Follow or Surpass? Collaboration, Sound, and the Recognition of Influence in Lineages of Jazz Trumpet Players
Abstract
Cultural fields cohere not only horizontally, through collaboration, but also vertically, through lineages of artistic influence. Considerable attention has been devoted to collaboration networks in various fields of creative production; however, we know less about the structure of artistic influence that is nevertheless key to individual artistic development and the evolution of genres. We examine the structure of such an influence network in a genealogy of 52 prominent jazz trumpet players, combining musicians’ discographies, demographic characteristics, geographical locations, and audio analysis of more than 16,000 recordings with exponential random graph models. Direct collaboration, overlap in collaborators, and sonic context similarity, that is, the similarity of the recordings on which players appear, are each associated with an ascribed influence tie, net of the others. Not surprisingly, ascribed ties connect musicians whose recordings share a similar sonic context, but musicians also tend to collaborate with their influences and share collaborators with them. However, players whose recordings share a sonic context and who move in the same circle of collaborators can be thought of as peers or rivals, rather than as influences of each other, because lineage implies a succession predicated on difference as much as on continuity. Taken together, our findings suggest that a field’s account of its own evolution is neither a record of who played together nor a map of shared sonic contexts, but a selective ordering that requires both. While our data do not permit a causal account, our aim is to provide a rich and varied methodological strategy and descriptive as well as inferential tools to understand the yet understudied vertical integration of cultural fields through influence ties.