Making jazz music - The coproduction of the aesthetic experience in a jazz-club

The jazz-club is a scene of musical performance which physically gathers listeners and musicians who develop collective aesthetic experiences. As such, it is a good subject to study ways of making jazz music. In its ordinary evenings one can hear and see a set of elements essential to some experiences that music analysis usually does not take into account, as it is blinded by the false transparency of the record or the score. These experiences lead to focus one's observation on how these elements articulate together whilst they "use" each other as well as the sounds produced and the stage setup. So that the "music" that happens during these evenings is strictly coextensive with the modalities of these connections. In this article we first sketch the paradigm which is used by amateurs to organise jazz-club evenings. Concurrently, we place it within the local jazz social configuration. We then describe the evenings' course of actions from two viewpoints: we analyse the kind of relations occurring between listeners, musicians and jazz masters as they are organized by the use of the stage form; we examine the division of aesthetic work and how it allows actors to elaborate their aesthetic experience.