There are over 1000000 jazz recordings, yet just a couple of hundred tunes were recorded again and again. Why did a minority of songs develop into jazz criteria? Why do a little songs--and no longer others--get rerecorded by means of many musicians? Shaping Jazz solutions this question and extra, exploring the underappreciated but the most important roles performed by way of preliminary construction and markets--in specific, agencies and geography--in the improvement of early twentieth-century jazz.

Damon Phillips considers why areas like ny performed extra very important roles as engines of diffusion than because the assets of criteria. He demonstrates why and whilst sure geographical references in track and crew titles have been thought of greater. He additionally explains why a spot like Berlin, which produced jazz abundantly from the Nineteen Twenties to early Nineteen Thirties, is now on jazz's ancient sidelines. Phillips indicates the major affects of organisations within the recording undefined, together with how list businesses and their executives affected what tune was once recorded, and why significant businesses might rerelease recordings less than creative pseudonyms. He exhibits how a recording's attraction used to be regarding the narrative round its construction, and the way the identities of its enterprise and musicians encouraged the tune's long-run popularity.

Applying attention-grabbing principles approximately marketplace emergence to a music's commercialization, Shaping Jazz bargains a different examine the origins of a groundbreaking artwork form.