Participating actively in an artistic world you want to study both helps and hinders your work. If you understand the people you want to study when they talk about their work, you already know what it might take an outsider months to learn. In our participant observation study of the world of jazz musicians, we discovered some common problematic situations for researchers who are themselves practitioners: embarrassment, crippling prejudice, mutual exploration, and making tacit knowledge explicit. You can frame questions in a way they understand easily, identify things you don’t understand (which will become, as you investigate them, the growing points of your study), and participate yourself in the artistic activities you want to observe and write about.