Community Structure in Jazz

TL;DR

The paper analyzes jazz musician collaborations as complex networks by constructing musician-level and band-level representations. It applies edge-betweenness based community detection to uncover topology-driven social structure, finding racially segregated musician communities and geography-driven band communities that reflect historical jazz dynamics. The results show high clustering, assortative mixing in the musician network, a stretched-exponential degree distribution in the bands network, and a heavy-tailed community-size distribution comparable to contemporary email networks, highlighting the universality of certain network patterns. Overall, the study demonstrates that simple collaboration rules embedded in these networks capture meaningful social and geographic organization within the jazz ecosystem.

Abstract

Using a database of jazz recordings we study the collaboration network of jazz musicians. We define the network at two different levels. First we study the collaboration network between individuals, where two musicians are connected if they have played in the same band. Then we consider the collaboration between bands, where two bands are connected if they have a musician in common. The community structure analysis reveals that these constructions capture essential ingredients of the social interactions between jazz musicians. We observe correlations between recording locations, racial segregation and the community structure. A quantitative analysis of the community size distribution reveals a surprising similarity with an e-mail based social network recently studied.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Distribution of musicians per band. The horizontal axis corresponds to the number of musicians that have played in a given band, while the vertical axis presents the fraction of bands with the given number of musicians. The inset shows the names of the five bands that include the largest number of musicians.
• Figure 2: Cumulative degree distribution $P(k)$ for the jazz musicians network (a) and the jazz bands network (b).
• Figure 3: Average degree $k_{nn}$ of nearest neighbors of vertices with degree $k$ (full circles) and clustering coefficient $C_k$ (full triangles) vs. $k$ for the musicians network (a), and the bands network (b). The dashed lines are guides to the eye.
• Figure 4: Community structure of the jazz musicians network. The root of the tree, in the middle of the figure, is indicated with the color blue. The musicians with $k>170$ are indicated with green.
• Figure 5: Communities in the jazz bands network. The arrow indicates the root of the tree. The different colors correspond to cities where a band has recorded: New York (blue), Chicago (red), both in New York and Chicago (green) and other cities (yellow).