Jam Sessions Research Articles

Actor training and intercultural jam in a multilingual context

Actor training in Singapore’s multicultural context often sees a synthesis of acting methodologies, which emerged out of a conscious interaction between training methods borrowed from foreign contexts. This process is mostly found in local acting schools and theatre academies. The recently formed theatre company Nine Years Theatre adapts the actor training methodologies of Suzuki Tadashi and Anne Bogart within a bilingual (English and Mandarin) context. This essay closely investigates their training methods in order to examine the specific nature of this training process and how Singapore-based actors have received the training. Drawing from interviews with the co-founders Nelson Chia and Mia Chee, and by observing their ‘jam sessions’, this article closely examines the subtler modes of intercultural negotiation that occur offstage. ‘To jam’ suggests a tentativeness to their synthesis but also a commitment to actor training. It reflects the company’s continual efforts to discover and train actors to meet the demands of their acting disciplines and to perform in Mandarin. Such intercultural training hinges on the suitability of foreign techniques to be absorbed by the actors’ bodies. In one particular exercise, actors sing a Japanese song often used by Suzuki to train breathing techniques and text delivery. Those instances bring into relief that interculturality is more than the blind adoption of mixed art forms. Instead, the switching of languages in order to recalibrate a body for performance suggests that culturally defined bodies often change viewpoints, and their shifts in corporeal registers can include phonological negotiation.

(Re-)Locating Prestige: Poetry Readings, Poetry Slams, and Poetry Jam Sessions in Contemporary Spain

Spanish contemporary poetry is enjoying extraordinary vitality. One of its more noteworthy manifestations is witnessed in poetry recitals, poetry slams, and jam poetry sessions. These events — performed in alternative venues outside official or prestigious literary circles such as cafés, bars, or clubs — take place without any form of support from official cultural institutions but manage to attract a high number of poets and audience members. Their great popularity signals a key feature in Spanish literary circles: a new and non-traditional generation of literary consumers — and producers — has emerged. This article analyses said cultural shift: the new spaces poetry has infiltrated, and scholars’ reluctance to adapt their concept of poetry to meet these recent developments. Performance poetry generates a great traffic of ideas and cultural exchanges, and this article explores its cultural value and calls for a redistribution and relocation of prestige within new economies of aesthetic value that can legitimize this poetry as a worthy form of cultural production.

«Lo inmediato y lo palpable»: música y erotismo en "Concierto barroco", de Alejo Carpentier

Eroticism seems to play an important role in the analysis of Alejo Carpertier’s novel Concierto Barroco (1974), although it has been frequently shelved in favour of other more dominant aspects. In addition, the existence of a continuous fusion of attributes assigned to music and eroticism should be highlighted. The interrelation of these two elements is particularly present in the «jam session» in chapter V, as well as in the symbolic status conferred to the trumpet, establishing the core parts of the eroticmusic interdependence. The aim of the present analysis is to provide evidence that eroticism is an important and fully integrated element we should have in mind in order to approach to the heterogeneous kaleidoscope that conforms this novel.

“Nice to Meet You, Three, Four”: New Orleans Musicians and the Attractions of Community

“Nice to Meet You, Three, Four”New Orleans Musicians and the Attractions of Community Michael Urban (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “I sang ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,’ and that was it. I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And my father being a jazz musician and my mother an opera singer and Fats Domino living next door and Al Hirt living down the street, oh my goodness . . . This is what I was supposed to do.” Charmaine Neville backstage at Snug Harbor between sets at her regular Monday night gig. All photographs courtesy of the author. [End Page 75] The term “New Orleans musician” refers to a highly valorized, historically rooted identity shared by a select community in the Crescent City. However, it concerns more than a place, a celebrated past, or even the style of music performed. Above all, a New Orleans musician is someone recognized by others as such because he or she engages in specific practices and abides by certain norms of the city’s musical community. This much I have learned from the musicians themselves—and from knowledgeable others, such as music journalists and audio recording engineers—over the course of some fifty-one open-ended interviews conducted with them between October and December 2013. I never used the term in my questions, but they frequently introduced it in their responses, tossing it around as a matter of fact not much different from, say, the chairs on which we sat. What makes a New Orleans musician? First, it is very likely that he or she was born into a musical family. About half of those in my sample reported that this was true of them. Three respondents in that group spoke of their earliest childhood experiences pointing them toward musical careers. Charmaine Neville told me of connecting with music at the age of two. “It was in church,” she recalled, “and I’ll never forget the choir director singling me out and saying, ‘Now, go sing.’ I sang ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,’ and that was it. I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And my father being a jazz musician and my mother an opera singer and Fats Domino living next door and Al Hirt living down the street, oh my goodness . . . This is what I was supposed to do.” Similarly, Davell Crawford remembered playing the piano at an early age but admitted to a dispute in that regard: his memory said at age three, while that of his caretaker, Auntie Pearl, said at age two. “My first gig was at age seven,” he continued, “and I was paid $7.39. I knew at that point that I was going to be a professional musician.” For Glenn David Andrews, this same knowledge may have been prenatal. “I began playing the day I was born,” he claimed. “I was born with music. My mother was in a second line, and the tuba player put the horn up to her belly and her water broke. They had to rush her to the hospital. That’s how I came into the world.” Andrews also emphasized the importance of a childhood spent in a neighborhood steeped in music: “I was born in Treme,” he said, “[which is] the heart of New Orleans music. Families raise musicians, and brass bands raise them too, because that’s where a lot of musicians get their start.” Moreover, those not born into musical families typically grew up in neighborhoods enveloped by the sounds of street parades and front-porch or backyard jam sessions. In either case, the primary experience of future musicians would be anchored in community, rather than in commercial aspirations. As recording engineer David Ferrell put it, “The musicians here really like what they do, and they are kind of homegrown. That is, they probably came from musical families, they learned their music in [End Page 76] the home, and they learned it not to propel themselves into careers with fame and fortune.” Click for larger view View full resolution “I began playing the day I was born,” Glenn David...

Seniors are using waiting room for jam session

Seniors are using waiting room for jam session

Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies*

Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker 1 Part I. Rooting Gender in Jazz History Separated at Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz / Lara Pellegrinelli 31 With Lovie and Lil: Rediscovering Two Chicago Pianists of the 1920s / Jeffrey Taylor 48 Gender, Jazz, and the Popular Front / Monica Hairston 64 Battle of the Saxes: Gender, Dance Bands, and British Nationalism in the Second World War / Christina Baade 90 Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural Replay in Music / Tracy McMullen 129 Part II. Improvising Gender: Embodiment and Performance From the Point of View of the Pavement: A Geopolitics of Black Dance / Jayna Brown 157 Perverse Hysterics: The Noisy Cri of Les Diaboliques / Julie Dawn Smith 180 Born Out of Jazz . . . Yet Embracing All Music: Race, Gender, and Technology in George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept / Eric Porter 210 But This Music is Mine Already! : Woman as Jazz Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947) / Sherrie Tucker 235 Fitting the Part / Ingrid Monson 267 Part III. Reimagining Jazz Representations Better a Jazz Album Than Lipstick (Lieber Jazzplatte Als Lippenstift): The 1956 Jazz Podium Series Reveals Images of Jazz and Gender in Postwar Germany / Ursel Schlicht 291 Exclusion, Openness, and Utopia in Black Male Performance at the World Stage Jazz Jam Sessions / Joao H. Costa Vargas 320 It Takes Two People to Confirm the Truth: The Jazz Fiction of Sherley Ann Williams and Toni Cade Bambara / Farah Jasmine Griffin 348 Blow, Man, Blow!: Representing Gender, White Primitives, and Jazz Melodrama Through A Young Man With A Horn / Nichole T. Rustin 361 The Gendered Jazz Aesthetics of That Man of Man: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Independent Black Sound Film / Kristin McGee 393 Bibliography 423 Contributors 435 Index 441

Jamming with Social Media: How Cognitive Structuring of Organizing Vision Facets Affects IT Innovation Diffusion

Organizing theory is an institutional alternative to the economic-rationality view of IT innovation diffusion. Institutional theorists have called for more attention to cognitive processes and structures in order to understand institutional mechanisms. Our objective was to unpack the cognitive structure of an organizing to understand its role in the diffusion of IT innovations. We focus on the know-why component of organizing visions and on social media as an IT innovation. In a two-stage study, Stage I leveraged schema theory, the orders of worth framework's six justificatory principles, and relational class analysis to discover the hierarchical structure of the social media organizing vision. This resulted in a view of the organizing as comprised of four schemas, which we conceptualized as visions-in-use, and ten nested business use cases, each comprised of different combinations of the six principles. Based on this understanding, Stage II explored how community appropriations of visions-in-use and business use cases from the repertoire provided by an organizing shape four facets of an organizing vision--coherence, continuity, clarity, and diversity--and how these facets influence diffusion of the IT innovation. We found that the two facets we surfaced-- clarity and diversity--are essential to understanding diffusion and how and why coherence and continuity matter to diffusion. Much as the vision of a musical jam session emerges from players' multivocal performances, an organizing emerges from community members' multivocal discourse about an IT innovation. Just as a jam session depends on a structure of rules and individual player creativity, diffusion of an IT innovation depends on an organizing that offers prospective adopters a well-defined repertoire of moves to choose from, yet affords them the freedom to improvise.

Sound at First Sight: Jam Sessions and Immigrants in Brooklyn, New York

This essay examines the incorporation of immigrant musicians in a jazz jam session in Brooklyn, New York. Migration scholars define incorporation as a dialectical process in which hosts and immigrants negotiate established social boundaries between “us” and “not us.” While the social dynamics of jam sessions have intrigued scholars since the 1950s, the interactions between immigrants and American-born musicians in jazz jam sessions have not been studied. Drawing on ethnographic participation as a bass player in a weekly jam session in Brooklyn, I analyze the ways musical competence is used to establish and negotiate social boundaries between immigrants and hosts. Ultimately, I argue that jam sessions privilege incorporation, allowing immigrant musicians to cross, blur and shift social boundaries between themselves and their American-born peers.

Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

<i>Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem</i>, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

At jamme med byens rytmer – selvorganiserede forhandlinger af tid og rum

Focusing on the city, this article examines the relation between the specific (body and place) and more abstract (time and space), in order to understand how people negotiate the affordances of materiality, space and time. Based on a two year anthropological multi-sited fieldwork, 38 people have shown and told me how they organize themselves in the city through music and dance. Focusing on the phenomenon self-organization as a special form of participation, the main argument of the article stresses that people create their own use of the city by exploring and sensing the social spaces and rhythms of the city. They improvise in their use of places that are not framed institutionally or pre-established in advance. In order to understand how people transform the city into a space for self-organization, the analytical framework of the article is the French neomarxist and urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis. The rhythmanalysis enables us analyze the dialectical relationship between the body and the city. The first part of the article analyzes three spatial elements of the self-organized practice: How spaces become exciting, the framing of a space through sound and light and the embodied exploration of space. Secondly, the article combines observations from a jam session with Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis and specifies the main argument of the article: self-organization is a practice of improvisation and is conceptualized as a way of “jamming with urban rhythms.”

Sustainability Jam Sessions for vision creation and problem solving

This article presents a concept for creating arenas where expertise from certain branches of industry can interact with sustainability professionals and researchers to address and solve sustainability challenges. The concept Sustainability Jam Session (SJS) builds upon the idea of conducting creative meetings between professionals in “jam sessions,” similar to those associated primarily with music and improvisation. Approaches such as these have been used in the IT sector over the past decades, but this is the first attempt to apply it in the area of sustainability. SJS's were tested at the 2012 Greening of Industry Network Conference (GIN2012) and here we report our experiences from arranging six SJS's at the conference.A typical process of an SJS includes a preparatory phase, the actual jam, and documentation and follow up. The preparatory phase mainly involves identifying hosts and topics to be addressed at the SJS, followed by attracting participants. The jam is started by an introduction of the topics, a technical visit (if appropriate), and a problem-solving workshop, ending with a wrap-up reporting. Thorough documentation is necessary for following up the results of the SJS and preparing for implementation of the identified solutions.We conclude that skill, structure, setting, and surrender of control, as well as finding “red and hot” topics for the jams are the key factors for successful SJS's.Based on our experiences from GIN2012, we recommend other research conferences in the sustainability field use SJS's if the intention is to boost the interaction between the conference and the host region or non-academic organizations in general. We also suggest that a similar approach can be used in regional development for creating an infrastructure for learning and transformation towards sustainability and initiatives for open innovation.

The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (review)

Reviewed by: The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. Anthony Bushard The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop. By Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (Music of the African Diaspora, no. 17.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [xi, 254 p. ISBN 9780520243910. $34.95.] Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Bud Powell was a prodigiously gifted pianist who became one of jazz’s most formidable talents as well as one of its more confounding personalities. While his parents wanted a career for him as a concertizing classical pianist, his equally prominent jazz impulses—inspired by the likes of Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Fats Waller, Mary Lou Williams, and Thelonious Monk—won out, and by his teenage years, Powell was a notable fixture at jam sessions at Minton’s in Harlem and eventually earned a prominent position in Cootie Williams’s orchestra. Yet in 1945, Powell was beaten by police and put in jail for disorderly conduct, after which he was severely traumatized and underwent psychiatric care. So began, according to Ramsey, the oscillation of “triumph and trouble” that was to haunt the pianist for the rest of his life (pp. 61–62). Equal parts biography, historiography, and music analysis, Ramsey’s brilliant study [End Page 105] represents a much-needed examination of one of jazz’s most influential pianists and artists who was just as crucial to bebop’s beginnings as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, yet who has not received nearly as much scholarly attention. Further, by filtering the political, social, and artistic tensions that coalesced around the beginnings of bebop through Powell’s life and music, Ramsey creates not only a fascinating portrait of a jazz icon, but also a more nuanced understanding of bebop’s role in twentieth-century American musical life. From the beginning Ramsey makes clear that this book is not an exhaustive biography of Powell’s life, but rather a focused account of Powell’s contributions to American music and the way these aspects interfaced with numerous issues associated with the development of bebop. For this reason, Ramsey’s monograph makes a suitable companion to more exhaustive studies of bebop, notably Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Eddie Meadows’s Bebop to Cool (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), as well as extensive treatments of jazz, politics, and identity such as Eric Porter’s What is This Thing Called Jazz? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Ramsey’s own Race Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Ramsey introduces his elaborate discussion with “‘Cullud Boys with Beards’: Serious Black Music and the Art of Bebop,” inspired by a line from Langston Hughes’s poem “Flatted Fifths.” Following a vignette about Powell told through his daughter, Celia, Ramsey begins to establish the foundation for the turbulent zeitgeist that gave rise both to Hughes’s poem and the artistic milieu in which Powell made his most lasting contributions. For instance, Ramsey reminds the reader, correctly, that the desire for a new form of creative expression on behalf of African American musicians—evidenced in the irregular rhythms, enhanced dissonance, and blazing tempos of bebop—was also demonstrated by photographers, artists, and poets. Further, to examine Powell’s music is to consider it alongside complex issues of high and low art, aesthetic expression and overt commercialism, and most importantly, as a renewed means of African American cultural expression in the face of more pervasive artistic modernism in the 1940s. Thus, bebop’s oft-cited migration from Harlem to 52nd Street not only demonstrated its increased acceptance by white, mainstream audiences, but also its ability to undermine the longstanding ghettoization of black music in Harlem. In addition, the move was necessary in order for bebop—and ultimately modern jazz—to be considered “art” music alongside the European canon. Finally, this perceived “invasion” into the midtown establishment fomented racial, gender, and sexual tensions between subcultures and underpinned the complex environment in which Powell developed his musical voice. After reviewing the role of jazz critics who espoused the “jazz-as-art” concept (p. 30), Ramsey concludes the chapter by...

Benny Golson and John Coltrane

This excerpt from Lifetime Grammy Award “hall of fame” inductee Benny Golson’s autobiography follows the composer/saxophonist’s recollection of the premature death of his close friend, John Coltrane. Its intimate narrative recalls adolescent jam sessions in Philadelphia that brought together a remarkable group of future stars: Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy and Percy Heath, alongside two aspiring sax players who greatly influenced jazz history. At the center of this vivid account, their unlikely teenage encounter with Thelonious Monk in Harlem and their life-changing evening with Charlie Parker in mid-’40s Philly frame Golson’s poignant memory of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship’s epochal artistic collaboration.

American Musical Life Before 1900

The Journal of the Society for American Music is the official organ of the Society; as such, the articles published in its pages deal with a wide range of topics that both reflect its mission and illustrate the incredible diversity of music and musical styles composed, performed, and heard in the Americas. A glance at the tables of contents for issues published in the last three volumes of the journal (February 2011 through February 2014) provides an illuminating snapshot of the wondrous multiplicity that characterizes American music history. The thirteen issues published during that time include articles on popular music (hip hop, ragtime, swing, jazz, rock, country, soul), musical theatre, teachers, conductors, works by composers ranging from Ives and Copland to Feldman, Harrison, and Reich (and many in between), performers (Heifetz, Robeson, Zappa), jam sessions, ethnomusicological topics; in other words, the journal reflects in a truly impressive manner the rich and varied musical culture of the Americas. What is seriously underrepresented in this panoply of musical multiplicity, however, is the rich, diverse, and similarly wondrous American musical culture of any time before the twentieth century. Of the forty-two articles published over this three-year period, only two (5 percent) deal with American music or musical life before 1900, both of them on nineteenth-century topics.

Conference review: popMAC 2013

Academic discourse through text is a very beautiful thing: there is a sensation of time travel to be experienced through the well-articulated arguments of our academic colleagues. But reading others’ work, past or present, is always one-way communication. An academic paper is like a recording of a great song – it’s a fixed point in time whose sound will live on long after the band breaks up. A conference is more like a gig, or perhaps a jam session; there’s a real-time interaction that the ‘recorded’ object can never capture. It’s a chance to meet those scholars whose work we admire, and to take issue with those whose arguments we may wish to question. It’s an environment where we get together en masse and admit to each other the self-evident and humbling fact that is fundamental to all academic research, but is often absent from our publications – there are some things we’re just not sure about. [continues]...

Slaughterhouse Ruins at Aledo

By all accounts, the American painter Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1997) was one of a kind. She wore a pointy hat and drove a Rolls-Royce automobile that she could not afford. She was unabashedly egocentric; her paintings, she said, were all about herself and her inner life. The images were dreamy and mysterious: a woman running through the woods at night, a girl with an owl, a swimming horse, a ruined slaughterhouse ... simple and a little strange, she said. Her icons were ladders, cats, and brooms. She drank heavily and entertained often, hosting all-night jam sessions in her home. She was self-critical and often had the blues, but her friends, a misfit assortment of writers and itinerant musicians, found her enchanting. The jazz pianist Richie Powell based the rhythm of his composition Gertrude's Bounce on the way she walked (a 1956 recording by the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet featuring Powell on piano can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=uNFlZVcXY6Y), and the novelist James Purdy modeled

Jam sessions in Madrid’s blues scene: musical experience in hybrid performance models

Examining the differences between presentational and participatory music, this paper explores the importance of jam sessions as hybrid performance models and collective musical practices. As such, they display democratic and hierarchic devices that produce complex social and cultural settings, providing particular frameworks for community gathering and interaction between the different participants. Based on my field research in the Madrid’s blues scene, where jam sessions have gained a dominant widespread, I will discuss two significant and distinct jams that take place every Sunday. The aim is to practically analyse what type of musical experiences and relationships they produce, considering the significance of the blues genre production and the underground status of the scene. Overall, I intend to broaden the academic interpretations of jam sessions, suggesting hybridity as a theoretical framework for analysing the social life of situated live music experiences in different genres.

Beyond Jamming: A Historical and Analytical Perspective on the Creative Process

IntroductionThe goal of this project is to document the creative process of a group often referred to as from a historical, social, and musical perspective, and offer strategies for transfer of the findings to any group setting. While there are some authors who have drawn parallels between the creative process of musicians and general creative thinking techniques,1 this article adds an in-depth historical and social perspective based on personal interviews, surveys, and a variety of historical documents. The broadened scope of settings and historical evolution enlightens the dynamics and social context of the creative process and also preserves essential historical facts of the first century of history. In addition, analysis of the jazz process reveals seven factors that facilitate group creativity. Definitions and examples of these factors frame a possible model for innovative group interaction, thus serving the needs of our current creative economy.Originally used as a verb, jam indicated cramming as many musicians as possible into one room. Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley (1987) suspect though that the idea of cramming the maximum number of ideas into each solo comes closer. The term jam session came to denote informal gatherings of musicians allowing for extended playing opportunities away from the demands of their regular jobs. The sessions also bring together artists from different bands and diverse playing levels.Paul Berliner (1994) points out that sessions may arise spontaneously when musicians drop in on each other at practice studios. They might arrange invitational practice sessions lasting a long time, often playing one single tune for hours. Such relaxed environments were ideal for learning and the exploration of new ideas. Of course, nightclubs often offered more formally organized sessions during afternoons, after hours, or for Sunday matinees. Art Farmer recalls2 just walking the streets at night and going from one place to another. Sometimes musicians would distinguish those sessions in terms of skills of the participants. Certain clubs hosted groups with more advanced players and potential jammers would not dare to sit in until they knew the repertoire. Probably some of the most documented and well-known sessions were in the 1940s in Minton's Playhouse, Monroe's Uptown House, and Small's Paradise Club in Harlem. On the other hand, other settings often not perceived as jam environments, such as Jazz at the Philharmonic or performances by Riff' Big Bands were crucial in developing the language and etiquette of performance in form of a repertoire of common beginnings and endings, accompaniment patterns, stylistic conventions, as well as musical skills for the participants.Throughout its historical development from the New Orleans red light districts to concert halls, from party music to art form, from segregation to worldwide integration, from musical illiteracy to integration into the university curricula, the model of the combo combining improvisation with collaboration has proven successful as an incubator for innovation and creativity. As economic development increasingly depends on novel ideas and creative group interaction, the study of the dynamics of the model and factors influencing the process of group creation could encourage new models of entrepreneurship and business innovation. In his book Jamming - the Art and Discipline of Business Creativity (1996) John Kao takes a similar approach by analyzing the process of creative thinking as an analogy to a group of jamming musicians.This article presents an analysis of the historical and social context of the jam session as a tool for training young musicians, developing creativity, and professional networking. Based on interviews and excerpts from oral histories with prominent musicians as well as survey data and personal experience as touring musicians, a series of factors were identified that shape the creative group process in the jam session model. …

Baraka’s Jam Session: On the Limits of Any Attempt to Collect Black Aesthetics Unbound

Baraka’s Jam Session: On the Limits of Any Attempt to Collect Black Aesthetics Unbound

Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger’s Life and Musical Journey

Throughout the career, he continually found additional ways to use his skills as a musi- cian and documentarian. like the other Seegers, mike took on a strenuous workload. he suffered from tensions associated with a life of deadlines. two of his marriages ended in divorce, and he seemed distant to many people. but author bill c. malone tells us that the Seeger family valued accomplishment above all. in mike Seeger's case, the music world noticed his contributions. mike's reputation as an authority grew through his ca- reer, and malone displays the vast mike Seeger legacy as one that lies in the many old-time jam sessions that dot the north American landscape, the holdings he deposited in folk cultural ar- chives, the documentary and commercial re- cordings he created, and the resurgent popular- ity of old-time music today.