Jazz Studies Research Articles

Del discurso a la performance: la producción de significaciones de nacionalidad en el “jazz argentino”

Within the framework of Argentine jazz studies we focus here on senses of nationalism built in to speeches of and about this music, proposing to focus on those produced in the context of performance as a productive space of social meanings. At first, we contrast these meanings with hegemonic discourses of nationality in Argentine music, and analyze how both senses present tensions related to the signification processes within and about music. The article also includes a brief critical review of the theoretical discussions on meaning construction around identity and nationality, understanding the need to place the discourse studies as a part of the musical complex sound/performance. RESUMEN A partir de trabajos de investigación realizados en torno al jazz argentino, nos enfocamos aquí en los sentidos de nacionalidad construidos en los discursos de y sobre de esta música, proponiendo además un enfoque para aquellos producidos en el marco de la performance como espacio de creación de significaciones sociales. Contrastamos esos sentidos con los discursos hegemónicos sobre músicas nacionales en el país, y analizamos de qué forma unos y otros entran en tensión en el marco de la producción de significaciones en y sobre la música. La propuesta incluye también una breve revisión crítica de las discusiones teóricas sobre construcción de sentidos en identidad y nacionalidad, colocándose la necesidad de ubicar los estudios discursivos también el marco del complejo musical sonido/performance.

The Occupational Aspirations and Expectations of College Students Majoring in Jazz Studies

This study was designed to investigate the occupational aspirations and occupational expectations of college students majoring in jazz studies in the United States. Participants included the population of jazz studies majors ( N = 211) at a large mid-southern university known for its prestigious and internationally recognized jazz program. A response rate of 85% was obtained. Occupational aspirations and occupational expectations were measured on the Jazz Occupational Prestige Index. Results indicated that students aspired to more prestigious occupations but expected to be employed in occupations less prestigious when considering the realities of the job market. A small percentage of students (4.7%) aspired to teach while a higher percentage (15.8%) expected to be engaged in teaching as a profession. The analysis of relationships between variables revealed a low positive relationship between occupational aspiration and support from significant others. All other relationships were negligible.

The Recording Studio on Stage: Liveness in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

This essay brings jazz studies and performance studies into dialogue in order to examine the interplay between recordings and live performance in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom . Although most scholarship has tended to focus on the racial exploitation of black musicians, less explored is Wilson’s decision to locate a recording session within a play in order to perform the fraught tension in blues and jazz history between live improvised performance and recordings. Situated within the ongoing conversation among jazz scholars about the status of recordings as historical evidence and the aesthetic of “the break,” this essay suggests that the text and action of the play evade the recording as a way to translate the break to theater.

“We Both Speak African”: A Dialogic Study of Afro-Cuban Jazz

AbstractFrom 1947 to 1948 the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra with Chano Pozo produced some of the most important recordings that contributed to the development of Afro-Cuban jazz. Pozo had already led a successful career as a professional musician in Havana before he moved to New York City, where he met Gillespie and joined his bebop big band. The integration of a black Cuban percussionist into Gillespie's all-black band raises important questions about the racial politics enveloping the popularization of bebop, Afro-Cuban jazz, and the work of others in contemporaneous political, cultural, and intellectual arenas. This article provides new documentation of Pozo's performances with the Gillespie band in the United States and Europe and shows the ideological concerns that Pozo and Gillespie shared with West African political and cultural activists, Melville Herskovists and his students, and early jazz historians in the 1940s. The article suggests an alternative methodology for scholarship on jazz in the United States that approaches jazz's extensive engagements with Cuban and other Afro-Atlantic musicians as embodying the crux of jazz's place in the Afro-Atlantic.

The Development of Diminutions in American Jazz

Allen Forte, the prominent Yale music theorist, delivered this previously unpublished lecture in Germany in 1958. In “Forte’s Lecture on Jazz: An Introduction” (included elsewhere in this issue), Benjamin Givan states that this lecture is “the earliest known analytical study of jazz by a professional music theorist.” The lecture applies Schenkerian concepts of “diminution technique” to jazz improvisations from early blues to bebop, including recordings by Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and the Modern Jazz Quartet. As Forte explains, “By diminution technique is meant the melodic means (as distinct from, say, the rhythmic or chordal means) by which a given basic tonal structure is varied so as to expand or prolong its content.” Several notated examples are provided, as well as an appendix of recordings referenced.

Letter from the Editors

The editors of the Journal of Jazz Studies explain their rationale for converting their print journal, the Annual Review of Jazz Studies, into a free, open-access, online publication. Open access makes the journal universally accessible, and offers other technological advantages. Unpaid scholarly work belongs in the public realm, and the open-access movement has made steady progress in the world of academia.

More Than Just Guide Tones: Steve Larson's <em>Analyzing Jazz—A Schenkerian Approach</em>

Henry Martin, a composer, music theorist, professor of music at Rutgers University–Newark, and co-editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies, contributes a review-essay about Steve Larson’s recent book, Analyzing Jazz: A Schenkerian Approach (Pendragon Press, 2009).

Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society

Musical Improvisation: Art, Education and Society Edited by Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl Preface - Bruno Nettl Introduction - Gabriel Solis Part One: Society 1. Jazz as Political and Musical Practice - Ingrid Monson 2. John Cage and Improvisation: an Unresolved Relationship - Sabine M. Feisst 3. When Traditional Improvisation is Prohibited: Contemporary Ukrainian Funeral Laments and Burial Practices - Natalie Kononenko 4. The Juncture between Creation and Recreation among Indonesian Reciters of the Qur'an - Anne K. Rasmussen 5. Genius, Improvisation, and the Narrative of Jazz History - Gabriel Solis 6. Formula, Variation and Improvisation in Participatory Music - Thomas Turino Part Two: Education 7. Learning to Improvise Music, Improvising to Learn Music - Patricia Shehan Campbell 8. Improvising Mozart - Robert Levin 9. Keyboard Improvisation in the Baroque Period - Charlotte Mattax Moersch 10. Beyond the Improvisation Class: Learning to Improvise in a University Jazz Studies Program - John P. Murphy 11. On Learning the Radif and Improvisation in Iran - Bruno Nettl 12. Hindustani Sitar and Jazz Guitar Music: A Foray into Comparative Improvology - Stephen Slawek 13. Music Improvisation in the Modern Dance Class - John Toenjes Part Three: Creation 14. Representations of Music-Making - Stephen Blum 15. Improvisation and Related Terms in Middle-Period Jazz - Lawrence Gushee 16. Opening the Museum Window: Improvisation and its Inscribed Values in Canonic Works by Schumann and Chopin - Robert S. Hatten 17. Improvisation in Beethoven's Creative Process - William Kinderman 18. Why Do They Improvise? Reflections on Meaning and Experience - A. Jihad Racy 19. Preluding at the Piano - Nicholas Temperley Contributor List Index

Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies edited by Rustin, Nichole T., and Sherrie Tucker

<i>Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies</i> edited by Rustin, Nichole T., and Sherrie Tucker

Bop, Rethought: Jazz, culture, and ‘Art Music’ in 1950s America

This paper seeks to discuss of one of the most significant questions in the critical discourse of jazz studies and of ethnomusicology more broadly: How does a musical genre, such as jazz, come to be understood as ‘art music’? This paper looks to develop a theory about the concept of ‘art music’ in relation to jazz, as it is understood in North American culture. In applying this theory, which I call the audience-aesthetic specialization theory, I investigate specifically the stylistic innovations of trumpeter Miles Davis in the mid-fifties, and the place of jazz in American culture of the mid-to-late-fifties more broadly. From this investigation, I attempt to extrapolate a new historiographical understanding of the stylistic changes that facilitated the widespread cultural recognition of jazz as ‘art’. Wherever possible, I attempt to nuance my claims using a multi-faceted approach that considers a range of theoretical, aesthetic, and cultural ideas that surround the concept of ‘art music’ as it relates to jazz.

Looking beyond memory studies: Comparisons and integrations

Projects in memory studies are best driven by topic not tradition, because the phenomena under investigation are usually interactive, not neatly compartmentalized. This imposes open-endedness not only in tracing diverse activities of remembering across the spread of relevant disciplines, but also in looking beyond memory altogether in order better to understand its diverse manifestations. In different contexts (theory-development, descriptive case study, interventionist manipulation, and so on) the balance shifts between pinpointing particularity and seeking pattern. It is notoriously diffi cult, as Steven Brown noted in Memory Studies 1(3), to identify ‘the limits and extent of this aspect of human conduct that we are calling “memory”’ (2008: 262). Building on Brown’s robust acceptance of this uncertainty, this editorial encourages the comparison of memory studies to other projects, or other domains of enquiry. Brown worked through an analogy between memory and sexuality to point to ‘a set of fundamental obstacles’ to the study of ‘memory’. The comparison with sexuality, among its other effects, warns of the dangers of fi xing concepts, strategies and institutions too fi rmly and too fast. But are there any other domains for comparative analysis that, used for different purposes, might reveal clues and options as well as pitfalls? What is the state of memory studies in relation to the interdisciplinary study of dreaming, say, or of gesture, or emotion, or colour vision? Or, for other purposes, we might spy on the interdisciplinary study of jazz, say, or of gardens, or sport, or diagrams, or cloth, or martial arts, to ask whether and how the multiplicity within each of these domains is acknowledged and mapped in case study or in theory. The activities and phenomena in most of these domains, as in remembering, are complex and highly structured, involving at once many distinctive dimensions that specifi c analyses may try to map and tap: neural, affective, kinesthetic, sensory, material, interpersonal, historical, political, cultural, technological, and so on, where each dimension named in this truncated list is itself wildly heterogeneous. Brown argues that because instances or activities of remembering usually occur across many such dimensions at once, ‘an implicit barrier is set against establishing the analytic priority of any particular aspect of the practice’: he goes on to diagnose various forms of anxiety at the unbounded nature of the resulting projects (Brown, 2008: 269).

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (review)

Reviewed by: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music Edward Komara Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. By Ted Gioia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. [xiii, 449 p. ISBN-13: 9780393062588 (hardcover), $27.95; ISBN-13: 9780393337501 (paperback), $16.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Because the blues in the Delta region in the northwest corner of Mississippi is so much a part of the region’s oral culture, little about it has the appearance to historians of being known for certain. As a result, many presentations of Delta blues history have had to rely on much that some readers may take as speculation, folktale, even myth. Whatever failings as history that Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981) may have had, Palmer did attempt to “fight fire with fire,” that is, to address a few myths not with facts, but with new myths of his own. That W. W. Norton has published a book on Delta blues is not surprising, since it has published in three editions one of the key books about African American music, Eileen Southern’s Music of Black Americans (1971; 1983; 1997). But what sort of book is Gioia’s Delta Blues? His previous books include three volumes on jazz (especially The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]), and his 2006 Duke University Press publications Work Songs and Healing Songs may be regarded as broadening his research scope. Studying the blues is a logical move from jazz studies, since jazz musicians use blues forms as bases of improvisation. Taking up Delta blues, despite its difficulties to historians because of its lack of written and notated documents, follows from Gioia’s study of work songs because of the work-song phrasing of many pre-1942 (“pre-war”) Delta blues singers. But his thesis that “[rock music] is the true final destination of the Delta sound” (p. 6) strikes me as out of step with his previous studies, and debatable in view of the very limited role that Delta blues played in blues overall during the early years of rock (1954–63) until British rock groups from 1964 on brought Delta styles to great prominence. While the stripped-down instrumentation (often a single guitar) lends to Delta blues a primitive-seeming sound, it does not mean necessarily that Delta blues has a primal function as the source of all blues—although it is tempting and very easy to think so. Historians have long been divided over whether blues began in the Delta and spread outward, or whether it developed across the South from Arkansas to Georgia. The first two chapters of Lawrence Cohn’s Nothing But The Blues (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993) each present the opposing viewpoints of that debate: Samuel Charters (“Working on the Building: Roots and Influences,” pp. 13–31) took the Delta-centric view, and David Evans (“Goin’ Up The Country: Blues in Texas and the Deep South,” pp. 33–85) thought blues was the result of the South as a whole. For the sake of his thesis, Gioia appears to be a Delta-centrist, on the side claiming that the blues—or at least the most influential of all blues styles—comes from the Delta. One need not be a Delta-centrist to relate the history of Delta blues; in fact, one may be better off not being one, so as to notice and discuss without bias the outside influences on Delta blues. One such example is Bessie Smith, whom Gioia mentions on pp. 40–42, but does not comment on her influence. Charlie Patton used her rendition of “Mountain Top Blues” for his 1929 Paramount record “Hammer [Hammock] Blues,” and Son House and Skip James each took lyrics from her “Work House Blues” release for their own blues. Instead of a continuous narrative, Gioia uses a series of chapter-length portraits of individual musicians to relate his history. Those he singles out are W. C. Handy, Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King. Palmer had followed a similar plan featuring...

Archie Bleyer and the Lost Influence of Stock Arrangements in Jazz

The study of jazz has always been beset by problems concerning the di vision between improvisation and composition. While it is generally ac cepted that jazz by definition must have some improvisational elements, many scholars and aficionados have been much slower to accept the im portance of written materials, especially in regard to jazz of the 1920s and 1930s.1 This perception often has racial divisions, with the idea being that black bands relied more on improvisation and collective arrangements, while white groups depended more on printed music. Often during those decades, the written materials in question were commercially produced stock printed by music publishers to tie in with the issue of new songs. But regardless of stereotypical perceptions, these arrangements were liberally used by both black and white bands to fulfill a dual pur pose: allowing writers and publishers to disseminate new songs and dance bands to acquire and perform with relative ease new jazz material.

Big ears: listening for gender in jazz studies

Big ears: listening for gender in jazz studies

Delta blues: the life and times of the Mississippi masters who revolutionized American music

blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insight, Ted Gioia - the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz - brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King and others. Tracing the history of the blues from the field hollers and plantation music of the nineteenth century to the exploits of modern-day musicians in the tradition, Delta Blues tells the full story of this timeless and unforgettable music. No cultural force boasts such humble origins or such world-conquering reverberations. In this evocative rags-to-riches tale, Gioia shows how the sounds of the altered the course of popular music.

Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. By Charles Hersch. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv, 289 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-32867-6.)

Charles Hersch fills a historiographical gap by providing the first interpretive cultural study of early New Orleans jazz. This is surprising; the tropes, signifiers, discourses, and other indices of cultural conflict and change arising from the city's dangerous streets, shabby dance halls, multiracial brothels, lakeside bandstands, and parades and celebrations, circa 1880–1920, have long been ripe for theorizing. Earlier histories avoid such postmodern approaches, but they provide many suggestive illustrations of oppositional behavior, subversive textuality, and cultural hybridity among the Creoles of color, Sicilian and Irish immigrants, voodoo queens, pimps, roustabouts, and slumming white dance hall patrons who peopled the New Orleans scene. Hersch both repeats the narratives of other historians and realizes their inchoate interpretations. Like earlier histories, Subversive Sounds describes at length the Caribbean character of New Orleans society and the liminal social status of the city's Creoles of color, and finds both to be central to the formation of jazz. The degraded status of all African American residents in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) reflected the dominant white view that blacks threatened Caucasian racial purity; jazz, Hersch argues, boldly injected “impurity” into American music and culture. This is perhaps his most original argument, countering popular notions of New Orleans jazz as a cozy gumbo or melting pot of amicable white, Creole, and black influences. Hersch's introduction of the concepts of the carnivalesque (Mikhail Bakhtin) and heterotopia (Michel Foucault), though, add little to his analysis of the vigorous expressiveness of New Orleans street life, which covers familiar musical sites such as Congo Square, second line parades, and funeral marches. As an interpretation, Hersch's book resembles a lively bull session that clothes well-known historical data in mostly predictable interpretations. As a result, it only slightly modifies the prevailing narrative about the music. Hersch is a political scientist whose attention to chronology and use of analogies is more casual than that of most historians. This adds to the book's playful and suggestive nature but detracts from the persuasiveness of its interpretation. In contrast, Thomas Brothers's Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (2006), while less provocative, is more empirically thorough and original in its description of how musical materials cohered in specific times and places to create early New Orleans jazz.

Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty

Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty Eric Prieto (bio) Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of us traverse unseeingly in our day-to-day lives. He has also led a notable second career as a jazz critic, having written extensively on the music and its history. The relationship between these two pursuits seems to be a lopsided one: the influence of his poetic preoccupations on his jazz writing is clear and pervasive, but the influence of the music on the poetry is much less obvious and harder to characterize. And yet it played a crucial role in his development as a poet. Réda spent the early part of his career in search of his own distinctive voice and thematic territory. He found it in his somewhat eccentric approach to the evocation of place, which is most tellingly characterized by the apparent aimlessness of the flâneur, who works in what appears to be a random manner (à l’improviste), devoting himself to ephemera, and unapologetically refusing to monumentalize his subject matter. Having realized that his poetic vocation lay in this direction, but unsure precisely how to explain what made this subject matter so compelling to him, Réda found himself in need of a set of aesthetic principles—a way to explain and justify his poetic practice, if only to himself. It is, I argue, through his study of jazz that he was finally able to develop the vocabulary necessary to articulate such a set of principles and become the poet of place that we know today. In order to understand what is at stake in this endeavor, why he might deem such justifications necessary, it will be useful to consider a question from the essay/poem “Où, comment, quand, pourquoi?” [where, what, when, why] which problematizes his ongoing obsessions with flânerie, travel, and the evocation of place. Motorisée ou non, la petite monade, Que cherche-t-elle encore, avec la promenade, Qui ne soit dans ses jours déjà tout contenu?1 [Motorized or not, our little monad, What on Earth is it looking for in its excursions That is not already completely contained in its days?] [End Page 89] Every word in this passage will resonate for assiduous readers of Réda—from the question of the mode of transport (motorized or not), to the hint of alienation or isolation implied by the term “monad,” to the nuance of repetition and frustration implied by the term “encore.” But it is in the third line that the real import of the question surfaces. What, Réda asks, can he learn from his poetic peregrinations that is not already “entirely contained” in his daily life at home? The question is so striking because it seems to call into question, however playfully, the entire course of Réda’s poetic career. The problem is not one of understanding the appeal of travel or flânerie (such pastimes need no justification), but of reconciling his urge to write about his peregrinations in a way that shows an almost complete indifference to the kinds of monumental, one-of-a-kind attractions, epiphanic encounters, and lessons learned that are usually deemed to justify travel writing and urban poetry in the Baudelairian tradition. If Réda’s travels always lead him back to the banal and the quotidian, then what makes this kind of experience seem more meaningful to him than, say, solitary meditation or the domestic realities of his day-to-day existence at home? The answer, which comes at the end of the same poem, remains somewhat obscure, even potentially misleading: […] nous n’aurons été Si mouvants, si divers, que pour chercher l’unique Passage qui peut-être à la fin communique Avec ce point toujours caché sous l’horizon Dont la douce clarté n’est d’aucune saison, D’aucun soleil parmi l’herbe qu’elle illumine. (40) [If we have been So restless, so shifting, it is only to seek the singular Passage that may in the end communicate With this...

Development of Cooperation Skills During Acquisition Process of Jazz Singing

Introduction. During jazz studies, a student develops not only the skill to play the chosen instrument or the vocal technique, but also participates at sessions of playing music in groups. To successfully incorporate in this creative process, theory-wise, practical and psychological readiness is needed, as well as cooperation skills. Aim of the Study. To find possibilities to develop cooperation skills during acquisition process of jazz singing. Materials and Methods. Analysis of pedagogical and psychological theory, pedagogical observation, analysis of artistic experience, questionnaires. Results. Results of questionnaires have been summarised, possibilities to develop cooperation skills during acquisition process of jazz singing have been found. Conclusions. It is necessary to develop contents of studies, drawing more attention to sessions of playing music in groups, purposefully preparing students for work in groups, taking into account individual readiness and gradualness.

EL JAZZ EN EL CINE CLÁSICO NORTEAMERICANO: ESTUDIO Y APLICACIONES DIDÁCTICAS SOBRE "A SONG IS BORN" (1948) DE HOWARD HAWKS

This study of A Song Is Born, a 1948 comedy by the NorthAmerican director Howard Hawks, came about as a result of my interest in the use of pre-exisThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.159 on Sun, 22 May 2016 04:43:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 646 VICENTE GALBIS LOPEZ ting music in film scores. The screenplay is based on a musicologist's efforts to include the study of jazz in a global history of music he is working on together with another six researchers. This is a pretext for the appearance of various jazzmen in the film, such as Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, the latter playing one of the musicologists. The film contains several scenes that can be analysed from a didactic perspective. For instance, a theme by Grieg transformed into a jazz piece, while a summary of jazz history is presented in live performances. The study is completed with an analysis of aspects including the combination of jazz and concert music, and the image of musicology as reflected in the film.

When Did Jazz Go Straight?: a queer question for jazz studies

Scholars in Jazz Studies who seek to analyze sexuality in meaningful ways struggle against a historical legacy of writing saturated by racist and colonialist desires manifest in primitivism, romanticism, and hyper-sexualization. This baggage does not go away when scholars turn their focus to “hidden histories of queer jazz musicians.” This article argues for another tack, to analyze heterosexual norms as social constructions; to understand intersectional analysis as a network of actively changing and contingent categories, and to attend to dynamics of “queering” and “straightening” in historically and culturally specific moments. This article poses the question—“when did jazz go straight?”—not as a literal question that can be answered once and for all, but as a candidate for inclusion in a new and improved “sexuality” compartment of the Jazz Studies toolkit.