Experiences of Belonging and Exclusion in the Production and Reception of Some Contemporary South African Jazz: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Abstract

Focussing on music as a locus of power relations, this article explores how individuals’ musical experiences may be discursively mediated. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) it specifies some of the ways in which a small sample of interviewed jazz musicians and audience members active on the jazz scenes of mid 1990s and early 2000s Durban and Johannesburg used aspects of their musical experiences to affirm or contest aspects of their membership within larger social groupings defined by generation, language identity, and gender. At an epistemological and theoretical level the article tentatively proposes that combining IPA and CDA may be a productive way to explore – in some empirical detail – how larger societal dynamics find expression at a unitary individual level of musical experience.