Dinner Jazz: Consumption, Improvisation, and the Politics of Listening

ABSTRACT It’s rare to find a high-end restaurant in North America that doesn’t have jazz music on the menu. As the acoustic counterpart to your braised leg of lamb and Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, jazz music signals a level cultural refinement that befits culinary sophistication. Nor is the relationship between jazz and fine dining a unidirectional appropriation: from jazz album covers featuring bottles of fine wine, to the numerous beloved “club date” live albums, to the photography of artists like Herman Leonard, jazz musicians and other stakeholders have also developed the link between jazz and haute cuisine over many decades. Certainly, the jazz-dining connection might be summarily dismissed as a simple matter of historical coincidence. Nevertheless, the historical connection between the two practices subtends an intriguing analogy: both the practices of playing jazz music and dining out are improvisatory. Dining out therefore represents a fascinating juxtaposition of modes of improvisation: one – jazz music – potentially politically radical; the other – dining – highly pleasurable, but altogether mundane, elitist, and ostensibly apolitical. This paper examines the juncture of jazz and the restaurant “servicescape,” with a view to unpacking the politics of dining, the limits of politicized improvised musical practice, and the responsibilities of the listener.