National Endowment for the Arts Releases Further Details of Jazz Musicians Study

Washington, DC - The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has released further details of its extensive survey of jazz musicians titled, “Changing the Beat: A Study of the Worklife of Jazz Musicians." The report contains extensive data from about 2,700 jazz musicians located in New York, Detroit, San Francisco and New Orleans. The survey was designed to provide an understanding of the jazz environment in each of the cities involved and to provide a detailed needs assessment from jazz artists. An executive summary of the report was released last January.

http://www.arts.gov/pub/JazzExecSummary.pdf

“We hope this body of information will help those who appreciate and support jazz music better understand the needs of the artists who produce this uniquely American art form, which is central to America's cultural legacy," said Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

To compensate for the difficulties involved in identifying jazz musicians, survey targets were chosen from a random sampling of American Federation of Musicians members (AFM) and by Respondent-Driven-Sampling (RDS), an iterated chain-referral method that included both union and non-union musicians.

Volume II of the report includes demographic information of the AFM respondents-such as age, gender, marital status, and education level-in addition to employment, benefits and income-related findings. Respondents also provided details of their worklife such as touring frequency, copyright ownership, and recording history.

http://www.arts.gov/pub/JazzII.pdf

Volume III provides similar information about the RDS group. Both volumes also include an overview of the jazz scenes in the cities studied, as well as a breakdown of statistics by city.

http://www.arts.gov/pub/JazzIII.pdf

Changing the Beat was conducted by the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia University Teachers College under a cooperative agreement with the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Study Center. The survey was supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Grammy Foundation, American Federation of Musicians, American Federation of Musicians Local 802, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

For more information, contact the NEA Office of Communications at 202-682-5570 or visit the NEA Web site at www.arts.gov.