Forbidden triads and Creative Success in Jazz: The Miles Davis Factor

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that forbidden triads, a specific social network structure, significantly predict success in jazz recordings, with Miles Davis's sessions exemplifying this effect.

Contribution

It reveals the importance of forbidden triads in creative success and highlights their role in jazz, especially in Miles Davis's work, using comprehensive historical data.

Findings

Forbidden triads are more common than expected in jazz collaborations.

Density of forbidden triads correlates with higher recording success.

Miles Davis's sessions uniquely benefited from forbidden triads.

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of forbidden triads - open triads with high-weight edges - in predicting success in creative fields. Forbidden triads had been treated as a residual category beyond closed and open triads, yet I argue that these structures provide opportunities to combine socially evolved styles in new ways. Using data on the entire history of recorded jazz from 1896 to 2010, I show that observed collaborations have tolerated the openness of high weight triads more than expected, observed jazz sessions had more forbidden triads than expected, and the density of forbidden triads contributed to the success of recording sessions, measured by the number of record releases of session material. The article also shows that the sessions of Miles Davis had received an especially high boost from forbidden triads.