Bebop and the Recording Industry: The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered
This was a research article written by Scott DeVeaux and published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I came across it in The Thelonious Monk Reader, and the topic is fascinating: a musicians union—the AFM—asked its members not to record music until they got a better cut of revenue from recording companies (“By making recordings which could be used in place of live performances on radio and in clubs, [. . .] union members were putting themselves out of work.”) The significance, typically described, was that we listeners today lost out on three years of seminal jazz, including recordings that could have been made by Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and a handful of big band leaders who were starting to experiment with bebop.
DeVeaux’s article is a bit of a let-down, in a sense, because he’s “reconsidering” that traditional dramatic view of the recording ban. It turns out the ban wasn’t as long as people think it was, bootlegs of club shows were made, and, in any case, formal recordings don’t capture what was really happening at Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown or the later downtown jazz clubs.
So the article is a great piece of historical research, and it ruins any chance to be up in arms about something people used to be up in arms about!
Lots of people though are still up in arms about something related. Record labels today are in the place musicians unions were then, trying to the control the supply of music or renegotiate the terms of its distribution.
The article, written in 1988, touches on these issues—a decade before Napster at that. It references a Supreme Court decision that the “control of performing artists over their own recordings” ended “at the time of sale”. And there’s this gem, hinting at my feeling that the recording industry isn’t worth saving:
And what of the idea that recording companies would, under normal circumstances, have documented this music [bebop]? In much of the writing on jazz there is the unspoken assumption that “documentation” is a virtually automatic process—the inevitable result of there being music worth recording. In reality, of course, the major recording companies were run by businessmen, who logically gave precedence to the tried and true over innovations by relative unknowns.
So there’s no guarantee this jazz would have been recorded. (Moreover, DeVeaux makes a should-be-obvious point: who was going to buy jazz records in 1942-1944 when the majority of American men were at war and the very materials needed to manufacture records were rationed, to the point that records were being melted down and re-pressed?) When the ban was lifted, it was new independent companies that came to the fore and recorded bebop while the big companies still churned out big-band records.
The same thing happens today, just at an accelerated pace. While big companies do everything they can to restrict access to recordings—they do want it out there but only on their terms—small companies and independent artists take advantage of changing technology to make a name for themselves. New artists have an almost zero chance of getting wealthy off their work and only a slightly better shot at making a short career out of it by touring. But if you look at the market forces, the supply of good music completely outstrips the ability of people to listen to it all. We have a century of recorded music to listen to!
Take a lesson from Monk, who, while he played at Minton’s, went home every night to live at his parents’ apartment. Musicians and their labels don’t have a right to compensation simply for playing music. The 20th century was a golden age, when supply, demand, and heavy-handedness intersected just right. But now great musicians can be discovered and shared at almost no cost and thus with little chance for making a living off it. As with Monk, it has to be a passion. You have to love music and playing it. And if you find a place to play and friends to play with, that’s what makes it worth it.
