Hacking Viral Jazz’s Gendered Hierarchies

Despite insights gained from studies of algorithmic cultures, the extent to which online platforms impact artistic practice and career potential in jazz music has been little examined. This study expands recent knowledge in relation to the affordances of online platforms for jazz musicians, drawing attention to jazz’s gendered dimensions within networked music sites. It examines how jazz musicians adapt to online ecosystems, variably retaining established gendered performance conventions yet updating them to attract new audiences. A critical perspective on current modes of music performance and promotion within jazz genre, recently coined as “viral jazz,” is spotlighted as the context within which Korean American jazz saxophonist Grace Kelly has developed her virally attuned polygeneric jazz aesthetics. Through a multi-faceted study of her prolific performances and promotional strategies online, the study reveals how combined expertise of “algotorial” curation systems with acquired wisdom regarding pervasive cultural and gendered ideologies stimulates innovative promotional and performance contexts for Kelly as a virtuosic female multi-instrumentalist. Yet these new contexts contain residues of entrenched hierarchical gendered performance expectations and ideological evaluative contexts. Given the continued power of these historically prominent categories, online platforms are revealed as failing to fully upend the hyper-masculinity and male domination promoted by pre-digital jazz institutions. Nevertheless, they afford critical exposure for especially entrepreneurial and polygeneric jazz musicians such as Kelly and jazz-oriented vocalist and composer Laufey, two of the few twenty-first century jazz musicians to have broken the glass ceiling in both online and live music performance contexts.