Four Rivers: Archiving Loft Jazz in Postindustrial Pittsburgh, Bibliography
This is a list of sources to accompany the presentation “Four Rivers: Archiving Loft Jazz in Postindustrial Pittsburgh” for the 2026 meetings of the American Studies Association and the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Abstract:
The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for American Music has spent the last five years accumulating collections of musicians from New York’s 1970s loft jazz scene, under the direction of Michael Heller. In this presentation, I read this pivot in archival practice in the context of Pittsburgh’s post-industrial shift to a care economy driven by “meds and eds.” First, I contend that the enmeshment of post-war jazz with Pittsburgh’s memory of industrial prosperity allows today’s archivists to treat improvisation as a tool for urban placemaking, positioning themselves as care workers. Second, I trace the web of living practices surrounding the collection of loft saxophonist Sam Rivers, which was processed in 2024. Through interviews with archivists, Rivers’ musical collaborators, and local musicians, I illustrate how information circulates or fails to circulate between university jazz archives and creative music scenes just beyond their walls. These accounts lay bare the challenges faced by archivists of improvised music: memorials to jazz may create a stronger sense of emplaced historicity in a city, while serving as cultural accomplice to urban redevelopment.
Bibliography:
Caplan, Lee. “The Rise of the Jazz Studies Movement: Institutional Politics and the Legacies of Bill Dixon and David Baker.” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education (Los Angeles, CA) 48, no. 1 (2026): 40–61.
Dwyer, Michael D. Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2025.
Hall, Stuart. “Constituting an Archive.” In Third Text54 (2001): 89–92.
Harper, Colter. Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood. 1st ed. University Press of Mississippi, 2024.
Heller, Michael C. Loft Jazz : Improvising New York in the 1970s. University of California Press, 2016.
Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pickover, Graeme Reid, Razia Saleh, and Jane Taylor, eds., Refiguring the Archive. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002: 19-27.
Vitale, Patrick. Nuclear Suburbs : Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Winant, Gabriel. The next Shift : The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Harvard University Press, 2021.
