Jazz Artists Research Articles

The Effects of Jazz Artists’ Collaboration Works: A Study of Larry Carlton

The Effects of Jazz Artists’ Collaboration Works: A Study of Larry Carlton

Musical Identity in Contemporary Creative Works Among Thai Jazz Artists

This study aims to explore the musical identity of Thai contemporary jazz artists by examining their attitude, musical content, and music creation process. Thirteen informants participated in this qualitative study through in-depth interviews. The results demonstrated that musical identity could be divided into three categories: 1) regional musical identity, 2) individual musical identity and 3) cultural musical identity. The factors associated with the emergence of musical identity include musical movements and phenomena, integration between two musical styles in terms of articulation and contextual elements, and contemporary and hybrid-crossover music approaches in today’s world. These factors, along with social interactions both within and outside the jazz community, affect the transformation of musical identity. The findings of this study will help Thai jazz artists and those involved in the jazz industry effectively build their musical identity, create value for their music, and elevate their works to an international level.

Experimental fusion (<i>fusión</i>), ritual <i>batá</i>, and gendered interventions

Cuba constitutes a site of immense importance for the history of jazz (and Latin jazz) in the United States, and attention to the contributions of Cuban women artists contributes to a broader understanding of the gendered histories of global jazz. This article explores women jazz artists in Cuba and its diaspora, excavating how women instrumentalists and vocalists have transformed the landscape of Cuban, Latin, and global jazz through groundbreaking and experimental performances. I attend to how the fusion-centered approaches of Cuban women unearth an emic orientation towards collaborative experimentalism that builds upon specific, local histories of jazz performance on the island. These performances draw upon histories of revolutionary-era musical experimentalism and fusion (fusión) that have emerged since the late 1960s and 1970s in Cuba and which repeatedly tie jazz experimentalism closely—though not categorically—to dance forms (both popular and ritual). Amid Cuba’s intensifying economic crises, I additionally engage how women regularly pursue careers—and, in an overwhelming number of cases, emigration—to Spain, Canada, the continental United States, Puerto Rico, and other international locales, in turn impacting local and translocal jazz scenes.

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History

Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History

Soul

<i>Soul</i>

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

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 Brett Grainger Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century. By Vaughn A. Booker. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $35.00. Scholarly narratives on African American religion have long centered on the Black church and its predecessor, "slave religion" (what Albert Raboteau called the "invisible institution"). In both cases, Protestant influences, themes, and institutional forms have dominated discussion. In recent decades, however, scholarship has widened to encompass non-Protestant and post-Protestant modes of religiosity, including Afro-Catholicism, Black Islam, and Afro-Diasporic traditions. Taken together, these developments have decentered the "Black [End Page 78] church" in American religious history by questioning its monopoly over African American religious and cultural life. Vaughn Booker's new work returns our attention to mainstream denominations and church life, but for a different purpose: to show the ways in which twentieth-century jazz musicians leveraged their celebrity to become "race representatives"—ambassadors of Black respectability to the white world—alongside religious leaders, advancing social and cultural progress for other African Americans and helping to transform the reputation of jazz from the devil's music to high art. Drawing upon a rich archive of popular materials—interviews and articles in the Black and white press, private writings, and a number of other sources—Booker demonstrates how jazz musicians embodied beliefs and practices that both mirrored and diverged from those of the Black church. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Representations of Religion and Race," describes how, early on, middle-class Black ministers worked to resist the rising popularity of jazz among their younger congregants. Their efforts failed, but with an ironic result: as the press held up jazz men and women as spokespersons for their race, these same artists came to see themselves as burdened with the responsibility of representation, turning the stage into a kind of pulpit. Booker focuses on three ways in which jazz artists performed religion for the public: through their "irreverent performances of African American religious leadership and expressive acts of worship," their "commitment to black Protestants' social and political activism against Jim Crow," and their "sacralization of 'Africa' in narratives of African American history" (13). If the second theme might come as less of a surprise to readers, the first and third themes are less well documented, and Vaughn presents them in especially striking and memorable ways. In chapter two, which focuses on Cab Calloway, Booker surprises and delights by situating the multitalented singer and bandleader within a long tradition of "religious irreverence." Chapter 4, "Royal Ancestry," moves from irreverence to reverence, showing how the "sacred concerts" of Duke Ellington, among other explicitly religious jazz works, presented an African American history "emerging from, and connected to, a sacred African past that included both biblical scriptures and ancient African civilizations," a story that effectively rendered "the enslaved African experience in the United State … as an extension of that sacred African history" (16). In Part II, "Missions and Legacies," Booker foregrounds the religious thought and practice of two pianists and composers, Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams. Booker attends to the ways Ellington struggled to articulate his theological beliefs as he navigated a variety [End Page 79] of religious settings, revealing how his sacred concerts were conceived less as an authentic recapitulation of the Black Protestant traditions of his childhood than an ecumenical religious project directed to an explicitly white liberal Protestant audience. Roman Catholicism receives the most sustained attention in the two chapters devoted to Williams, who Josef Sorett has described as the most famous Afro-Catholic convert of the post-war era, a period that saw a massive increase in African American affiliation with Catholicism. The seventh chapter explores Williams's religious journey to the Catholic faith. Booker ably narrates how Williams's loss of her friend, bebop pioneer Charlie ("Bird") Parker, to a heroin overdose contributed to her decision to convert and how Williams struggled with whether to give up music entirely until a number of friends, including several jazz-loving clergy, convinced her to use...

Jazz Poetry as a Message of African American Culture: An Interview with Lenard D. Moore

Jazz Poetry as a Message of African American Culture:An Interview with Lenard D. Moore John Zheng Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Lenard D. Moore is a prolific poet with seven poetry collections. Known internationally as a haiku poet, Moore shows his great interest in various poetic forms and expressions in The Geography of Jazz, reprinted by Blair in September 2020, which brings us his jazz experience and feeling. To Moore, jazz is a celebration of American life and culture. This celebration challenges him to present such great jazz musicians as Max Roach, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, or the unknown ones described in the poem "Raleigh Jazz Festival, 1986." The impact is immediate as The Geography of Jazz renews the jazz performances. This interview, conducted by email in February and October 2021 and revised in March 2022, serves as a complement to a previous interview, conducted in 2017, which focused mainly on Moore's haiku writing and other books. John Zheng: How important is jazz as an essential musical expression of African American experience? Lenard D. Moore: Jazz is one of the great musical genres, which African Americans invented in New Orleans around one hundred twenty-one years ago or around the turn of the last century, the twentieth century. An expressive form, it is so important that it emerges in the way we talk and walk. Zheng: And how important is it to American culture? Moore: Jazz is American culture because it is part of the fabric and part of the quilt of America. It is appreciated and celebrated all over the world. To that end, America is jazz as well as other forms of music. [End Page 99] Jazz has a way of bringing everyone together. When we come together, love happens. Zheng: What has urged you to write jazz poetry? Moore: It is the feel of jazz and the improvisation that have led me to write jazz poetry. I also like what Langston Hughes, Michael S. Harper, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Eugene B. Redmond have done with jazz poetry. In fact, Harper's book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, has been such an important book to me. I reread Harper's book again and again. He incorporated much history as well as music into his poetry. I like his approach to writing jazz poetry. I, too, employ history in my poetry. I want to capture the mood and innovation of jazz and infuse it into my poetry. In addition, I like to take risks with my poetry writing. I do not want to be pigeonholed with my poetry. I keep doing new things. I write poetry in more than thirty different poetic forms. I think experimentation has a way of bringing about discovery. So, maybe I am able to work toward a sense of discovery in my jazz poetry by pushing the boundaries or extending the boundaries. If possible, I strive to write until the jazz poem sings back at me. Zheng: Poetry is a carrier of music. Is there an emphasis on the title of your poetry collection, The Geography of Jazz? Moore: Yes, there is a definite emphasis on the title of my poetry collection. My original manuscript was cut about thirty pages because I wrote about jazz artists and jazz tunes from all over the world. I really had a focus on the geography of jazz. So, I came up with the title of my manuscript several years ago. I worked on my manuscript for more than twenty years. At some point, however, I hope to publish the other section of my original manuscript. My original manuscript depicts jazz musicians and singers from Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere. I like different schools of jazz, including Bebop. I am interested in what newer artists are doing, such as Esperanza Spalding, Keiko Matsui, and Youn Sun Nah. Of course, I love the standards or classic jazz tunes. Zheng: Who are your favorite jazz musicians who have invigorated your jazz poetry? [End Page 100] Moore: Musicians who have invigorated my jazz poetry are John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Dizzy...

Mixtapes from Heaven: The Global Duke Ellington Fandom and the Music they Preserved

The Rhodes S. Baker, Jr. Collection of rare and unissued sound recordings at the University of North Texas Music Library demonstrates that, in archival settings, the incidental content that is often deleted from commercial releases is actually “a feature, not a bug,” so to speak. This article elaborates on two reasons for the desirability and necessity of such content: First, it often provides the context necessary to make sense of a given recording, determining a date and release status, especially for recordings that are not well labeled. It also provides lasting evidence of the human activity underlying every aspect of the performance, capture, distribution, and preservation of a recording.&#x0D; The Rhodes S. Baker, Jr. Collection’s unissued recordings of Duke Ellington and other major jazz artists, packed onto reel-to-reel tapes like the “mixtapes” of decades later, have obvious intrinsic value. Still, preserving and acknowledging the human activity that compiled them adds value: doing so provides a window into the depth and intensity of the “fandom” (or community of fans) that thrived for Ellington even in his sixties, along with the multifaceted efforts to preserve his live performances.&#x0D; Ellington and his music created an international fan community, and their story augments his own. This article describes historically significant content from the Rhodes S. Baker, Jr. Collection, digitized in early 2016, in the context of the social participation of Baker and other fans and collectors, including the prominent Swedish collector and discographer Benny Aasland. The preservation and description of the collection demonstrates a complementary relationship between archival practice and musicologist Christopher Small’s concept of musicking. Insights from Pauline Oliveros and John Cage further inform an approach to musicking inclusive of incidental sounds and other artifacts of recorded live performance which might otherwise be dismissed as “noise,” but are essential to the full context of the captured performance.

Audiotopias of the Multi-Local Musician: Israeli Jazz Musicians, Transcultural Jazz and the Polyphony of Style

ABSTRACT In this essay I consider transcultural iterations of jazz as practiced by Israeli jazz musicians and their implications for a post-nationalist world. By considering the performers discussed multi-local musicians, I offer an alternative to both American exceptionalist views of jazz as well as to “jazz nationalism,” a scholarly outlook that emphasizes the localization of “jazz” in (non-American) nation-states, and that continues to hold sway around the world. In so doing, I also aim to invite explorations of the multi-local music making practices of jazz musicians worldwide. Following a brief discussion about transcultural and transgeneric jazz, and an introduction to my conceptualization of the multi-local musician I discuss the work of Israeli jazz oudist and guitarist Amos Hoffman whose music clearly exemplifies ways in which many jazz artists follow the commonly heard directive to “play their own voice” to the tune of music blending diverse global sources. Finally, I argue that Hoffman and his Israeli colleagues’ stylistic polyphony supports the case for transcultural jazz as an “audiotopia” of “multi-locality,” and that their music offers the possibility of envisioning a better future in the Middle-East.

Thinking the Future through Blackness

Thinking the Future through Blackness

Jazz jem sessions in the aspect of listener perception

The purpose of the article is to identify the characteristic features ofjazz jam sessions as creative and concert events. The research methods arebased on the use of a number of empirical approaches. The historicalmethod has characterized the periodization of the emergence andpopularity of jam session as an artistic phenomenon. The use of themethod of comparison of jazz jam sessions and jazz concert made itpossible to determine the characteristic features of jams. An appeal toaxiological research methods has identified the most strikingimprovisational solos of leading jazz artists. Of particular importance inthe context of the article are the methods of analysis and synthesis,observation and generalization. It is important to pay attention to the use ofa structural-functional scientific-research method that indicates theeffectiveness of technological and execution processes on jams. Scientificinnovation. The article is about discovering the peculiarities of the jamsession phenomenon and defining the role of interaction between theaudience of improviser listeners and musicians throughout the jams. Theprocesses of development of jazz concerts and improvisations at jamsessions are revealed. Conclusions. The scientific research providedconfirms the fact that system of interactions between musicians amongthemselves and the audience, as well as improvisation of the performers atthe jam sessions is immense and infinite. That is why modern jazz singersand the audience will always strive for its development and understanding.This way is worth starting with repeated listening to improvisation, in theimmediate presence of the jam sessions (both participant and listener).

The Sound of Jazz as Essential Image

Over the past two decades, jazz scholars have challenged the limited way that the music’s aesthetic was understood for decades prior, moving away from the study of jazz as merely a body of recorded or transcribed texts, to consider the myriad elements that produce meaning in every act of jazz performance. Examples of this important critical turn include Dana Reason’s assertion that ‘meaning [in jazz improvisation can be] located in the ways in which improvisers situate their bodies, change their facial expressions, and use their voices to accompany notes, gestures, silences or phrases’; or Vijay Iyer’s imperative for the music’s critical interlocutors to ‘explode’ the idea of the ‘narrative’ as the dominant way to understand meaning in jazz. While the field’s collective critical focus has expanded, especially to observe the gestural and visual elements in jazz performance, the specific influence of television in formalizing audiences’ understanding of these elements demands more attention.&#x0D; In this paper, I focus on the 1957 CBS television production, The Sound of Jazz, to consider the medium’s role in shaping mid-century understandings of jazz musicians as visual characters and theatrical agents. Conceptualized by innovative producer Robert Herridge, The Sound of Jazz proposed an unfiltered glimpse of a whole array of jazz luminaries in performance, including Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie. For musical advice, Herridge called upon the critics Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, intent on assembling musicians who were not necessarily the most commercially successful, but instead the most representative of the music’s ethos. As Hentoff remembered later, Herridge’s emphasis on ‘purity’ inspired many of the production’s choices, from the lack of artifice in the stage set, to the suggestion that musicians should dress as they would for rehearsal—in their own clothes and hats, that is, rather than in the exaggerated black tie that a TV spot might otherwise impel (xv). Superficially, one might read the effect of these decisions as a ‘behind-thescenes’ view of jazz musicians at work en route to a staged performance. As I suggest in counterpoint, though, what the programme ultimately offered was the sight of jazz artists exercising their self-representation and theatrical agency as they would in more liberated performance contexts. Freed from exterior expectations about setting and costume, that is, these musicians gave the show’s audience a look at how they envisioned and exhibited themselves in the representative settings where the jazz aesthetic developed.&#x0D; As Philip Auslander has written about the relationship between theater and television, the new medium’s ontology turned on the assumption that it presented something ‘live’, rather than approximate the fixity of cinematic texts. Effectively, Auslander writes, television ‘colonized’ theatre’s ‘liveness’ and remediated stage performance through a ‘claim to immediacy’ (13). With this distinction in mind, I argue that The Sound of Jazz is of inestimable importance to the critical imperatives of new jazz studies. Just as the most acclaimed jazz records simulated access to the sound of live performance, the 1957 programme codified audiences’ awareness of the music’s theatrical elements and visual codes. Ultimately, if jazz is to be understood in this more expansive way, then this television document must be seen—and additionally, seen as canonical, with the same weight given to the contemporaneous LPs that earlier defined our sense of what jazz is.

Jouer avec la forme : politique et poétique du jazz dans la prose et les chansons de Boris Vian

This article examines the multi-faceted influence of jazz music on Boris Vian’s writing process. As a jazz critic, a songwriter and a novelist, Vian did not merely write about jazz or use it as a prop. His writing displays a political conscience in tune with class and race issues as well as a strong measure of audacity and irreverence that characterized the music of the jazz artists he most admired. A closer look at his activity as a singer-songwriter and an analysis of his formal approach in chapter 32 of L’ecume des jours reveal a disdain for the conventional and point to traces of Vian’s own musical practice transposed to the page.

Religion Around Billie Holiday by Tracy Fessenden

Reviewed by: Religion Around Billie Holiday by Tracy Fessenden Brett Grainger Religion Around Billie Holiday. By Tracy Fessenden. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018. 280 pp. $34.95. Few jazz artists have attracted more mythology than Billie Holiday, the legendary singer whose technical ability, iconoclastic sound, and notorious personal life made her arguably the most popular vocalist of her day. In Religion Around Billie Holiday, Tracy Fessenden works to free Holiday from the romantic myth that argues that the height of her artistry was somehow dependent upon the depth of her misery (a string of abusive boyfriends, drug addiction, incarceration) or, better, to demonstrate how Holiday could be both a victim of a racist, misogynist culture, and also a resilient agent who cannily participated in her own mythmaking. [End Page 86] The book is the latest entry in Penn State Press's "Religion Around" series, which examines "the religious forces surrounding cultural icons," rather than offering straight-up biographical narratives. As Fessenden writes, her entry focuses "not on Holiday's religious practice or expression but on the environing religious conditions to which her genius responded, and in which her life and sound took form" (4). Fessenden's chapters trace in heightened detail the multiple religious currents in which Holiday was formed and reformed. The first chapter, "Religion Around," outlines the American civil religion of the early twentieth century, one that was "broadly Protestant in tenor and emancipatory tilt." Through a comparison of two biographies—Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues and Ethel Waters's His Eye Is on the Sparrow—Fessenden shows how Holiday spurned the self-congratulatory anthem of Cold War America, which sent jazz musicians abroad as ambassadors of freedom, while forcing the same black musicians to live under Jim Crow at home. Chapter two, "True Confessions," filters Lady Sings the Blues through two genres of spiritual autobiography known to Holiday: Catholic hagiography and the popular tabloid. The third chapter, "The Story of Jazz," highlights what Fessenden calls the "Spanish tinge," the Afro-Cuban melodies and tonal structures that migrated into the ports of New Orleans and Baltimore where they mingled with blues and other musical traditions. "Crossing Jordan" tracks Holiday's emergence from the intersection of African American and Jewish cultural experience: the "marriage between Delta blues and Tin Pan alley," which produced the American songbook tradition of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Abel Meeropol's "Strange Fruit," which became Holiday's talisman. Resisting the longstanding habit of opposing Holiday's blues with the boyish grin of Louis Armstrong, Fessenden reveals the latter's persona to be a form of "Jewish stagecraft," a "production of joy" influenced by his own intimate experience of American Jewish life. The final chapter, "Our Lady," focuses on what Fessenden considers Holiday's most formative religious environment, "the urban, pre–Vatican II Catholicism that undertook to reform her." Holiday's early Catholic formation consisted of several stints at a Baltimore girls' school run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, one of two African American orders of Catholic nuns in the United States, and eleven months in the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a convent reformatory to which she was committed by a court at the age of nine and again two years later. As Fessenden argues, the House of the Good Shepherd was the place where Holiday "learned to arrange the jagged pieces of her life as matters of eternal consequence, where her wounded spirit was made the subject of confessional performance, and where, in [End Page 87] the course of this self-culture, she received dedicated practice and instruction in singing" (75). By imprinting the model of female Catholic sanctity at mid-century—especially the newly sainted Thérèse of Lisieux, who Holiday revered—Holiday built the persona of a suffering, sainted singer. Fessenden reveals a woman who worked to leverage the trap that she was in, without ever being able to escape it. A hungry, centrifugal curiosity animates Fessenden's writing. At times, her sense of "religion around" seems capacious enough to include nothing less than America itself. The danger of shooting with a panoramic lens is that, while seeking out broader sightlines, you...

Almost Like a Real Band: Navigating a Gendered Jazz Art World

Professional jazz has been organized around two contradictory cultures. Historically, the jazz art world has followed norms of meritocracy, which promote equality across boundaries of race and class. At the same time a culture of exclusivity, anchored in gendered essentialism, has severely limited female participation. By analyzing interview data with artists from the Hamilton College Jazz Archive, we illustrate how these contradictory cultures of inclusion and exclusion operate to channel women into feminized roles in the jazz world. We then discuss how women employ a number of strategies to work around the culture of exclusivity and capitalize on the norms and values of musical meritocracy. Despite institutional openings in professional jazz that emerged following the women’s movement, female jazz artists continue to face strong barriers toward full equality in the jazz world. Although female artists consistently demonstrate that they possess equal musical skills to male musicians according to the norms of meritocracy that guide professional jazz, women remain on the margins of the jazz art world.

The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany by Jonathan O. Wipplinger

Reviewed by: The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany by Jonathan O. Wipplinger Sharon M. Wailes and Monika Herzig Jonathan O. Wipplinger. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. U of Michigan P, 2017. 311 pp. Paper, $39.95. Jonathan Wipplinger presents a thorough analysis of the impact of jazz as a musical art form rooted in African American culture on the young democracy of Germany, specifically the city of Berlin. His research digs [End Page 174] deep into articles, news reports, publicity materials, concert programs, and also translations of the poetry of Langston Hughes, while also providing an analysis of the political context in order to document the impact of the arrival of jazz as a symbol for American culture. Wipplinger refutes the commonly held notion that legitimate African American jazz was unknown in Weimar Germany apart from its "diluted commercial imitations" (12). Furthermore, he argues that the overwhelming publicity that symphonic jazz and the white band director Paul Whiteman received in Weimar Germany eclipsed the presence of African American jazz artists, leaving the initial impression that Germans were unfamiliar with African American jazz. Wipplinger offers a badly needed alternative narrative in which the musical contributions of African American jazz performers and composers become visible and in which the complexity and "messiness of cultural transfer" are acknowledged (13). The modernism of the 1920s, observed in Dadaism and expressionism, was largely facilitated through the cultural friction associated with jazz that allowed the development of a new identity. During this dynamic period, American Sam Wooding and his jazz orchestra from New York premiered in Berlin. Wooding's presence points to an influence on Weimar culture of African American jazz directly from America. Wipplinger discusses the strong (both positive and negative) reception of the group and then moves to the theoretical level, engaging with modernist theory. He uses the concept of aural shock, based on the theories of Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin, along with socially constructed ideas of Blackness and images of the modern metropolis in his analysis. Wipplinger acknowledges Adorno's negative writings on jazz but nonetheless applies his theories, deliberately reading Adorno "against the grain" (70), a valid move consistent with the book's innovative approach. The paradoxical juxtaposition of the modern and the primitive was found in jazz—the machination and noise of the modern city reflected in the instrumentation and overwhelming nature of jazz, and Blackness in its associations for Weimar Germans with the syncopated rhythms of the "jungle" representing the primitive—yielding the concept of a "techno-primitive hybrid" (45). Wipplinger also argues that perceptions (and misperceptions) of African American musicians in Weimar Germany influenced modernist thought. With the rise of the Nazi party, racial discrimination led to the rejection of jazz. Nazis conflated Blackness, modern jazz, and Jewishness, as shown in an image at the exhibition Entartete Musik (Degenerate music), [End Page 175] depicting a caricature of a black saxophonist with a large hoop earring and a Star of David on the lapel (234). Yet German Jewish writers and artists were attracted to jazz because they saw parallels between the plight of African Americans in American culture and their own circumstances as outcasts. In uncovering an alternative narrative of history, Wipplinger also engages with gender directly. His chapter on Girlkultur discourse of the mid-1920s analyzes a new conception in which the feminine was cast as the foreign, even threatening other. Although the dancing girls of the era were white, Fritz Giese posits a primitive black ancestry to their rhythmic dancing. The ideas surrounding Girlkultur give jazz, race, and gender an interrelatedness that was perceived to drive the process of modernity. A thorough, in-depth document of the impact of jazz culture on the Weimar Republic, The Jazz Republic satisfies a need to see jazz from a transnational perspective and can function in the classroom as a springboard for fruitful discussion of German modernism and the complexity of cultural exchange. Wipplinger offers a list of alternative figures on the Weimar jazz scene whose presence can serve as an antidote to the prominent white males featured in textbooks for German foreign-language instruction. His narration supplements the usual...

Active Acoustics at the Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center

The Appel Room (formerly Allen Room) is a 483-seat venue used primarily for jazz performances in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex in New York City. In 2013 the Constellation active acoustic system by Meyer Sound was incorporated into the room’s architecture. The system allows a wide range of acoustic conditions to be set for any performance. In the first four years of operation, a variety of solo and ensemble jazz artists have performed in this venue. This paper will describe the room, the system, and the results over the first four years of operation with a variety of musicians.