This paper expands on Peterson’s process model for
historical
changes in jazz. Peterson suggests that, given certain circumstances,
musical genres migrate from ‘low-brow’ to ‘high-brow’.I test this
proposition for jazz by investigating whether bandleaders were
associated through the same sidemen (‘sidemenoverlap’) across time, and
the underlying logics leading to these overlaps. I confirm Peterson’s
model to the extent that sidemen overlap shifts from a ‘commercial’
logic to a ‘style-based’ logic. From1930to1949, sidemen overlap between
bandleaders is mainly predicted by recording session.
