relative proportion of these groups varies from venue to venue, but there was not a venue I visited where the younger group were in the majority. For this reason the dominant meanings of the scene are still derived from the three decades of Northern Soul. There has been some antagonism to Mod-revivalists in the Northern scene since the early 1980s because it is perceived to lack authenticity, and to be a youth fad (see St. Pierre dnk; Winstanley dnk) but this seems to have dissipated if my research is generalisable. Although there is some overlap in which records are danced to, the neo-Mods tend to dominate when certain records are played, and these are usually played within a themed set of early 1960s R&B, rather than the uptown Soul style associated with Detroit or Los Angelis labels. During these sets there are not major differences between dancers as the Northern dancers curtail the more distinctive features of their style. At other times, though, the differences between styles often leads to bodily contact as it is harder to predict the patterns of different, (Northern dancers would say) less disciplined styles.

There is another sense in which the Northern scene has expanded outside its former cultural territory of exclusion, and this has expanded the backgrounds of people at Northern venues. The rare Soul records which were collected and exchanged by DJs and dancers are now widely available on compilation CDs, and they have a wider circulation in radio programmes and on the sound tracks to adverts and TV programmes. Further, the greater prominence of women dancers, and of dancers who do not share the traditions and history of the Northern soul scene, have made the discursive practices of the scene less excluding, and the notions of the in-crowd less pronounced.

My main point here is that Northern Soul dancers are not just involving themselves in a physically pleasurable activity. Ethnographic observation and participation reveals dancing as a physically and psychologically pleasure activity, and the sweat and physical flow of dance, the relationship to music, and physical communality are major reasons dancers dance. However, they cannot explain the distinctiveness of why dance to these records in this way.

I recently re-edited a post I made about a year ago in an attempt to make the point I made more clearly. The post was about the Northern Soul scene in the UK and its links to African American culture. You can read the rewritten piece here, and the original here.

The post was picked up by several Northern Soul message boards and discussions groups, and has been widely attacked, often in the most vitriolic of terms. This was quite a shock for me. It was like a collision of two worlds. I’ve collected soul music and gone dancing for over thirty years and I feel a strong part of the bits of the scene I’m involved in. It’s great to still be dancing as I turn 50 to music I love, and to be in the company of many people who feel the same. But I’m also a university academic and I’ve debated long and hard with other academics, and learnt the skills of summarising what they say, and outlining the results of a detailed analysis in the highly condensed style we use, deploying all the technical terms and academic conventions that give us a shorthand to make a point in as few words as possible.

Of course there were probably many more thoughtful responses, every one of which made a number of important points; most of which I agreed with. In a great many cases people seemed to have misunderstood what I was trying to say; often thinking I was saying the opposite of what I thought I was saying. I have always found talking easier than writing, but I do regularly get work published after a thorough review by very precise academics. They seemed to understand what I was saying even though I am not a particularly elegant writer. When I write for students they seem to like the way I write, and they say I explain things well. So I concluded it was more about the style of academic writing that’s at stake, rather than my poor command of the art.

It’s taken me quite a bit of time to understand why I didn’t get my point across (we’re not always that bright, us academic types). There seems to be two interconnecting issues.

First, many people on the Northern Soul scene are affronted that the scene is written about in this academic way. Many people assumed I didn’t know anything about the scene, and gave some pretty rude, but sharply descriptive, statements of their image of an academic.

Second, I clearly didn’t get my point across to them. The very language that’s used in academic articles clearly isn’t helpful when making a point to a general readership. Many people who commented were articulate and very thoughtful; so I accept it’s my failing not theirs. Academic writing is a strange sort of form, very different from other forms of writing. All university teachers know this when we try to help our students master it. It has evolved to do some things academics think are important: get a lot of information and argument over in a very few words. After a while you get used to it, and other forms of writing can feel very slow (get to the point we shout!).

In part it’s the content that’s hard to follow. We do things that are not characteristic of other forms of writing.

Academics spend most of the time summarising what other people have said. That’s because when we write we think of ourselves as engaged in a set of debates with what has been written before. Many of the readers of my piece seemed to think that the views I was attributing to others were mine. I was setting them up to knock them down.

However, we are very polite about how we knock down the ideas others have presented. We tend not to set out relative positions with much strength. We try to be balanced. In my Northern soul piece I said that the issues were more complex than another writer had suggested. Someone else may have said they were simplistic, others that they were wrong. I know very well from the response of some non-academics to my writing that a common approach is to attack the author instead of the position.

We also do strange things like put peoples names in brackets as a way of pointing to a whole book or article of supporting evidence instead of spelling it out. And of course you have to know what the books say to understand the point. In Cultural Studies we also use lots of technical terms which signal debates and positions that if you know the terms you know what it means, but if you don’t it’s impenetrable.

Finally, we write in such a condensed form because we want to get a whole set of complex ideas into the few thousand words the journal editor will allow us.

I think it’s important to leave the original post up. I stand by my arguments. But I’ve added a slightly edited one to try and separate the points a bit, and particularly to make my parts plainer.

I could rewrite it for a more general readership (and I would if I had more time), but generally I’m just making drafts of academic articles available for anyone whose interested. I could just keep this to myself and the few hundred specialists who’ll read the finished piece in an academic journal. However, I believe strongly that ideas should be widely available. In the end you’ll have to take them for what they are.

This post is based upon a post I made about a year ago. In the year since I put it up it caused quite a bit of controversy with people on the Northern scene. I’ve rewritten it a bit to try and get my point across more clearly. If you want to compare this with the original post, it’s here. If you are at all interested in a few reflections on academic writing I made when I made the changes, they’re here.

This is a short extract from a much longer paper on dancing on the Northern Soul scene that was published in Popular music, and I posted the original extract as a contribution to a debate with other popular music academics about the link between white Britons and black music. So, I’m not trying to explain the Northern Soul scene here, just take issue with what’s been written by other academics about the link between the scene and black American culture.

Hopefully here’s a clearer discussion about that relationship between the UK Northern Soul scene and US soul music:

When writing about the Northern Soul scene in Britain many academics try and make some strong points about the link between the scene and US soul music and the African American culture in which the music developed. Based on my own involvement in the scene, and my own reflections as a popular music academic I’m not convinced the other academic analyses are correct.

Joanne Hollows and Katie Milestone (199 have produced a thoughtful mapping of the cultural geographic meanings of the relationship of the UK Northern Soul scene with the northern cities of the USA where the music was recorded. Many of the points they make are accurate. The authors note that by using imported records participants in the scene could produce a culture independent of London. They further suggest that people on the scene in the 1970s negotiate the competing meanings of ‘North America’ in English culture to produce a relationship with an ‘imagined’ African American culture structured through an interpretative community which extends from the US cities in which the music was produced, through the dancefloors of the Northern scene, and to the pop sensibilities of other consumers of soul records (87- 94).

That is an overstatement of the case. The relationship between the UK Northern Soul and the black culture of Northern cities of the US is even more complex than Hollows and Milestone suggest. The greater complexity can be grasped by attention to the practices in African American music culture during the 1960s, and the British Northern Soul scene in the 1970s and beyond.

As a number of other scholars have demonstrated, there is a richness to the politics of culture, identity and music generated in African American communities in the 1960s and 70s, which requires sophisticated analysis (George 1986; George 1988; Early 1995; Ward 1998; Smith 1999). The music played in Northern clubs is selectively, and meaningfully, drawn from the historical moment in which the aspirations among black Americans for integration gave way to a desire for a self-defined equality. Specifically, Northern soul DJs most often play records from the earlier black pop pro-integrationist period, and exclude those with strong musical elements associated with the ‘funkier’ music associated with the African pride and black power initiatives which followed.

This point will become clearer, perhaps, if we turn to Dobie Gray’s recording of ‘Out on the Floor’. I’ve used this record elsewhere to explain Northern Soul dancing, and within the scene this is how it is meaningful. However, in the context of the development of black music in the USA the lyrics and music place the song in an interesting mid-point between the integrationist agenda in black politics and the civil rights movement and a greater emphasis on separatism.

Brian Ward has allied these cultural poles to the move from the Motown black pop of the early sixties to the black power funk of late sixties James Brown (1998, p. 123-169). The early operation and music of Motown Records in Detroit exemplifies the internationalist cultural and political ambitions (Smith 1999) – and it is no coincidence that Motown’s early records are often presented as key to the Northern sound – while Brown’s late 1960s and early 1970s music embodies both the move to a more conscious celebration of the distinctive qualities of black culture and the contradictions of trying to operate in a white dominated society and music industry (1988, 388 – 415).

On the one hand the lyrics ‘Out on the Floor’ deal with hedonism and dancing drawing upon a repertoire of black entertainment, and reference points from the broader sixties American youth culture which were apparent in much of the black pop produced by Motown and other independent record labels that were established after the success of Rock and Roll (Gillett 1971). Gray sings the lyrics in a style mid way between the dominating influences of Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson; two of black pop’s biggest contemporary stars who worked in Los Angeles where Gray also recorded. The production reflects many of the pop experiments undertaken by Phil Spectre at the time.

On the other hand the recording also features hints of the new developing music of Soul and Funk. Unusually for black pop the lyrics feature the sorts of African American phraseology increasingly apparent in the music of James Brown at this time (see Wall 2003, p. 138-141). As such, it is an example of what Brackett argues is the articulation of a new black ‘soul’ culture (Brackett 2000). While Gray’s vocals do not feature the high key style which gives James Brown’s singing its distinctive feel, he does use Sam Cooke’s characteristic glissandi and the urgency of Jackie Wilson’s blues gospel style with increasing prominence as the song progresses. Nevertheless, the song structure is characterised by the same sorts of developments found in Brown’s music, where verses and choruses are increasingly dissolved into continually movement and delayed harmonic releases. The mid section of increasingly emotionally-expressive sung one-liners of black vernacular speech are very similar to the sorts of developments in Brown’s repertoire of the time, particularly the ground-breaking ‘Papa’s got a Brand New Bag’ from 1965.

However, in my experience on the scene these very important factors in African American music are not significant in the way the record is interpreted on the Northern scene. It is not incidental to the popularity of the record on Northern dancefloors – along with another Gray success ‘The In-crowd’ – that the lyrics seem to celebrate the world of dance culture that gave them a new life beyond the deletion racks. Further, the song’s lyrics of sixties black vernacular speech are transformed in the scene to articulate the scene itself, and its strong sense of communality (rather than its connection to liberation politics). This is also true of the use in the scene of the African American-derived terms ‘right on’, ‘keep the faith’, and ‘brothers and sisters’. The ‘faith’ is no longer one of liberation and a better future, but of a commitment to a community, its records and dancing.

The lyrical content of the record is understood to stand for, and articulate, the scene as a whole and many dancers sing these key lines as they dance. The sense of identity with Northern Soul is the product of a complex set of layered relationships: the musical structure of a record like ‘Out on the floor’; then performed as dance within a common set of competencies of dancers and shared techniques.

That is not to deny that there is some sense of identification with African American culture. My own interest in black music, and my development of an academic career around that interest, was fired by my love of soul records. However, the relationship between the scene’s participants and African American culture is not direct, is much more conditional. African American music on record relates more to the cultural possibilities it offers for a British alternative identity, than to any consistent support for the liberation struggle taking place in the US at the time.

Brackett, D. 2000. ‘James Brown’s ‘Superbad’ and the double-voiced utterance’, in Reading Pop, ed. R. Middleton. (Oxford): 122-39
Early, G. 1995. One nation under a groove: Motown and American culture. (New Jersey)
George, N. 1986. Where did our love go? : the rise & fall of the Motown sound. (London)
George, N. 1988. The death of rhythm & blues. (London)
Gillett, C. 1971. The sound of the city : the rise of rock and roll. (London)
Hollows, J. and K. Milestone 1998. ‘Welcome to dreamsville: a history and geography of northern soul’, in The place of music, ed. A. Leyshon, D. Matless and G. Revill. (New York ; London).
Smith, S. E. 1999. Dancing in the street : Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit. (Cambridge, Mass. ; London)
Ward, B. 1998. Just my soul responding : rhythm and blues, black consciousness and race relations. (London)
Wall, T. 2003. Studying popular music culture. (London)

This is an extract from ‘Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dancing on the Northern Soul Scene’ in Popular Music 25/3

The musical genres of jazz, world, alternative and indie rock, folk and Americana tend to be in the margins of mainstream music radio in the US, but interestingly, they are particularly prominent in the programme schedules of the college radio stations I studied here. In North American radio, each of these genre terms cover a wide range of music, while still not embracing the full range of music made available by the genre-ordering structures used in music cultures outside radio playlists. It is necessary, then, to understand in what sense these could be understood as alternative musical forms, and why particular recordings are included in a programming category, while others are neglected.

Chris Atton (2002; 2004), through an engagement with the key texts of media structural analysis, has shown how neglected the notion of alternative media is, and maps the idea of an ‘alternative media’ within discourse on culture and political society. His attempt to produce an analytical definition which emphasises media subject matter and organisation, and covers artistic and subcultural, as well as political practices, is very helpful. However, as he himself shows, so wide are the range of practices that can be defined as alternative that it extends beyond the unconventional and radical. In this study, I do not seek to provide a definition of ‘alternativeness’ against which the radio stations I studied can be compared. Instead, I want to explore in some detail how the development and contemporary operation of radio broadcasting within the USA has constructed various and particular notions of ‘alternativeness’ as they are applied to music and radio. Following Michel Foucault’s (1972: 49) methodological directive, I am more interested in teasing out the discursive practices which constitute alternative radio as a cultural object.

Any notion of alternativeness must, of course, have a binary ‘other’ against which it is set. In music culture, these senses of alternativeness are built around a notion that there is a ‘mainstream’ which dominates music culture. This metaphor is itself interesting, and contains within it two senses. First, that – in the range of music possibility that runs analogously from bank to bank of a waterway – there is a central flow where the culture runs most clearly and speedily, without the eddies and complex clutter of the margins. Second, that this mainstream runs down from the source in a continuous flow. The mainstream is the common current of thought or practice.

While this analogy is widely used in both vernacular discussions and more systematic academic analysis, the concepts and the way they are deployed receive little scrutiny. For instance, while Raymond Williams (1976) established an approach to discussing the ‘Keywords’ of culture and society, he did not include the concepts of alternative and mainstream; and neither did the authors who updated the work (Bennett, Grossberg et al. 2005). Primarily, this is because the selected keywords are the terms through which intellectuals ordered their analysis of culture, rather than the terms used by the participants who practiced it.

The very notion of a mainstream is constructed by two parallel processes. One, in which an idea of the common current is an assertion of the values of the norm in society: ‘common sense’, ‘what we like’, ‘not esoteric’; the other, in which a mainstream is constructed as an ‘other’ against which values of difference, freedom, and non-conformity can be asserted. These values of difference are in themselves variable, and not necessarily compatible. Most relevant to the discussion here are the polarisation of the exotic from the everyday, the exciting from the indifferent, the substantial from the lightweight, the experimental from the formulaic, and the authentic from the manufactured.

While earlier studies of college radio have used a core notion of alternativeness, and one at least presents clear evidence that college radio staff use phraseology similar to that utilised by the respondents in my own research, these ideas remain undeveloped in the presentation of the research data. We can see this clearly in, for instance, R. Wilfred Tremblay’s (2003) investigation of college radio faculty advisors’ attitudes to the future of college radio. He quotes station staff as champions of programming around ‘alternative music, blues and jazz etc’ (: 173), and concludes that there is an acceptance of ‘the traditional college radio ideology: to be an alternative to commercial radio’ (: 179). He also reports that localness was an important driver within the stations, and that such programming independence, rather than national networking, were often seen as the basis of future success (: 180). Similarly, Samuel J. Sauls (1995; 199 has discussed college radio and the formation of alternative rock music in two descriptive conference papers which summarise journalistic commentary on college radio. Neither researcher, though, takes the opportunity to drill down further into the ways in which differences in programming and presentation practices order this idea of alternativeness, and then make it manifest in the broadcast.

In essence, this is the task I set myself. Following three quite distinct radio stations over a five-year period, I examined the changing programming and presentation practices within each station in some visits and discussions with key staff in 2003 and 2006, and by scrutinising their playlists, programme schedules and broadcasts on a yearly basis from 2002. During my visits, I watched presenters at work selecting and broadcasting the music in their live shows, and went through the music programming practices with key station personnel, including the senior management, programming staff, presenters and faculty advisors. In our discussions, notions of alternativeness were a common theme. As I will show later, my findings reveal considerable variation in practice and output, and incremental but significant change over the five-year period. My analysis shows that these music programming practices drew on the differing repertoires that operate in the wider music cultures associated with the forms of music played.

In more straight-forward terms, there is not one type of alternativeness; and the distinctive sense of alternativeness articulated by the jazz, world, indie rock, folk and Americana music played on the college stations was as much rooted in the cultural histories of those musical genres as it was in the way they were programmed and presented. In addition, the cultural uplift agenda of the 1920s’ university-based stations, the progressive mission that underlay the birth of NPR, and the counter-cultural radio form of the 1960s are all also apparent to different degrees in the way that the alternativeness of the music is articulated within the stations and on air. The music itself, the programming practices, and the presentation styles, then, operate as a ‘homology’ which, paraphrasing Dick Hebdige paraphrasing Levis-Straus, we can understand as the ‘symbolic fit’ between production values, subjective experience, and musical forms (Hebdige 1979: 113). These become apparent if we explore the way that college radio deals with genre styles of indie rock, jazz, and world and folk.

In the 1980s, the association between college radio and certain forms of rock music became so strong that the homology was articulated in the term ‘college rock’. In a retrospective attempt to capture the trajectory of the term, All Music Guide presented it as a ‘confluence of new wave, post-punk, and early alternative rock’ with better selling bands with ‘thoughtful lyrics and socially conscious idealism’, ending in 1991 with the introduction of many of the bands into commercial station playlists after college rock staple Nirvana gained international commercial success (AMG 2007). Certainly, by 1987, the New York Times linked college stations with emergent forms of rock, and six years later presented college radio as key to the development of what would become known as grunge (Pareles 1987; Schoemer 1992).

The ordering of alternative rock codified the experimental forms of free form radio that developed in colleges in the early years of FM into a more organised, and probably more widely palatable, radio format, just as the introduction of station programmers on commercial FM stations had built its elements into the AOR (Adult Orientated Rock) format (Neer 2001). Keith Negus suggests that the growth of interest in college radio by record companies during the late 1980s moved the stations away from the domain of enthusiasts and a maverick image (Negus 1992: 103). The codification of college radio as a format is most apparent in the development of CMJ as a taste leader amongst station staff. Key to the sense of rock music’s alternativeness in the accounts is a merged sense that the music is exciting, substantial, authentic and occasionally experimental, set against a view of music programming on commercial radio as indifferent, lightweight, manufactured and formulaic.

By contrast, jazz programming has tended to construct a sense of alternativeness by following a pattern set within a paradigm established by academic critics constructing jazz as a tradition of great artists, whose performances they actively disassociate from the commercial music industry in which they were created (Ulanov 1952; Stearns 1956; Williams 1959). In doing so, they remade jazz as ‘America’s classical music’. Jazz programming, and presentation on the jazz shows that developed at NPR and college radio stations from the mid-1970s, reflected the ideas of a historical canon and the discographic detail found in the critics’ journalism and books. In particular, the programmes gave little attention to the new forms of music which developed out of the black arts movement, and the retelling of jazz history by black cultural critics (Jones 1966; see Looker 2004).

Jazz programmes were often the cornerstone of college radio’s specialist shows, most often found in the evenings or at weekends, and presented by knowledgeable station staff with large record collections of their own. These programmes presented jazz’s alternativeness as ‘substance’ in contrast to the ‘lightweight’ of other popular music. Most significant was the idea of a mainstream jazz as a tradition which had to be learnt, and into which individual artists had to be placed (Gennari 2006: 207 to 251). It allowed for the idea of a peripheral avant garde, but favoured a textbook rendition of the music’s past. More recently, jazz’s tradition has been recontextualised by the
adoption of the ideas of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who have articulated the music’s development within African American culture (Ellison 1964; Murray 1976; Ellison and Murray 2000). These perspectives have been influential within jazz education, on musician and educator Wynton Marsalis (via cultural critic Stanley Crouch), and on wider notions of jazz as a concert, or repertory music. This has placed jazz, along with classical music, comfortably as part of a discourse of cultural uplift, and it is in this context that it is most often programmed and presented on college radio.

Folk music, and particularly its reinterpretation by Bob Dylan, was an important element in the 1960s counter-cultural movement which lay at the heart of what Keith has characterised as ‘underground radio’(Keith 1997). The association of folk forms with progressive politics has a long history (see Denisoff 1971; Eyerman and Jamison 1998), where folk is asserted as possessing an authenticity that is contrasted with the manufactured nature of mainstream popular music. From the 1970s onwards, a similar association, rooted in the activities of field musicology and song collecting, built around the vernacular forms of other peoples. Marketed as ‘world music’, it connects to the idea that localised music from different parts of the world is more authentic than the international repertoire that is played on stations with for-profit owners (Taylor 1997). World music works in radio programming terms as ‘exotica’ against the ‘everyday’ of American life, and is presented as part of cultural uplift in widening personal horizons beyond the limitations of North America. It is significant that such programmes hardly ever include music from the homelands of prominent minority groups within the US, and reggae, for instance, is preferred over contemporary US black music forms.

I want to argue, then, that a sense of an alternative music culture is built up out of a series of discursive practices around music, which are then reinforced in the programming and presentation of the music on air through remnants of the ideas of cultural uplift, progressive politics, and counter-culture that have pervaded not-for-profit radio in the US.

This is an extract from a longer paper on college radio in the USA which will be published soon in the Radio Journal

University-based radio stations have a long tradition in the USA, and a number of issues trelating to music programming in the twenty-first century are first found in the origins of this form of broadcasting. Some of the earliest radio stations established in the first half of the 1920s were based at universities or initiated by faculty staff, at a time when only 7% of radio broadcasts came from profit-maximising stations (Dimmick 1986), and by 1923 the 72 university stations constituted a major category of broadcaster (Barnouw 1966: 4). State universities were particularly prominent among these early broadcasters, and their leaders tended to share a view that radio was an important part of a wider progressive agenda which aimed (in the terminology of the time) at cultural ‘uplift’. In this they juxtaposed their intentions to utilise the new medium for broader social purposes against those of for-profit broadcasters, who aimed to maximise audience size as a means to attract programme sponsors. The debate is captured in a contemporary commentary, in which a professor of political science at The University of Chicago, Jerome Kerwin, argues that profit maximisation was incompatible with educational programming because, “in order to secure the largest audiences which the advertisers want and will pay for, it is necessary to stage the least elevating types of programme” (cited in Smulyan 1994: 135). Derek Vaillant’s study of the Wisconsin state station WHA in the 1920s indicates that music was an important part of a culturally ‘uplifting’ programming mix. Performances of classical music by the university’s orchestra were central to an attempt to produce music programming noticeably different from what WHA’s first broadcast chief referred to as the “jazz and other worthless material” broadcast by for-profit stations (quoted in Vaillant 2002: 64).

Susan Smulyan (1994) has characterised the period in radio history from 1920 to 1934 as a struggle between organisations representing, on the one hand, the primacy of social objectives versus those in pursuit of profit; a struggle in which ‘commercialization’ eventually won out. The progressive agenda of the early university stations had difficulties surviving in an environment in which federal policy tended towards a ‘corporate liberalism’ that privileged certain forms of ownership, versions of intellectual property rights and the commodification of audiences that benefited for-profit corporate oligopolies (Streeter 1996). Regulatory changes in 1927, and the policies of the Federal radio Commission in particular, made it increasingly difficult for such stations to survive against growing competition from profit-maximising stations funded by sponsorship. In the five years to 1926, 177 licences were issued to educational stations; only 12 were issued in the five years from 1927, and only 38 of the 202 stations licensed in the fifteen years since 1921 were still running in 1936 (Smulyan 1994: 130).

While the historical record of the politics of regulation bears out Smulyan’s analysis, there are another set of dimensions to the issue which were as important for the early college radio stations as they are eighty years later. State universities and land grant colleges seemed to be most successful in keeping their licences, perhaps because of their collective commitment to a progressive mission of education, cultural ‘uplift’, and economic and technological development, and the modernist aspirations of senior staff. However, the managers of these stations still struggled with questions about the processes involved in programming decisions, the relationships between the programming in the university-based stations and that of other broadcasters, and of the relationships between the broadcasters and the communities who could listen to the station. Vaillant’s study of the operation of WHA in the 1920s sets the desires of the station’s staff to be part of a project to “rejuvenate and reform rural culture through educational programmes and uplift” against the reception of the programming amongst Wisconsin’s rural communities (2002: 84). So, while some of WHA’s classical music broadcasts were clearly valued by some listeners, others argued for music which was rooted far more deeply in the cultural values of the rural community.

These examples of debates within organisations pursuing social broadcasting aims (offered by Smulyan), and of programmers trying to resolve the friction between audience expectations and their own objectives (offered by Vaillant), are indicative of the wider, century-long, history of radio broadcasting as an institutional form within the US. The progressive mission of some early broadcasters did survive the initial decline of the university stations, and can be understood to have developed within the campaigns of the broadcast reform movement of the 1930s, and in the establishment of National Public Radio (NPR) in 1967 (Engelman 1996; Mitchell 2005).

However, the post-war transformation of the dominant form of radio, from mixed programming to music radio, happened outside the university-based and public radio sectors, primarily in the commercial sectors. For Eric Rothenbuhler and Tom McCourt (2002) ‘radio redefines itself’ in the US in the fifteen years from 1947. This transformation is apparent in programming, the inter-relationships of stations, and the relationship between a station and its respective publics. For Rothenbuhler and McCourt, it is primarily a movement from a network era to a format era. The pre-war, centrally-devised, mixed-block programme broadcasting gives way to locally-devised, strip-structure programming, using a recorded music and news format but overlapped by a transitional period of diversity and experimentation.

By the point that the hegemonic network system had fully given way to a plethora of small independent stations making local decisions within strict conventions, diversity in programming had significantly declined, and the variety that did exist was organised within conventional formats aimed at specific audiences, mainly of teenagers, urban African-Americans and rural whites. The development of Top 40 programming structures (Rothenbuhler and McCourt 2004) was paralleled by the growth of black music format stations (George 1988; Barlow 1999) through to the 1960s. From these roots, a dominant form of AM pop radio developed, built around personality DJs and a fast rotation of a few records, selected on the basis of market information published in music and radio trade journals.

By 1960, then, a dominant music radio ‘mainstream’ had been established in the USA. Presentation became a highly conventional form, taking many of the mannerisms of black radio presenters, but codifying them into a youth-orientated ‘total station sound’, in which the single elements of personality and recorded music were less important than the overall identity of the station. The centralisation, and later the computerisation, of music programming became a central part of ensuring that the station sound predominated. Although as competition within music radio intensified new formats of music broadcasting were developed (Barnes 1988; Berland 1993), pop AM stations relied on well-worked-through formulas to hold market share. These formulas were only challenged in the late 1960s and early 1970s by stations operating on the FM band.

College radio, as distinct from university-based radio stations, developed in the 1960s, to some degree in parallel with FM radio as a technical method of transmission and as a style of music radio. Both the expanded college stations and the for-profit stations explored new forms of presentation and music programming aimed at a rising, young and increasingly wealthy middle class population that saw itself as part of a music-centric counterculture (Eyerman and Jamison 1998: 106 to 139). This expansion in music radio took advantage of the opportunity to transmit on the underused VHF band, and of regulatory changes which discouraged simultaneous AM and FM broadcasting.

Transmission of sound by modulating the frequency of the radio wave, rather than its amplitude, had been established by RCA as early as 1935, but the technical challenges of broadcasting pictures, the second world war, and regulatory changes over the frequencies of VHF transmission standards meant that a settled system was not in place until it was used to send stereo signals as part of the development of domestic high-fidelity audio playback systems (Shingler and Wieringa 1998: 7 to 10). The retarded social application of FM radio and the relatively high cost of FM receivers created an underused broadcast space that, in contrast to the highly formatted AM broadcasters, allowed experimentation with music programming and presentation that was later to be called freeform radio. In Steven Van Zandt’s mythologizing words, the form of broadcasting that developed as FM in the US was ‘quieter, even though it was louder. Peaceful, while it spoke of revolution. Slower, while we evolved at an inconceivably rapid pace’ (2001: viii). The presenters, and their choices of music, were actively constructed as offering an alternative to AM pop radio where, in the contemporary critique from freeform radio pioneer Tom Donahue, ‘the disc jockeys have become robots performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound’ (1967: 2).

These freeforms of music radio returned the control of music selection to the programme presenter, who adopted an antithetical style to AM pop radio, purposely juxtaposing music of very different styles; playing lengthy album tracks rather than high-rotation singles; talking slowly for long periods, or not at all; never interrupting a music track and maybe even leaving pregnant pauses (Keith 1997; Neer 2001). The presentation styles were of particular appeal to college students, who adopted many of the practices in their new low-power campus stations.

By contrast, the main thrust of forms of cultural uplift programming, which had motivated the university-based broadcasters of half a century before, was focused on the development of a national public radio system. In the early 1970s, the newly formed NPR distributed classical music concerts for broadcast by public stations, but they did little to engage with a wider issue of diversity of music (McCourt 1999). However, the trajectories of anti-format broadcasting, alternative provision and cultural uplift were to play out in music culture and college radio over the next-thirty five years, through the idea of alternative music cultures.