Author: Alex Stewart

"New Yorkers' imaginations operate on a large scale," claims Stewart, in their choice of orchestras as well as in other pursuits. This article describes the high level of musicianship, variety, and sheer numbers of big bands operating in the city, and surveys the venerable history of New York big bands beginning in the first decades of the 20th century.

Authors: Brent Hayes Edwards Jed Rasula

This dialogue was initiated by literary journal New Ohio Review between two professors of literature who have explored the meaning of jazz and improvisation for their craft. Rasula and Edwards begin by discussing how they happened to become interested in jazz in the first place and who sparked that interest. From that starting point the conversation ranges to how audiences for jazz may emerge and how communities may form around it (particularly those of various ethnic diaspora). The authors conclude by proposing that all of these communities necessarily coalesce around their own "mythologies."

Author: Lawrence Gushee

Gushee asks whether New Orleans deserves its central place in the story of jazz' origins. He argues that, although ragtime was being "faked" throughout the country by the beginning of the 20th century, it was New Orleans' version that had the most influence on Chicago jazz and early swing that followed in the 1920s. Drawing on a thorough and imaginative command of primary sources, Gushee focuses on New Orleans musicians' distinctive manner of accompanying contemporary dance music to make his point.

Author: Christopher Washburne

Washburne asks why Latin jazz has been overlooked in histories of jazz and lists of canonical works, explores what it has to teach us about jazz on the whole, and provides an invaluable survey of this influential music and its culture.

Author: Eunmi Shim

This chapter of Shim’s biography of Lennie Tristano deals with the pianist’s arrival in New York and his critical and professional reception thereafter. Tristano’s music startled some, confused others, and inspired many more, including protegés Billy Bauer, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh.

Author: Mike Heffley

In 1974, Anthony Braxton was considered a radical among radicals. This was true not least for his distinctive embrace of post-war European avant-garde composition, then assumed to be particularly uncongenial to the average listener's taste. Mike Heffley's liner notes to Braxton's Arista recordings explain how Braxton nevertheless signed on to a label whose roster included what were then jazz's hottest properties and became "the man of jazz' hour." Heffley also remarks on his own personal and political inspiration from Braxton and provides extensive notes on the individual tracks of the Mosaic re-release of the Arista recordings (Mosaic Records #242).

Author: Ben Givan

Analysis of jazz solos has often focused on formal coherence. Proponents of this approach have often tried to establish a parallel to the formal rigor of classical music-and thus to uphold jazz' status as an art form (for example, see Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation). Givan argues that close analysis can be instead be used to highlight not continuity in a jazz solo but discontinuity, which has its own creative and symbolic possibilities. He presents a number of examples from the mercurial style of Belgian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt to illustrate his point.

Author: Gerald Majer

Gerald Majer, a native of Chicago's racially segregated South Side, has written a book about its musical life. The Velvet Lounge combines his personal experiences with the story, or stories, of his community, merging his account of the music and with the difficult conditions that shaped it. The result is an innovative combination of history, subjective experience of that history, and reflection on its meaning-that is, of fact, literature, and criticism. In the chapter posted here, Majer, after evoking the passion and pathos of Ammons' music, constructs a hypothetical but plausible explanation based contemporary oral accounts of the tenor saxophonist's arrest and unusually long jail sentence for drug possession.

In the coming months, JSO will feature more exceprts from The Velvet Lounge on other artists including Sonny Stitt, Wild Bill Davis, Jimmy Smith, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Author: Mark Tucker

Monk and Ellington were kindred spirits: both were profoundly influential composers and wonderfully idiosyncratic pianists. Tucker explores and evaluates Monk's recording of nine Ellington compositions from 1958. Detecting some diffidence in Monk's attitude toward the project, he suggests that the recording may have been designed to position Monk as part of an emerging jazz "mainstream," or middle way between extremes, which was a commercial and critical trend so powerful it swept along even an iconoclast like Monk.

Author: David Chevan

Chevan documents the musical literacy of early jazz musicians in order to debunk romantic notions of "primitivism" in jazz. Even as jazz first emerged as a distinct musical form, its leading musicians had to read music as well as improvise.  Reading music was essential to understand the variety of styles they absorbed and incorporated and to function in any professional situation they found themselves in. Chevan takes an ethnographic approach to his research, drawing on musicians' oral histories to show that neither black nor white jazz musicians of the early 20th century were inspired primitives incapable of adapting to written forms.