Making the Scene Contemporary Ne York City Big Band Jazz [Paperback]

The received wisdom of popular jazz history is that the era of the big band was the 1930s and '40s, when swing was at its height. But as practicing jazz musicians know, even though big bands lost the spotlight once the bebop era began, they never really disappeared.Making the Scenechallenges conventional jazz historiography by demonstrating the vital role of big bands in the ongoing development of jazz. Alex Stewart describes how jazz musicians have found big bands valuable. He explores the rich rehearsal band scene in New York and the rise of repertory orchestras.Making the Scenecombines historical research, ethnography, and participant observation with musical analysis, ethnic studies, and gender theory, dismantling stereotypical views of the big band.

Alex Stewart,a former freelance jazz musician, is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Vermont.

Alex Stewart's excellent book tackles a subject which has been hidden in plain sight: the central importance of the big band, not as dead artifact of the Swing Era, but as a seminal and nurturing force through the entire history of jazz down to our own time. Through an attractive blend of ethnographic participant-observation, historiography, and formal analysis, Stewart puts the big band at the center of jazz, arguing for its indispensability as a locus of instrumental training and rehearsal, composition, legitimation, and professional networking. Informed and enriched by his own experience as a performer in those worlds as well by his ethnomusicological training, Stewart brings a multi-angled perspective to processes of music-making and career-building that are not often illuminated in scholarly or journalistic literature. John Gennari, author of Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

A superb book, combining first-class scholarship with the insights of a musician who was there. Bill Kirchner, jazz musician, historian, producer

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