Jazz Composer Research Articles

Twentieth Century Compositional Techniques Applied to Jazz: Pitch-Class Sets in Jazz Composition and Improvisation

This paper presents a speculative method to coalesce traditional jazz improvisation with techniques and elements of post-tonal composition. Throughout the 20th century, erudite composers came up with several aesthetic and conceptual developments but jazz, until very recently, did not move in the same direction. To maintain a fruitful collaboration between composers and improvisers, if the pallet of compositional techniques available to the jazz composer expands, I would argue that a similar development must occur in the field of improvisation. For composers, this paper proposes creative processes supported by pitch-class set theory and, in the interest of coherence and unity with pre-composed material, it offers a complementary approach to soloists.

The Musicality of Birds: From Charles Darwin to Hermeto Pascoal

Traditionally, music is studied from an anthropocentric point of view, which neglects the wealth of knowledge that can be learned from considering the role of the natural world in the creation of music. One of the most notable contemporary jazz composers to draw inspiration from the natural world is the Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal. Throughout Hermeto’s prolific career, he has written numerous compositions that were inspired by nature. This essay explores several compositions by Hermeto that were directly inspired by birds and examines the musicality of birds through the lens of evolutionary biology and aesthetics. To demonstrate the intricacies of bird songs, I will explore Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, aesthetic mate choice, and his ideas concerning aesthetic evolution. By understanding the function of bird songs and how they have evolved, new insights can be gained that will offer a new way to appreciate Hermeto Pascoal’s music. I argue that the complexity of aesthetic mate choice is manifested in the intricacies of bird songs and has subsequently influenced the compositional output of contemporary musicians such as Hermeto Pascoal, which has led to a deeper appreciation of biotic art in the jazz idiom.

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

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.

David Baker: The Nexus of Jazz Curriculum and the Civil Rights Movement at Indiana University

In 1966, David Baker, a Black man and esteemed jazz musician and composer, created and developed the Jazz Studies program at Indiana University (IU). The purpose of this study was to investigate how David Baker came to join the faculty and created the Jazz Studies program at IU through an examination of the school’s course offerings and historical context between the years 1949–1969. This time period captures when jazz was evolving from its roots as an informally learned art form into one that was taught in academic settings, as well as important evolutionary moments in jazz, specifically the transition from bebop and cool jazz through the development of hard bop, modal jazz, and Third Stream. Finally, it captures the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s which coincided with IU’s hiring of David Baker and the school’s decision to begin to include jazz courses in its curricular offerings. This examination concludes with a discussion of relevant implications for jazz and music education.

Фольклорная и патриотическая тематика в советских джазовых композициях 60–70-х годов ХХ в.

This article examines the influence of folklore on the works of Soviet jazz composers. Musicians, ensembles and jazz orchestras of various republics of the former USSR actively introduced into their repertoire both arrangements of folk songs and original pieces with a national flavor. An outsize proportion of improvisations in these compositions gave an extraordinary appeal to this music. Also, the article mentions the popularization of famous military songs by jazz bands and singers during the Second World War. Many famous world stars also replenished their repertoire with Russian melodies. Since the 50s, Russian composers have been paying increasing attention to the creation of plays with a folklore flavor. Such pieces bring popularity to jazz groups. This is facilitated by the development of the jazz festival movement in Moscow, Leningrad and the capitals of the Union republics. In conclusion, about the influence of folklore themes on the formation of the creativity of modern jazz performers.

How the Slave Trade and the Shoah Gave Rise to a Musical Marvel. An Interview with Jacques Schwarz-Bart

Four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade bequeathed enduring legacies of pain and suffering from Africa to the Antilles, not to mention the Americas. Four years of the Holocaust (Shoah, in Hebrew) compressed millennia of persecutions of the Jewish people, with repercussions from Europe to the Middle East. The shockwaves of those two heinous epochs have fused in a most unexpected and artistically creative way, giving rise to the incomparable jazz composer and saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart. In this interview with William Miles, the son of the 1959 Prix Goncourt laureate André Schwarz-Bart and the award-winning Guadeloupean novelist and playwright Simone Schwarz-Bart reflects on his life, inspirations and career.

Xamissa by Henk Rossouw

Reviewed by: Xamissa by Henk Rossouw Christian Bancroft (bio) Henk Rossouw. Xamissa. Fordham University Press. Henk Rossouw's debut poetry collection, Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018 as a part of their Poets Out Loud Series, represents a letter of complicated intimacy and affection to Rossouw's birth city, Cape Town, South Africa. The title of the book stems from the word "Camissa," which Dutch colonists believed was the Khoe term for "place of sweet waters." The Dutch arrived in Cape Town in 1652 on behalf of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East India Company, which was founded because of a government-directed merger of six small Dutch companies (voorcompagnieën). Rossouw stylizes the VOC as , the company's logo, which functions as a haunting visual vestige of colonialism throughout the book. "Camissa," however, was a "linguistic error." Rossouw informs us in the introduction that "Colonists likely mistook the Khoe words for water, freshwater, to mean an actual place." Rossouw reassures us that Cape Town's "legendary springs and streams exist," and has himself waded and swam in them. The X in "Xamissa," according to Rossouw, "stands for … the intersecting languages of Cape Town past and present," and originates from the double album Dream State by jazz composer Kyle Shepherd, on which one of the tracks is named "Xamissa." Following the "Proloog," which details the above information, Rossouw includes a copy of his South African birth certificate. Before the collection begins, we are witnesses to Rossouw's most bureaucratic form of identification, one that exposes his date of birth, gender, and race. It's a vulnerable gesture and might, under other circumstances, be read as sentimental, but Rossouw makes clear that his origins are intertwined in the socio-political histories of Cape Town. Xamissa is divided into six more sections after the "Proloog," and this structure Rossouw has established befits the book. The beginning of the book introduces us to the author in the most exposed fashion and with each subsequent section, the poems become increasingly more entwined in archival research, concluding with the book's most profound statement on Cape Town's history and its future, "Helena | Lena |." This isn't to say that Xamissa becomes less personal as the book continues; on the contrary, even in the final section, Rossouw [End Page 178] threads his own subjectivity into the narrative in such a way that he interrogates Cape Town's colonial past, its democratic present, and its future in conjunction with what it means to be an Afrikaner born in 1977, just before the election of Pieter Willem "P.W." Botha—an opponent of black majority rule and international communism—as Prime Minister. As a result of these socio-political dimensions in Xamissa, the book doesn't serve so much as a counterpoint to the personal dimensions of Rossouw's life as they serve as a complement to these aspects of the book. For example, in the section "The Dream of the Road," Rossouw presents us with an intimate scene involving his father riding a "1300 c.c. six-cylinder" Kawasaki bike that Rossouw washed on Sundays and on which he rode pillion. Rossouw's father was a part of the "Kingdom Riders," a motorcycle gang rooted in the Christian faith. Rossouw and his father rode with Oom, or Uncle, Ibby, a "Coloured" who was forced to live segregated in a separate, residential development because of the Group Areas Act. Ibby's girlfriend, Jesse, from the rival motorcycle club Black Widows, would "dialect / [Henk's] father's name," turning "Eugene into Denie," which "sounds like genie," and Rossouw supplements this memory by asserting "In Afrikaans, anything / can happen." The moment is at once tender, nostalgic, and haunting, not in the least because we find out earlier in the poem that "Jesse died young" from a motorcycle accident. At the end of the poem, Rossouw describes a recurring scene from his childhood when he wrestled his father at home on the carpet. If he won, Rossouw would be hoisted up, reminding the poet of Jesse "in heaven, an upended bucket with a palace on top / ablaze like Caltex the refinery, my night light." "Doppler...

AUDIOVISUALITY AND THE CITY OF MARSEILLE, FRANCE: CREATIVITY, COMMUNICATION, REPRESENTATION

The Wicked City (director Peter Mak, 1992), House on the Waterfront (director Edmond T. Gréville, 1955), The French Connection (director William Friedkin, 1971), the obvious Borsalino (director Jacques Deray, 1970)… up to the recent Netflix series Marseille (creator Dan Franck, 2016–2018): when browsing the titles of the most important audiovisual representations of Marseille, one immediately notices how this city seems to (be made to) communicate a few recurrent topoi: the frontier city, site of mostly illegal activities and inhabited by a multi-ethnic (or rather stateless) community of gangsters, sailors, adventurers and prostitutes – ingredients often mixed with an abundant amount of charm and nostalgic fascination. Mostly informed by the theories and methodologies of film studies, musicology, creativity studies and communication studies, the present article aims to emphasize the consistence of significations conveyed by both visual and musical sources. As a case-study, the article shall focus on Borsalino, possibly – at the same time – the most famous film placed in Marseille and the most famous soundtrack (by jazz composer Claude Bolling) – both, it is argued, perfect syntheses of the above-mentioned topoi.

Four Studies of Charlie Parker's Compositional Processes

Charlie Parker has been much appreciated as an improviser, but he was also an important jazz composer, a topic yet to be studied in depth. Parker’s compositions offer insight into his total musicianship as well as provide a summary of early bebop style. Because he left no working manuscripts, we cannot examine his compositions evolving on paper. We do possess occasional single parts for trumpet or alto saxophone of pieces written for recording sessions and four Library of Congress lead sheets copied in his hand, and, as an introduction, I show examples of such manuscripts. The article continues by exploring what we can infer about Parker’s compositional processes from those instances where he made revisions to improve or create the final product. In particular, there is one instance of Parker revising a work already completed (“Ornithology”), one instance of Parker combining two pieces by another composer into one of his own (“My Little Suede Shoes”), and two instances of Parker composing in the studio where we can hear his revisions immediately (“Red Cross” and “Blues (Fast)”). The middle part of the paper explores Parker in these creative settings. Parker’s methods sometimes differ from traditional composition and suggest that we reconsider the usual distinction between improvisation and composition. I conclude with observations on Parker’s procedures, proposing refinements to ontological models of musical works to account for jazz compositions.

Multi-Voiced Archival Performances and Sun Ra/ El Saturn Collection

This article critically explores creative reinterpretations of a sonic archive. It focusses on the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection, a catalogue of the experimental jazz composer Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914-93). In 2010 the collection’s caretakers commissioned visual artists, writers and musicians, including myself, to create new works based on the recordings. Each resulting work acts as an archival performance, understood here as any embodied reimagining and recontextualisation of the archive. Together, the works suggest a process of listening to and remixing the archive ‘from below’, rather than a singular, top-down authority of archival interpretation and power. I examine these works through analysis and artist interviews, noting a tension between appropriation and recontextualisation on one hand and archival stewardship and acknowledgement on the other. I observe how exchange, conflict, solidarity and accountability are all potentially present within each archival performance.

Review of phenomenology and the arts, ed. Peter R. Costello and Licia Carlson

Through an exploration of the arts, Phenomenology and the Arts traces the relationship between phenomenology qua historical movement and qua descriptive method. Serving as an artistic undertaking, the phenomenological method itself echoes its content when describing artistic matters such as painting, drama, literature, and music. After establishing the thematics and structure of the volume, contributors analyze in rich and groundbreaking ways specifically Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, and works of art, including select jazz composers, the visual arts of Warhol and Klee, and others affect us. The book is of interest to interdisciplinary researchers engaged in the relationship between art and philosophy.

Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett

Reviewed by: Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett Darren Ingram Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium. By John Corbett. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. [x, 250 p. ISBN 9780822363507 (cloth), $104.95; ISBN 9780822363668 (paperback), $24.95; ISBN 9780822373155 (e-book), varies.] Illustrations; paperback includes supplemental flexi-disc. Vinyl records as carriers of recorded sound have been described as a dying format for several decades. While their mainstream popularity may have waned, they are far from extinct in some quarters. Vinyl Freak, a relatively compact and intriguing book, is billed as "love letters to a dying medium." A mixture of a loving commiseration for a declining format and a discovery tool for uber-enthusiasts and curious listeners, the book stands out for its individuality, quirkiness, and authority. Duke University Press published several of Corbett's other writings about sound recording (Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein [1994]; Microgroove: Forays into Other Music [2015], and "Ephemera Underscored: Writing around Free Improvisation" [in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (1995), pp. 217–42]). The author is also a musician, record producer and reissuer, adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and former columnist and now staff writer for Down Beat magazine. He draws on many of his Down Beat columns from 2000 to 2012 for this book. Initially, I struggled to connect with Vinyl Freak. As I flipped through the paperback version, it yielded what [End Page 280] appeared to be a formulaic design with an abundance of LP covers. At the end, however, there was a surprise (I overlooked the announcement on the front cover): a limited collector's edition, bright orange flexi-disc affixed to the back cover containing an unreleased recording of It's a Good Day by Dave Barbour and Peggy Lee, in a piano-vocal performance by Sun Ra (American jazz composer and experimental music guru). Even before getting into the stride of "track" one (chapters are called "tracks"), I was hooked, and the book became a literary version of an audio earworm—and a worthy read. Though many of the artists and their rare, out-of-print LPs will be unfamiliar, most readers will enjoy the journey, learning something about Corbett, his interests and musical exploration, and bits about various artists and their musical output. It was all from a distant time, when life was a lot slower and collecting could be more arduous, often requiring patience and a lot of detective work. (I understand the collector's bug and desire, even though I may seek to deny it to my wife, who wonders what I will do with the piles of phonograph cylinders, transcription records, and other desirable collections that fight for space, cataloging efforts, and auditory attention.) Attempts to reproduce previously published magazine columns, even with slight updates or postscripts, rarely works well, but on this occasion (though without comparing the book to the magazine directly), it seems to be wholly appropriate and relevant. As well as giving readers the potential to discover unknown or forgotten music, the book also underlines the problems of recorded sound going out of print and thus made inaccessible. This is a particularly serious issue for the older (analog), less-popular, or nonmainstream music. Sometimes a particular version or release was well received, but because it was poorly distributed, it is found now only in disparate archives and private collections, if even that. What are the options if you want to do the right thing, but matters such as copyright laws and myriad of regulations stand in the legal way of rerelease? Hoping to discover a poor-quality dub, transiently uploaded to a video or music-sharing site without permission, may be an option—possibly the last option of choice—but it is hardly a responsible and enduring way of seeing that the music lives on for future generations to discover, access, and enjoy. For the recordings highlighted by Corbett, the reader is informed about its wider availability (or unavailability). In extremis, vinyl audiophiles resort to crate digging, auction or sale-site searching, and the broader collector's networks buoyed on by...

Assessing Psychological Complexity in Highly Creative Persons: The Case of Jazz Pianist and Composer Oscar Peterson

Assessing Psychological Complexity in Highly Creative Persons: The Case of Jazz Pianist and Composer Oscar Peterson

Other Planes of There: Critical Notice of Graham Lock's Blutopia

Graham Lock's Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton explores several di­ mensions of cultural critique in the writings and music of three highly in­ fluential musical artists. The book extends Lock's pursuit of related topics in Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music (1988), an engaging and highly informative account of Braxton's career as a composer, instrumentalist, and bandleader. Forces in Motion featured ex­ tensive interviews with Braxton and the members of his 1985 touring quar­ tet, Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway, and Mark Dresser, along with Lock's own commentaries and research findings. Lock is also the author of Chasing the Vibration: Meetings with Creative Musicians (1994), a collection of interviews with jazz composers and improvisers, and the editor of Mixtery: A Festschrift for Anthony Braxton (1995). Blutopia does not focus its attention on written scores, the sonic dimen­ sions of recordings, or the sonic and social dialogism of live ensemble per­ formances. Lock instead seeks to elucidate some of what Ra, Ellington, and Braxton said and wrote in their books, interviews, liner-notes, poems, and elsewhere about their music and its social and philosophical connota­ tions. When he turns to specific musical examples, Lock is usually in search of particular extramusical and programmatic implications embed­ ded in lyrics, titles, and other linguistic cues. Scholars expecting formal musical analyses may be thrown off by Lock's critical method but they may also be surprised by how far his archival and interview research and his in­ terpretive tools can take readers into the distinctive conceptual worlds of Ra, Ellington, and Braxton. Three interlocking themes frame the book's six chapters. First, Lock considers how the three artists approached (and in Braxton's case, of course, continues to approach) their own music as an "alternative form of history" (2). As Sun Ra once remarked, "history is only his story, you Current Musicology. nos. 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002) © 2002 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985

new ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and in­ strumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of im­ provisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures.! In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jackson and co-founder and pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, as­ serted that, "The AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies" (Abrams and Jackson 1973:72). This optimistic declaration, based on no­ tions of self-help as fundamental to racial uplift, cultural preservation, and spiritual rebirth, was in accord with many other challenges to traditional notions of order and authority that emerged in the wake of the Black Power Movement. The AACM's goals of individual and collective self-production and pro­ motion challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure, serving as an example to other artists in rethinking the artist/business re­ lationship. A number of organizations in which Mrican American musi­ cians took leadership roles, including the early-twentieth-century Clef Club, the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, the Collective Black Artists, and the Los Angeles-based Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension, or Underground Musicians Association (UGMAA/UGMA), preceded the AACM in attempting to pursue these self-help strategies. The AACM, how­ ever, has become the most well-known and influential of the post-1960 organizations, and is still active almost forty years later. 2 The Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), which emerged from the AACM and has been active in one form or another from 1969 to the present, is one of the groups that most radically exemplifies AACM-style collectivity, or in the words of Samuel Floyd, "individuality within the aggregate" (Floyd Current Musicology, nos. 71-73 (Spring 200l-Spring 2002) © 2002 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques

AbstractThis article offers clarifications and critiques of actor-network theory and its usefulness for music historiography. Reviewing the work of ANT theorists Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, and other social theorists (such as Georgina Born and Anna Tsing), the author explains that ANT is a methodology, not a theory. As a general introduction, the author outlines ANT's methodological presuppositions about human and non-human agency, action, ontology, and performance. He then examines how these methodological principles affect three concerns of music-historical interest: influence, genre, and context. In conclusion, he addresses problems related to temporality, critique, and reflexivity. He draws on music-historical examples after 1960: John Cage, the Jazz Composer's Guild, Henry Cow, Iggy Pop, and the Velvet Underground.

Oscar Peterson: The Man and His Jazz by J. Batten

Batten, Jack. Oscar Peterson: The Man and His Jazz. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2012. Print. This young adult non-fiction novel explores the life of the legendary Canadian jazz pianist and composer Oscar Peterson. Beginning with an account of Peterson’s 1949 breakthrough performance at Carnegie Hall as part of the influential Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concert series, Batten traces the seventy year musical career of Oscar Peterson in an engaging and insightful style. This book seamlessly combines a personal and musical biography of Peterson with a history of the development of jazz from the 1920s to the time of Peterson’s death in 2007. True to the title of the book, Batten’s is indeed one about both the man and his music. From Peterson’s humble upbringing as the son of immigrants from the West Indies living in poverty in Montréal, the influence of his family on his personal and musical development is a consistent theme throughout the book. Batten does not hold back when describing the social conditions Peterson was operating under throughout his career. The racism Peterson encountered both at home and abroad, as well as the drug use prominent among jazz musicians is honestly explored, as are the personal tragedies Peterson faced, including his failed marriages and consistently poor health. Peterson’s many longtime musical collaborations are explored in great detail, with Batten highlighting the influential performing and recording achievements of his career. From his longtime relationship with the jazz promoter Norman Granz, through the many iterations of Peterson’s famous trio, Batten doesn’t leave out the details at any point. The addition of multiple photographs, quotes from Peterson’s teachers and collaborators, and a selected bibliography and discography add to the historical richness of this title. This book is recommended to the young adult reader with an interest in jazz history, and the life and accomplishments of one of Canada’s most cherished musicians.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sean LuykSean is the Music Librarian for the Rutherford Humanities and Social Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. Sean holds an MA in Music Criticism and B.Mus from McMaster University, as well as an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario.

Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929 (review)

Reviewed by: Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929 Tammy Ravas Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929. By Barry Kernfeld. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. [xii, 273 p. ISBN 9780226431826 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9780226431833 (paperback), $29.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. The author of this book, Barry Kernfeld, is best known as a jazz scholar. He edited the first and second editions of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, has written jazz-related articles and reference work entries, and is the author of What to Listen For in Jazz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). The book under review is not the first one of Kernfeld's to address general piracy issues in music. The Story of Fake Books (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006) describes the history of fake books as it evolved from Tune-Dex cards in the 1940s, bootlegged versions in the 1950s and 1960s, and culminated in The Real Book (1st ed., 2 vols. [Syosset, NJ: Real Book Press, 1973]), compiled by Berklee College of Music students and jazz composers in the 1970s and 1980s. There are several other books that address the topic of music piracy in different areas. To note just a few examples: Robert Chapman's Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (New York: Routledge, 1992) is an overview of pirate radio in England; Lee Marshall's Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry (London: Sage, 2005) discusses the allure of bootlegged sound recordings through the lens of romanticism; and Greg Kot's Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized the Music Industry (New York: Scribner, 2009) documents technological changes that altered the way that listeners access sound recordings, the music industry's desire to cling tightly to an outdated paradigm for distributing and selling recordings by accusing listeners of theft, as well as artists and bands who embraced digital innovations. Kernfeld's book builds upon such earlier works on the topic, and differs from them in that it provides a general overview of the music piracy in different manifestations beginning in the late 1920s. Pop Music Piracy covers three subject areas: bootlegging and piracy of printed music, pirate radio, and pirated sound recordings. Kernfeld outlines the major issues and summarizes the book in his thorough introduction. What struck me at first were the opening paragraphs, which describe the arrest of an eighty-year-old woman named Sarah Yagoda for purchasing bootlegged song sheets in 1930 (p. 1), and how that case is somewhat similar to recent litigation against other fans for accessing music through unauthorized channels. (Probably the most well-known example from the last several years is the ongoing case, Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas; see "Music File Sharing Case Back in Minn. Court," Duluth News Tribune, 6 January 2012.) Kernfeld [End Page 349] covers this recent case in the latter portion of the book (pp. 214, 216). The main argument illustrates how these scenarios keep happening—and will likely continue to happen—within the context of unauthorized means of accessing and using music: Famous musicians and powerful music corporations want to maintain a monopoly over the songs they control and to prevent others from distributing their songs without paying for the privilege. Other people want to use these songs without paying for them and without having to accept the package they come in, that is, to use them in ways the monopolists did not foresee or take into account. A struggle then follows between the two parties over obedience and disobedience. This struggle takes different forms, but in the end has the same result. The monopolists give in. (p. 2) The rest of the introduction discusses important distinctions between different kinds of disobedient uses of music such as "equivalency" and "transformational use." "Equivalency" is akin to strict counterfeiting of an item whereas "transformational uses" involve new or creative ways to use or access music, although they technically might still be considered illegal (p. 4). While Kernfeld covers some instances of equivalent piracy, his main focus is on transformational uses. Part 1 of the book, "Printed Music," discusses the bootlegging of song sheets in the 1930s, fake books, and the photocopying of sheet music. Song sheets...

‘The revolution never ended’

From the Jazz Artists and Jazz Composers Guilds, through the Collective Black Artists and New York Musicians Organization, to the Musicians of Brooklyn Initiative, Jump Arts, and beyond, New York City jazz collectives have long struggled to redefine the relationships among artists, audiences, and the broader music industry. Based on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, this article examines the contemporary cultural phenomenon of the Arts for Art collective, which has presented annual Vision Festivals in downtown Manhattan since 1996 to showcase their improvisational activism. As documented through interviews and engaged interaction with its artist-organizers, the history of this collective offers unique and critical perspectives not only upon the politics of artist-business relationships, but also upon the potential of avant-garde jazz performance practices significantly to restructure the artist-audience relationship through the creation of cohesive musical communities.