Dobson, 2010.pdf - University of Sheffield

250 Psychology of Music 39(2)
There’s definitely … a camaraderie thing about, you know, I think especially the older generation, it
was really, you had to get really … yeah, I mean there’s a ‘hard’ thing about it, you know, you’ve got to
drink people under the table and all that stuff. And I think there’s a certain kudos of being able to play
when you’re pissed, and stuff like that, which is a completely pointless skill, but I think it’s something,
you know, older musicians are always astounding me with tales of when so and so had 19 pints and
could still play. Which doesn’t impress me much, but it obviously impressed them. (J6)
J6 depicts an older generation of players for whom work-related drinking provides a vehicle for
creating a sense of shared history based on notions of deviance, and a culture in which professional
success is characterized more by on-the-job drinking ‘achievements’ than musical accomplishment.
J6 distances himself from this generation’s behaviour (‘completely pointless skill’,
‘doesn’t impress me’), although the way he initially attributes musicians’ alcohol consumption
to ‘camaraderie’ suggests that he still recognizes the role of drinking in professional socializing,
despite believing that his generation does not engage in these behaviours to such excess.
Two jazz musicians believed that a change in attitudes towards alcohol consumption was
not just generational but also societal: even the musicians who had previously conformed to the
stereotype of the heavy-drinking jazz musician had now changed their behaviour:
It’s funny, all the musicians I know now are fairly clean-living – it’s quite boring [laughs].... A lot of
musicians who were alcoholics, or who were like really, like in a bad way have kind of pulled themselves
out of it somehow, and are on the straight and narrow. And it’s really quite boring! [laughs] It’s
like that’s not jazz! (J9)
The laughter punctuating each occasion when J9 proclaims ‘it’s quite boring’ could be read as
signalling a degree of discomfort with this statement. Presumably she would not wish for her
colleagues to return to alcoholism, but her depiction of the new culture as ‘not jazz’ suggests a
reminiscence for a time when jazz musicians’ drinking habits did in some way define them as a
coherent professional and social group, and when a sense of ‘jazz’ identity may have been more
tangible (cf. MacDonald & Wilson, 2006, p. 75). J9 talked at another point in the interview of
her belief that jazz in Britain was ‘on the margins of existence’, especially in comparison to classical
music, which was ‘more embedded in society’. A tendency among freelance musicians to
feel alienated from the rest of society was highlighted earlier, and this is perhaps exacerbated for
jazz musicians, whose genre arguably receives less recognition in mainstream culture. Taking
this perspective, without deviant drinking cultures, jazz is depicted as a genre that is both
under-recognized and lacking in distinctiveness: of salience for an art form with the potential
to be regarded (and presented) by the media as ‘esoteric’ (Byrnes, 2007).
Performance-related drinking: Alcohol consumption as a consequence of pressure
or boredom
It was notable that only one string player (S8) made a distinction between the drinking behaviours
of an old and a new generation of musicians. Despite making this delineation he still
seemed resigned to the inevitability of a culture of heavy drinking continuing within the classical
music community. He qualified the drinking habits of classical performers by describing
the pressure orchestral musicians are constantly under, especially in terms of the requirement
to consistently produce accurate performances (cf. Dobson, 2010). The majority of string players
who discussed post-concert drinking attributed it to a need for a release from the pressure
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