Professional Jazz Research Articles

Being a man in dance: socialization modes and gender identities

This essay examines the participation of men in physical activities deemed female. Biographical interviews of 14 professional male jazz and ballet dancers were conducted and analysed to determine the gender-socialization modes that allow men to develop a taste for female activities, and the socialization effects of being in a female world on the gender identity of male dancers. The data provide evidence of a reversed gender-socialization mode within specific family configurations, as found in women who play male sports. The professional socialization of male dancers in a female world is shown to produce specific effects on their gender identity. As ‘feminist’ men, they fight against being stigmatized as homosexual dancers by recognizing gender-related ways of dancing. In addition to this shared characteristic, two forms of gender identity were found, men who want to ‘remain a man’ and men who describe themselves as ‘both feminine and masculine’.

Swing Once More: Relating Timing and Tempo in Expert Jazz Drumming

Swing refers to a characteristic long-short subdivision of the beat that is generally considered a crucial aspect that contributes to the quality of a jazz or pop performance. The current study measures this pattern (referred to as the 'swing ratio') at different tempi in jazz drumming. The experimental setup differs from earlier studies in a number of ways. First, swing ratios were systematically measured at different beat durations in a musically realistic range. Second, repeated performances were collected to check for consistency. Third, drummers were asked to perform on a full MIDI drum kit. The results show that professional jazz drummers have enormous control over their timing. Nevertheless, the swing ratio is not kept constant, but it is systematically adapted to a global tempo. As such, this study provides further support for the hypothesis that expressive timing generally does not scale with tempo.

Jazz musicians: creating service experience in live performance

Purpose – Although music has been indicated by nightclubs and pubs' patrons as the most important service offering, the service marketing literature provides very little guidance on how artists could increase their audience satisfaction with an experiential product such as live music. This paper aims to give a wider understanding of jazz musicians' experience of their role in the creation of live performance.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 12 biographical interviews with 16 professional jazz musicians were completed.Findings – The respondents identified audience, agents and venue owners as important elements of their product; however, they were inclined to see their live performance rather as an experience created by the product itself.Practical implications – As the quality of relationship between musicians and wider business is in need of significant improvement, this paper identified potential sources of misunderstanding in a saturated and highly competitive marketplace. Practical implications...

The parallax of art and commerce

This article adds to art versus commerce debate by introducing the thoughts of eight professional jazz musicians. Our article suggests that other studies of marketing in music are flawed either methodologically (e.g. Kubacki and Croft, 2004) or, more crucially, conceptually (e.g. Holbrook, 2005). We feel that too many discussions have misconceived of the debate by positing art and commerce at opposite ends of a spectrum, allowing for some degree of (theoretical or actual) concord in between. As such musicians are classified as artists, who “sell out” to commerce, or else mere commercial players who have no business calling themselves artists. We argue that the debate of art versus commerce is misconceived: it is not a spectrum but rather a parallax, a space between opposites that cannot be bridged and remains forever apart. The parallax shift is therefore one of perspective, which enables two opposites to co-exist without meeting in the middle. This paper therefore offers fresh insight into current problems identified in arts marketing theory by outlining the thoughts of leading artists themselves. In addition, the paper argues that marketing is an extremely important tool to ensure a sustainable UK jazz scene.

Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation

To investigate the neural substrates that underlie spontaneous musical performance, we examined improvisation in professional jazz pianists using functional MRI. By employing two paradigms that differed widely in musical complexity, we found that improvisation (compared to production of over-learned musical sequences) was consistently characterized by a dissociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex: extensive deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions with focal activation of the medial prefrontal (frontal polar) cortex. Such a pattern may reflect a combination of psychological processes required for spontaneous improvisation, in which internally motivated, stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance. Changes in prefrontal activity during improvisation were accompanied by widespread activation of neocortical sensorimotor areas (that mediate the organization and execution of musical performance) as well as deactivation of limbic structures (that regulate motivation and emotional tone). This distributed neural pattern may provide a cognitive context that enables the emergence of spontaneous creative activity.

Internet Metronome: An Experimental Remote Jazz Jam Session with Uncompressed HDTV Transmission over Lightpaths

SUMMARY An experimental remote jazz jam session with uncompressed HDTV over the Internet was conducted on September 21st as a Grand Final event of the Aichi Exposition 2005. Professional jazz musicians located at the venue of Aichi Exposition and at SARA in Amsterdam have made the jazz jam session with new mechanisms called as “Internet Metronome” and “delay-control unit” using an international “lightpath.” This was the first music collaboration using a new methodology and, one of the challenging demonstrations to transport the uncompressed HDTV streams with timing control under the current software and hardware architectures. “Internet Metronome” and “delay-control unit” enabled to make a tempo using and controlling delay, and “lightpath” minimized the network jitter. Using these new mechanisms and technology, the musicians could play with new music collaboration environment over the Internet with long communication delay, and enjoyed remote jazz jam session at both ends.

Musical identities of professional jazz musicians: a focus group investigation

Views about jazz, and being a jazz musician, were gathered from current Scottish practitioners. Jazz is a uniquely interactive creative practice, dependent on shared practices and meanings. These are inseparable from social and cultural contexts; however, research on musicians’ views has been concentrated on individuals in the USA. This study therefore uses focus group interviewing to access group musical identities in the UK. Reflexive issues of the research procedure are also addressed. Maintaining swing feel and a balance of collective and individual practices emerged as important. Eclectic professional practice created a demanding lifestyle; in this context, the group aspect of jazz is integral to related musical identities. Diverse discourses highlighted the constructed nature of these identities; focus groups are thus a useful method for this field. Consideration of the interview circumstances suggests how these function, and has implications for subsequent research.

Joseph Santini: Divided I Stand

This short story chronicles a professional jazz musician, Joseph Santini, in conflict about whether he should accept a full-time teaching position as a high school music educator. This story focuses, interprets, clarifies, and communicates Joseph’s conflict. It also demonstrates the use of stories for culturally relevant research. Joseph’s experience transcends impressions of musicians and teachers prevalent in the dominant cultural milieu. The story offers a deeper insight into Joseph’s life as he explores teacher education and is guided by his artistic and performative experience. The coda at the end briefly discusses the use of creative nonfiction in research and how it can be a powerful tool to help musicians resolve their conflicts.

Relationship Between Complexity and Liking as a Function of Expertise

The inverted-U hypothesis has much empirical support in the field of experimental aesthetics. This hypothesis predicts that moderately complex art objects should be preferred over very simple or very complex art objects. Although it is tacitly believed that this hypothesis applies to experts, the literature does not contain any convincing studies that demonstrate this as fact. The present study addresses this issue. Professional jazz and bluegrass musicians rated the complexity of and their liking for short, but complete, jazz and bluegrass improvisations. Complexity and liking were operationalized by subjects� judgments on seven-point Likert-like scales. Regressing liking onto complexity did not reveal any evidence for an inverted-U relation for experts. Moreover, no relationship between liking and complexity was found for the jazz musicians; a negative relation was found for the bluegrass musicians, but only when listening to the bluegrass improvisations. Furthermore, by comparing the expert data with a reanalysis of nonexpert data collected in a previous, but identical study, we propose as a first approximation that musical expertise dissolves the relationship between liking and complexity.

The History of Jazz Education: A Critical Reassessment

Most narratives of the history of jazz education seem to reinforce the perceptions of a fundamental distinction between academic and non-academic practices. This essay explores the development of a historical identity for the field of jazz education, and how this historical narrative speaks to the ways in which the field has emerged as a unique cultural system within higher musical education itself. The narrative of history, to this end, serves a distinct purpose, in which such an identity becomes not only one segment of a historical document, but also an instrument in the power-laden relationships which characterize musical study in higher education. Rethinking the History of Jazz Education The relationship between jazz educators and those within the professional jazz community has been, at certain times, a troubling one. In particular, academic jazz programs have often been accused of being too far removed from the traditions of jazz - as these traditions developed through both performance and informal learning situations. In reflecting upon his own experiences as a student in jazz education programs, Keith Javors advances the view that jazz education represents, in some sense, a clash of musical cultures, that of academia and what he terms the indigenous jazz community. He writes that [The] concern for jazz performance programs developed through a colliding of experiences in what I increasingly believe can exemplify two disparate value systems related to jazz performance: that encompassed within professional practice and that encompassed within academia.1 The historical construction of jazz education as represented by documented histories of the field presents a fundamentally diachronic narrative of its

The Jazz Community as an Art World

Just over forty years ago, the American anthropologists Alan Merriam and Raymond Mack published a paper in which they aimed to present ‘…a factual description of what we shall call the jazz community’ (1960: 211). As they recognised, the term ‘community’ is problematic in various ways, but what Merriam and Mack had in mind was that group of people who not only have an interest in jazz, but who display an ‘…extreme identification with and participation in the occupational role and ideology of the professional jazz musician’ (ibid.) They noted the relatively large proportion of the jazz community who were themselves musicians of some kind, ranging from former professionals to occasional amateurs, and, in part because of this, emphasised the extent to which, from a sociological point of view, professional players and their public could be regarded as members of a single group, sharing a particular ideology (ibid: 217). As more recent research has shown (e.g. DeVeaux, 1995), the high proportion of performers within the jazz public has remained a significant characteristic of the jazz scene generally. For the moment however, I want to focus on the central idea developed by Merriam and Mack. In their words: While the jazz community is characterised by a number of distinctive behavior patterns, almost without exception these tend to cluster around one central theme – the isolation of the group from society at large, an isolation which is at once psychological, social, and physical (ibid).

Toward Objective Measurement and Evaluation of Jazz Piano Performance Via MIDI-Based Groove Quantize Templates

The purpose of this study was to (a) objectively measure and analyze performance deviations from mechanical regularity for three jazz pianists via MIDI-based "groove quantize" procedures and (b) measure how experts rate musical examples incorporating these deviations as being representative of the swing style. The "groove quantize" software procedure was used to measure performance deviations from mechanical regularity for (a) note placements (timings), (b) note durations (articulations), and (c) note velocities (dynamics) contained in 281 measures from 33 performances by three professional jazz pianists. Differences among the performers and for relationships between the performance variables and tempi were measured. Performance models or "grooves" were developed representative of each performer's style and a general swing style. For comparison, "mechanical" models were constructed on the basis of mathematical ratios. Forty-two judges rated the "swing representativeness" of an unaltered melody from each pianist and seven variations of each, four based on the derived performance models and three based on the mechanical model. Analysis revealed that four derived performance model variations were rated significantly more representative of the swing style than were the mechanical variations. Swing ratings did not differ significantly between an unaltered melody and variations based on individual performance models for two of the performers, suggesting that they were representative grooves.

John Coltrane: His Life and Music

John Coltrane was a key figure in jazz history, a pioneer in world music, and an intensely emotional force whose following continues to grow. This new biography, the first by a professional jazz scholar and performer, presents a huge amount of never-before-published material, including interviews with Coltrane, documents in his handwriting, photos, genealogical documents, and innovative musical analysis that offers a fresh view of Coltrane's genius. Compiled from scratch with the assistance of dozens of Coltrane's colleagues, friends, and family, John Coltrane: His Life and Music corrects numerous errors from previous biographies. The significant people in Coltrane's life were re-interviewed, yielding new insights; some were interviewed for the first time ever. The musical analysis, which is accessible to the nonspecialist, makes its own revelations - for example, that some of Coltrane's well-known pieces are based on previously unrecognized sources. The appendix is the most detailed chronology of Coltrane's performing career ever compiled, listing scores of previously unknown performances from the 1940s and early 1950s.

Improvisational creativity: An analysis of jazz performance

Abstract: This article addresses the phenomenon of improvisational creativity, taking jazz performance as a prominent example within American culture. A series of interviews were conducted with professional jazz musicians. The interviews focused on creativity and jazz improvisation. Five salient characteristics of jazz improvisation, which distinguish it from compositional creativity, were identified in the interviews. Improvisation and composition are compared and discussed within the context of current creativity theory. Given that most creativity theory has focused on compositional forms of creativity, the analysis of improvisational performance could provide a new perspective on the creative process.

A Professional Jazz Group

A Professional Jazz Group

The relationship between selected scales of the Adjective Check List and musical creativity: A validation study

The purpose of this study was to determine whether personality characteristics associated with creativity in other samples of creative adults would distinguish a group of professional jazz musicians, selected for excellence of improvisational ability, from a group of professional symphonic musicians. A second purpose was to determine whether such differences found between these professional groups would also characterize groups of adolescent jazz and symphonic music students. In this regard, 60 male professional musicians (30 jazz and 30 symphonic) and 60 male student musicians (30 jazz and 30 symphonic) were asked to respond to items of the Adjective Check List (ACL). The ACL failed to distinguish between the jazz and symphonic players at every level of analysis—from two specific creativity scales, through profile analysis, and on down to the item level. These findings raise questions about the generalizability of the ACL creativity scales.