Martin Jackson and The Melbourne Jazz Cooperative; how they influenced the Melbourne modern jazz scene.

This thesis primarily investigates the Melbourne Jazz Cooperative (MJC) from the years 1982 to 1993. However, it begins by documenting the history of Martin Jackson, founder and chairman of the MJC, and ends with the history of the MJC from 1982 to 1993. This thesis presents a case study of how an individual functions in a modern arts organization and describes how the individual navigates, through interaction with funding bodies and artists, the beneficial outcomes that such organisations can provide and the problems they face in contemporary Australia. The study argues that acknowledging the benefits of the arts to society and of arts organizations themselves is more necessary than ever in contemporary Australia where public perception of the arts is conflicted and misunderstood and funding support for the arts is highly unstable. The thesis argues through the case study example, that the MJC made curatorial descisions that provided support and opportunities for Australian jazz musicians to meet each other, to meet international artists, and also how it provided avenues for cultural transmission and exchange that enabled an even greater number and range of performances for these musicians. The research component of the thesis employed unstructured interviews with Martin Jackson, along with historical method corresponding to Bruno Nettl’s ‘fifth stage’ of ethnomusicology (Nettl 2005). This research reveals, for example, that Martin Jackson had to sacrifice his own musical development and artistic career to fulfill specialized roles in the MJC because there was no funding available for expert assistance. This thesis concludes that, in order to fully benefit artists and the community at large, arts organizations must be supported by expertise of specialists in the fields of Arts Administration. Without this support, the artists themselves must contribute too much of their time to administrative work at the expense of their art.