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One of the ubiquitous trends in social behavior is the formation of comprehensive systems of interaction known as communities. Everywhere in the world and throughout man's existence on earth, the formation of communities has been evident, from the primitive tribe to the contemporary nation-state. Among the exciting developments within the more complex communities of mankind, such as cities and nations, is the emergence of subcommunity forms which both complement and contest the arrangements of the larger society. Status communities and ethnic communities of many sorts belong among the contemporary sub-communities. It is instructive to apply this concept of sub-community formation to areas of behavior such as the worlds of art and jazz, when that behavior can be shown to approach closure and completeness with respect to a distinctive way of life. This paper deals with two major tasks: (1) the development of a special theory of the jazz community as an unique form of status community, and (2) a judgment as to the validity of referring to the social world of the jazz musician as a community. It should be mentioned that while this formulation is conceived in terms of the jazz subculture, it also has widespread application elsewhere in the area of social deviance. Since the concept of status group has its roots in the general theory of community, we shall briefly outline that concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study centered around the following two research interests: (1) What is the position of the jazz musician in the larger society? (2) To what extent do jazz musicians tend to form into communities of their own? After having developed a theory of the jazz community, six hypotheses were derived and tested by means of an ex-post-facto study design. It was predicted that jazz musicians would rank lower than commercial musicians on the major social dimensions of class, status, and power in the wider community and higher than commercial musicians on these same dimensions within the jazz community. In general, this study confirmed these hypotheses on a single population of jazz and commercial musicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]