Jazzvertising: Music, Marketing, and Meaning

• Main Author: Laver, Mark
• Other Authors: Kippen, James R.
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: ethnomusicology; jazz studies; advertising; media studies; 0413
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/31826

This dissertation examines jazz from the perspective of advertisers and marketers that have used the music with a view to unraveling the complicated web of cultural meanings and values that attend to jazz in the 21st century. Advertising is a critically important and profoundly complex medium for the mass dissemination of music and musical meaning. Advertisers and marketers therefore offer crucial perspectives on the construction, reification, and circulation of jazz meanings and discourses. At the same time, I argue that historically jazz has been a cultural practice that is uniquely situated on the cusp of the binarized cultural categories of “high art” and “popular/commercial”. With that in mind, I suggest that jazz offers an invaluable lens through which to examine the complex and often contradictory culture of consumption upon which North American capitalism is predicated. In a broad sense, then, I examine the confluence of jazz, consumption, and capitalism as they are articulated through the medium of advertising. I contextualize my analysis with a short history of music in advertising and a discussion of jazz’s embeddedness in capitalism and the North American culture of consumption. The core of the dissertation consists of three detailed case studies: an analysis of jazz and luxury in a 2003 Chrysler Canada campaign for the high-end cars Sebring and 300M, featuring Diana Krall; a discussion of the function of jazz in the spectacularization of cultural diversity and individual agency in the television campaign for a 2006 Diet Pepsi product called “Jazz”; and an examination of corporate amorality in the Toronto Dominion Bank’s sponsorship of jazz festivals in Canada. Finally, I consider how both communities and individuals have been subjectively constituted and/or called into being by consumption and, conversely, how they have used the convergence of jazz and consumption to “talk back” to capitalism.