Jazz Research Articles

Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul by Deanna Witkowski

Reviewed by: Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul by Deanna Witkowski Kim R. Harris Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul. By Deanna Witkowski. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press. 2021. 168 pp. $16.95. During a recent solo piano jazz concert, performer, composer, recording artist, and author Deanna Witkowski explained that she wrote Music for the Soul to encourage people to “listen to the tunes.” With this book on the life, music, and spirituality of Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981), Witkowski accomplishes her goal. Jazz enthusiasts reading the book will remember Williams in the context of her contributions and importance to virtually every period of jazz history during the twentieth century. Readers with interest in Catholic liturgy will understand Williams as a composer of sacred music, as well as a music minister and director for jazz Mass settings. These Masses include Mary Lou’s Mass, the first jazz Mass to be sung and prayed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City (February 18, 1975). African American Catholic readers, many of whom know her story in part, will come to know in greater depth Williams’s contemplative vision, conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, and her [End Page 74] place in Black Catholic history. Readers of the previous books in the People of God series, of which Music for the Soul is a part, will welcome Williams’s addition to the group of historic and contemporary heroes and heroes of faith. All who imbibe Witkowski’s lush musical descriptions will be drawn to “listen to the tunes.” As a musician, scholar, and adult convert to Catholicism, Witkowski has unique qualifications to author this text. Her connection to Williams includes working relationships with several of Williams’s musical colleagues, spiritual contemporaries, and former students. This deep association with Williams’s life, work, and community recently led to Witkowski’s relocation to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Williams’s hometown. Williams’s positive attitudes and actions, as well as her tenacity, hospitality, and generosity, shine through in the recounting of her care for jazz musicians, friends, and family members. The story of this jazz giant also includes encounters that for a time discouraged Williams from creating and performing the music she loved. Though Williams wrote of being sexually assaulted only in diaries, Witkowski briefly recalls these experiences, as well as other challenges, disappointments, and outright betrayals faced by a young and eventually seasoned female African American jazz musician, performing solo and with various bands “on the road.” Intertwined with accounts of her musical career. Witkowski weaves stories of Williams’s mystical experiences, devotion to Mary, Mother of Jesus, and her soul’s journey toward religious conversion. Readers will almost hear and see Williams practicing on the basement piano at Our Lady of Lourdes parish, quickly stopping to write down the “crazy arrangements” that came into her head when she went to the church to meditate and pray. Witkowski writes as someone who in Williams has found an unexpected conversation partner, “soul companion and lifelong mentor.” This book offers the intimate writing of a skilled musician, spirited person of faith, enthusiastic convert to Catholicism, and an expert in the jazz idiom. It should encourage readers to seek out material such as the audio recordings and videos of Williams available online. Additionally, documentaries, lectures, recordings, and performances by [End Page 75] musicians (such as Witkowski herself) are expanding knowledge of Williams’ legacy for those of us who are inspired to “listen to the tunes.” Kim R. Harris Loyola Marymount University Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop ed. by Stephen Cramer

Reviewed by: Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop ed. by Stephen Cramer Eric Plaks (bio) turn it up! music in poetry from jazz to hip-hop Stephen Cramer, ed. Sundog Poetry Center and Green Writers Press https://www.sundogpoetry.org/shop/p/turn-it-up-music-in-poetry-from-jazz-to-hip-hop-edited-by-stephen-cramer 400 pages; Print, $19.95 As I suspect is true of many readers of this anthology, compiled and edited by poet and University of Vermont professor Stephen Cramer, I approach Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop with more recognition of the names and sounds in the music world than in the world of poetry. Since I am a jazz performer and music enthusiast, there are very few musicians referenced in the anthology that I had to google, but almost every poet was a new discovery to me, with the exception of some extremely well-known figures (James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg). As such, I found reading Cramer’s three-part alphabetic-by-last-name anthology of gorgeous words by a vast array of mostly American poets on the topic of music to be an incredibly valuable and pleasurable experience. The title of part 1, “A Shower of Golden Eighth Notes: Poems about Jazz,” comes from a line in Lynda Hull’s poem “Lost Fugue for Chet,” one of four poems by Hull included in the anthology. Like so many of the poets and their musician subjects in this anthology, Hull lived a fascinating and tragically short life, dying in a car crash in 1994. In a sense she lived the crazy life of the stereotypical jazzer, running away from home and college after having been accepted to Princeton at age sixteen and moving from Chinatown to Chinatown in her teen years (it’s a long story worth checking out on its own). Like her subject, Baker, Hull had personal experience with heroin, and the “shower of golden eighth notes” is Hull’s unforgettable word picture of the fatal fall of Baker’s body from an Amsterdam balcony in 1988. While the alphabetical presentation of the poets would seem to be a natural randomizer in terms of thematic organization, themes do emerge. A world of jazz is being sketched out by thirty-five poets in alphabetical order, [End Page 150] each one a giant in his or her own right despite having only one to five poems included in this anthology. It is not the factual world of jazz history, but rather the impressions made on the poets, who are a very diverse bunch although still a bit more recent and a bit whiter on average than the jazz musicians themselves. There is to me a bit of the widespread romanticization of the trappings of jazz—the smoke, the scene, the heroin, Chet Baker and Chet Baker again—but poet after poet more than solves the conundrum of writing about music that Cramer references in his introduction, when he quotes an unknown author (Steve Martin? Frank Zappa? Thelonious Monk?) of the phrase “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” These poets make music when they write about music and, as in jazz, it’s all about the phrasing, and the phrasing is gorgeous. As I learned more about the poets, more direct connections to jazz emerged—for example, Jayne Cortez, the author of two extremely hip poems in the collection—“Rose Solitude” (dedicated to Duke Ellington and getting at his African roots) and “Tapping” (read this poem aloud and you will feel that it is tap-dancing about poetry and not the other way around)—is the mother of Denardo Coleman from her relationship with Ornette. Part 1 has poems about jazz legends such as Bird, Miles, Mingus, Chet (too many), Lena Horne, Trane (many, and many about his heroin and his rotting teeth), Monk (lots), Sonny Rollins, Billie, Dinah, Ella, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, J. J. Johnson, McCoy Tyner, Sidney Bechet, Art Tatum, and Sonny Criss—but also poems about lesser-known figures such as Indianapolis drummer Stan Gage (“Sonnets for Stan Gage...

Auto Jazz: Barney Wilen and the expanded soundtrack

This article offers a close analysis of the 1968 ‘soundtrack’ LP Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini (MPS) by the French saxophone player Barney Wilen. The theme of the LP is Italian racing driver Lorenzo Bandini’s death in a motor racing accident at the Grand Prix Automobile de Monaco in 1967. The article also discusses the visual dimension of the work; image materials were originally to have been presented with the recording to make Auto Jazz a multi-media experience. We tend to associate the late 1960s with revolutionary jazz, free jazz and experiments with jazz form and Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini is certainly ‘far out’. Jazz music at this time took on revolutionary tendencies both aurally and ideologically. However, it is not the politics of such countercultural acts that the recording expresses but rather (as a unique soundscape with elements of musique concrète) the emotional impact of a tragic real-life event through organized sound. The article examines the context for the LP: the development of ‘new wave’ cinema and use of jazz in this form, the concurrent revolution in modern jazz and contemporary experimental music and the form of ‘expanded cinema’ () that Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini was conceived to a contribution to.

Джаз в пространстве изобразительной культуры: вариации интермедиальных проекций

The relevance of the topic is determined by the intensive development of intermedial interactions, including those in the field of artistic culture. An analysis of these processes makes it possible to more fully characterize the content of not only artistic and aesthetic states but also broader sociocultural contexts. On these grounds, the article for the first time analyzes the spectrum of features of the stylistic and thematic influence of jazz on the creation of works in the space of visual culture, mainly in the visual arts. The variety of projections of the jazz theme in the visual and artistic spheres is largely due to the essential properties of jazz music: the improvisational nature of its creation, the spectacularism of musical images and the process of music reproduction itself, expressive rhythms and musical colors, strong emotionality, stylistic diversity and variability. The possibility of free self-expression in the process of creative improvisation has attracted artists of various trends and styles to jazz as a cultural theme. Understanding jazz as a kind of algorithm for creative activity has made it possible to visualize the content of many non-artistic sociocultural contexts that are relevant both for jazz musicians and for the creators of visual artifacts. Of particular importance is the ability of jazz to vividly convey the mood of real cultural and historical time, its atmosphere and collisions. These images are projected into the visual and pictorial environment perceived by artists and find various embodiments in subjective visual equivalents. Going beyond the self-sufficiency of musical and visual works, such projections expand the field of cultural designations and meanings that arise in the course of the intermedial interaction.

Contributors to This Issue

Other| June 01 2022 Contributors to This Issue Jazz and Culture (2022) 5 (1): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.5.1.11 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors to This Issue. Jazz and Culture 1 January 2022; 5 (1): 116–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.5.1.11 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJazz and Culture Search Advanced Search CISCO BRADLEY is associate professor of history at the Pratt Institute. He has published widely and is the author of two books, the most recent of which is Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021). He is the founder of the Free Jazz Oral History Project that has recorded more than 120 interviews since 2016. He is also the editor of www.jazzrightnow.com, where he has published hundreds of interviews and music reviews since 2013. His current research focuses on music and migration in the United States and Africa.RASHIDA K. BRAGGS is an associate professor in Africana studies and affiliate faculty in comparative literature at Williams College. Her book Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris investigates the migratory experiences of African American jazz musicians in 1946–1963 Paris. Her work has been published in such journals as the Black... You do not currently have access to this content.

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

Sonicated Blackness in Jazz Age Shanghai, 1924–1954: Jazz, Community, and the (In)visibility of African American Musicians in the Creation of the Soundtrack of Chinese Modernity

Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.

"Expert musical improvisations contain sequencing biases seen in language production": Correction to Beaty et al. (2021).

Reports an error in "Expert musical improvisations contain sequencing biases seen in language production" by Roger E. Beaty, Klaus Frieler, Martin Norgaard, Hannah M. Merseal, Maryellen C. MacDonald and Daniel J. Weiss (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022[Apr], Vol 151[4], 912-920). In the article, the supplemental materials link on the first page of the article should not appear, as the supplemental materials are available only via the Open Science Framework link that is noted at the end of the first paragraph of the Method section. The online version of this article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2022-07928-001.) Language production involves action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real time, placing a computational burden on working memory that leads to sequencing biases in production. Here we examine whether these biases extend beyond language to constrain one of the most complex human behaviors: music improvisation. Using a large corpus of improvised solos from eminent jazz musicians, we test for a production bias observed in language termed easy first-a tendency for more accessible sequences to occur at the beginning of a phrase, allowing incremental planning later in the same phrase. Our analysis shows consistent evidence of easy first in improvised music, with the beginning of musical phrases containing both more frequent and less complex sequences. The findings indicate that expert jazz musicians, known for spontaneous creative performance, reliably retrieve easily accessed melodic sequences before creating more complex sequences, suggesting that a domain-general sequencing system may support multiple forms of complex human behavior, from language production to music improvisation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

An Interview with Dr. Steven Lee: Scientist, Jazz Musician, Athlete, Wine Connoisseur, and Founder and Former Director of the Forensic Science Program at SJSU

An Interview with Dr. Steven Lee: Scientist, Jazz Musician, Athlete, Wine Connoisseur, and Founder and Former Director of the Forensic Science Program at SJSU

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

“Perspektif”: Sebuah Komposisi Jazz untuk Band Kombo

Purpose: In this modern jazz composition entitled “Perspektif”, composers were exploiting 3 major aspects of music, which is: rhythm, melody and harmony. The main purpose in this piece is to persuade other composers to not only think creatively but to maximize and research deeply all the basic aspects of music. Research Methods: Modern jazz music can’t be separated from the old school jazz and classical music. The key to be making innovative and creative composition was by learning the music from the previous era. Results and Discussion: By learning the history and research deeply into all the basic aspects of music, the composers can easily come up with something innovative and creative, which in this case is combining jazz music instruments with different kind of sports as non-musical instrument. However, not only it features the sound of the sport but also playing advanced rhythm and filling the space what the music instruments can’t do. Implication: In the process of making this composition from 3 major aspects in music, the composers got enlightened that all of each aspect has many different ways to be looked at or played at. Since the composers named this piece “Perspektif” with a format of 4 pieces jazz combo, 2 guys playing badminton, 1 guy playing basketball and the other 2 doing boxing.

A novel approach for optimal synthesis of path generator four-bar planar mechanism using improved harmony search algorithm

ABSTRACT Since last few decades, a lot of work has been done on the evolutionary techniques to solve the optimisation problems. With the time passes, these techniques were modified, and also new algorithms were introduced to improve the performance. These techniques had been used by many researchers in synthesis of mechanisms to get the optimum results with minimum design errors. Improved harmony search (IHS) algorithm is developed from harmony search technique by improvising the harmony in HS algorithm. This technique is inspired by searching the best state of harmony in musical process in which a jazz musician make practice after practice to find the same. In this paper, IHS algorithm is utilized to synthesize four-bar path generation mechanism. A mathematical model was derived using vector loop closure equation, wherein the error function, representing positional error between actual and desired points, was considered for forming objective function. The penalty function was used to prevent violation of structural constraints corresponding to Grashof’s criteria and input crank angle sequence. Three different cases were studied with ten, fifteen and eighteen precision points with and without prescribed timings. The results obtained from the study, compared with other evolutionary techniques from literature, and found significant competition.

Praca z dziećmi zagrożonymi wykluczeniem i demoralizacją w perspektywie symbolicznego interakcjonizmu

Introduction: By creating a framework composed of such concepts as the self, definition of the situation, meaning, joint action, making indications, and social labelling, symbolic interactionism (SI) provides us with a useful conceptual apparatus for understanding human behavior and analyzing the process of criminogeneity. Research Aim: Similar to the way that Howard Becker has discussed the social character of deviations using excerpts of interviews that he carried out with marijuana smokers and jazz musicians, I try to show on the basis of interviews with counsellors how we can use methods of rehabilitation drawing from SI to social work and treatment of at-risk and delinquent youth. Method: These findings were based on data drawn from in-depth interviews (semi-structured) with counsellors from day care treatment centres (sociotherapists). Results: The article presents four methods of rehabilitation and social work with at-risk and delinquent youth, which were generated from collected data and from the theory of SI. Conclusion: Probation officers, social workers, counsellors, street workers, sociotherapists are professions that can use the ideas and methods presented in the article in their professional practice.

Long-term factors and trends in the development of the fuel and energy complex of Ukraine

The objective of the paper is to define long-term trends and factors in the development of the world energy industry and their refraction to Ukrainian realities. The article consists of an introduction, three sections, namely: the main trends in the development of the global fuel and energy complex, analysis of the current state, long-term trends and factors in the development of the national fuel and energy complex of Ukraine. Conclusions end the paper. As for the world energy sector it is shown that its modern changes – Grand Transit – are due to the ideology of sustainable development and have the character of an extraordinary change in the technocenosis, the transition from the use of fossil fuels to energy from renewable sources, mainly – wind and photovoltaic nature. Along with the major tendencies of the Great Transition, there is also the trilemization and politicization of energy sector. Trilemization components are: Energy Security, Energy Equity and Environmental Sustainability. There are three scenarios for the development of the global energy – Unfinished Symphony, Modern Jazz and Hardrock, distinguished by the degree of greening and the availability of energy resources. Political motives are becoming more and more significant at all levels – from global to local. Major players are lobbying their interests, there is an activity of structures from the field of nuclear energy, powerful fuel companies, owners of gas transportation and gas distribution infrastructure. In Ukraine, transformation processes are taking place against the backdrop of low environmental acceptability and high depreciation of fuel and energy sector facilities and infrastructure, political and economic instability. The requirements of decarbonization create challenges to the very existence of coal energy, which is the main component of the energy generating fund of the country and the regions, where mines are located. Options for the development of hydrogen/ammonia energy in the form of vertically integrated energy-chemical systems with the nuclear power plants and reformed coal-fired thermal power plants are considered as promising; energy diversification of mining regions; the creation of virtual power plants based on hydrodynamic water heating installations.

Improvised musical performance as conversational language in jazz

AbstractMusical interpretation, in the form of the act of spontaneous composition, defined jazz throughout its stylistic evolution. Unlike other serious music, jazz has crystallised mainly due to the creative act of musical interpretation and less to the process of written musical construction. Within this cerebral musical genre, the act of performing took over as the fundamental role in the artistic communication between jazz musicians and audience but it especially took the form of an interrelation in the collective musical interpretation. The act of musical improvisation, in terms of jazz, is controlled by certain stylistic parameters, associated with form, phrasing and timbre, constantly relating to the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic planes. The standardisation of these parameters transformed jazz into a conversational musical language, which allows constant and organised communication between musicians through the phenomenon ofinterplay(the interaction of performers during the collective interpretive act). The principles ofinterplayare also integrated in the solo interpretation, especially in the case of pianists, who always improvise referring to the context and the relationship created between the accompaniment and the melodic plane. At the same time, just like verbal communication, mastering the jazz language involves reaching the level of free speech, with a spontaneous and contextual expression. This freedom of artistic expression involves the assimilation of the jazz language, creating a personal vocabulary and its use as a means of constructing authentic (spontaneously created) and eloquent musical discourses. Jazz language cannot be assimilated only through individual study, as is possible in the serious music of European tradition. The study and improvement of jazz musicians constantly depends on artistic socialisation and musical conversation. Jazz is a musical genre in continuous transformation, due to the fact that it is definitely more of an act of interpretation than of a compositional one. Jazz imposed musical interpretation as having the same contribution of creation with the compositional act, in terms of stylistic definition and crystallisation of an elaborated musical current or genre.

Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Alisha Lola Jones Vaughn A. Booker, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York: New York University Press, 2020) Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religion and African American studies scholar Vaughn A. Booker, incisively challenges assumptions about African American jazz musicians’ performance of race, personal belief, and socio-cultural hardwiring toward or against Afro-Protestantism in the popular imagination. Booker’s titular pun—Lift Every Voice and Swing—follows a tide of publications over the last decade on anthems (see Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora [2013]) and particularly on “the Negro National Anthem”—J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—profiled in Imani Perry’s May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Further, Lift Every Voice and Swing hearkens to the primacy of vocality and swing as prized organizing components and commoditized principles in religio- cultural performance practices that set apart popular African American musicians in the twentieth-century mediascape. After all, to echo Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s signature 1931 composition, “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing. ” [End Page 131] With a keen awareness of the African philosophical worldview that there is no bifurcation of the “sacred” and “secular,” Booker confirms that for many African American jazz and other musicians there is only a continuum between the religious and non-religious in the artistic discourses accessible to them. To illuminate this observation, he explores the extent to which four jazz tastemakers’ (networks’) commentary and performances influenced religious expression in multi-faith/transdenominational liturgy and popular religio-cultural portrayals: Cab Calloway, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams. In the introduction, Booker establishes the parameters of “sacred” Afro-Protestant aesthetics, offering insight on the “swing concept” of vibraphonist and convert from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science Lionel Hampton. Hampton asserted that it was sacrilege for bands to swing (Negro) spirituals, especially in cinematic portrayals, presumably because of the sultry and sensuous musical associations that swinging prompts: “Sacred African American music was a cultural possession of Hampton and other African Americans, and, in his view, to transform it into a festive or entertaining commodity was to commit sacrilege and racial offense” (1). Hampton’s commentary reveals the extent to which Afro-Protestant religious expression is culture among African Americans, regardless of one’s personal belief. The first part of the book, entitled “Representations of Religion and Race,” comprises four chapters. Readers will note that Booker places taste-makers Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald into the conversation by innovative means, tapping into often overlooked autobiographical material about Calloway, and, and taking alternative measures for Fitzgerald, who rarely interviewed and never produced an autobiography. The first chapter introduces a group of religious race professionals beyond male clergy who are middle-class leaders of Afro-Protestant denominations, organizations, and churches. In the second chapter, Booker concentrates on maestro Cab Calloway’s early jazz career and the extent to which, as a person who did not participate in institutional religion, he deploys religious humor to push the limits. Instead of typically centering Black male musicians within Bebop jazz discourse, the third chapter centers on the vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s efforts to fashion her raced, gendered, and (non-)religious identity. Racial and religious reverence are investigated in the fourth chapter through Duke Ellington’s musical compositions in which he explores biblical and historical African civilizations. [End Page 132] Part two, “Missions and Legacies,” spans five chapters. The fifth chapter attends to Duke Ellington who was influential in religious literature while maintaining core conversation partners who were not formed in Christianity. We learn in the sixth chapter about Ellington’s theology through his recorded private thoughts in relation to his compositional practice. Composer Mary Lou Williams is featured in the seventh chapter, which examines her religious thoughts following her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Following Williams through her business archives...

Piano Concerto and Jazz Music in the Second Half of the 20th Century. New Approaches to the Stylistic Fusion Concept

Abstract In the early years of the twentieth century, jazz and academic music each followed a distinct path, each exhibiting its own stylistic evolution. Most jazz musicians did not have any formal musical education and those in the academic milieu were, in their turn, neither jazz performers nor jazz composers. With the evolution of the jazz genre and its penetration in the field of the concerto, jazz becomes a credible music and starts enjoying a well-defined and generally accepted value rank in its own right, to the point where classic music performers and composers become open to experimenting fusion with jazz. Piano concertos were initially timid in approaching such fusion and consisted of taking over and stylising some jazz-specific components and integrating them into their own piano concerto language. In the second half of the twentieth century, piano concertos capitalising on this stylistic mix grow more and more natural and elaborate, turning into a field for expression of the most diverse jazz / academic music fusion. The fundamental driver that prompted the growth in value of the piano concertos that were approaching the jazz-classic music fusion proved to be the gradual familiarisation of classical music composers with the two stylistic directions through their experience as performers or through their academic music education. This article provides a brief overview of the pluralistic approach of the piano concerto genre at the intersection between jazz and academic music creation in the second half of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century.

Expert musical improvisations contain sequencing biases seen in language production.

Language production involves action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real time, placing a computational burden on working memory that leads to sequencing biases in production. Here we examine whether these biases extend beyond language to constrain one of the most complex human behaviors: music improvisation. Using a large corpus of improvised solos from eminent jazz musicians, we test for a production bias observed in language termed easy first-a tendency for more accessible sequences to occur at the beginning of a phrase, allowing incremental planning later in the same phrase. Our analysis shows consistent evidence of easy first in improvised music, with the beginning of musical phrases containing both more frequent and less complex sequences. The findings indicate that expert jazz musicians, known for spontaneous creative performance, reliably retrieve easily accessed melodic sequences before creating more complex sequences, suggesting that a domain-general sequencing system may support multiple forms of complex human behavior, from language production to music improvisation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning Jazz Language by Aural Imitation: A Usage-Based Communicative Jazz Theory (Part 2)

Abstract How can imitation lead to free musical expression? This article explores the role of auditory imitation in jazz. Even though many renowned jazz musicians have assessed the method of imitating recorded music, no systematic study has hitherto explored how the method prepares for aural jazz improvisation. The article uses Berliner's assumption that learning jazz by aural imitation is “just like” learning a mother tongue. The article studies three potential stages in the method, comparing them to the imitative, rhythmic, multimodal, and protosymbolic behavior of infant perception (building on the works of Stern, Trevarthen, and Merleau-Ponty). The demonstrations of the aural imitation method draw on pedagogic experiences accumulated since 1979 at the Jazz Program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. By analyzing structures of behavior suggested by the method, the article indicates key traits that render aural jazz improvisation possible, such as a fundamental sense of rhythm, formation of symbolic behavior, joint musical attention, and the facility to “hear via the other.” In conclusion, we critically address a frequent theoretical model describing musical improvisation as a synthesis of discrete elements or building blocks.

"I'm gonna lose my strength, I'm gonna seize and die, And all that Jazz"! Neurological diseases in jazz legends.

Even though jazz is a musical style that excels in improvisation and virtuosity, it is not without its share of anecdotes, drama, and downright tragedy, and the biographies of jazz musicians and their demise are fraught with ominous and dire straits. Unsurprisingly, some would develop chronic and fatal diseases. The neurological diseases that afflicted the following six composers and musicians, all of whom are considered jazz legends, are briefly discussed: Charles Mingus, diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both diagnosed with neurosyphilis; Thelonius Monk, who had possible frontotemporal dementia; George Gershwin, who died as a result of brain glioma; and Cole Porter, who developed phantom limb pain following an amputation. The association of lifestyles, with drug abuse, particularly alcohol and heroin, in addition to great sexual promiscuity factors contributed to the development of a series of diseases such as syphilis. In addition, we also described some fatalities such as neurodegenerative diseases and cerebral glioma.