Cut, Carved, and Served: Competitive Jamming in the 1930s and 1940s

This essay examines the role of competition in both private and publicly‐staged jam sessions of the 1930s and 1940s. The historiographic materials and methods of inquiry into this fraught period in American history present challenges for the modern scholar of the jam session. First and foremost, this history must be scrupulously contextualized. The literature on midcentury jam sessions is filled with overstated images of primitive, aggressive, machismo, and/or antagonistic cutting sessions. In fact, jam sessions of the 1930s and 1940s were foremost productive sites of collaboration and cooperation. It is my argument that rather than frustrating this cooperative environment, competition paradoxically contributed to it. Among its other functions, competition in bebop jam sessions served the communal goal of raising the level of musicianship to be applied within the commercial sphere. Through a sort of collaborative‐competitive training, musicians sought to recuperate ownership over their artistic product within the African American and jazz communities. However, while competition in private, “after‐hours” jam sessions served the complementary interests of the individual musicians and their communities, publicly‐staged cutting contests (of the 1940s and early 1950s in particular) served a racist mainstream public that was comforted by an image of intra‐racial conflict and disenfranchisement among an increasingly unified and empowered sector of society.