1900-1920s

Magee traces the history of one of the most oft-performed early jazz compositions. He shows that the popularity of Jelly Roll Morton's "King Porter Stomp" was not inevitable, even though it is now frequently found in lists of canonical jazz works. The composition was often overlooked and became featured almost by accident. Magee argues that the eventual adoption and fame of "King Porter Stomp" is a testament to the very real influence and statue of the song's composer, who had claimed hyperbolically to be the "inventor of jazz."

In Playing Ad Lib, musicologist John Whiteoak explores improvisation in music that was never recorded. His evidence consists of print sources and anecdotes from throughout Australia. These include incomplete scores, published execution "methods" (e.g., for playing ragtime), snippets of advertisements, and published stories.

This essay documents the absorption of jazz by the European artistic vanguard between 1910 and 1930. Because of jazz' perceived spontaneous and libidinous qualities, avant-garde artists exploited it as a symbol of modernism "like a decal on a traveler's bag," in turn preparing jazz' appropriation by the world of fashion of that time.

Guthrie Ramsey's Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop explores the lationship between music and African American identity. Surveying an array of black music styles, Ramsey asks how African Americans have identified themselves in music. He draws upon his experience as a jazz and gospel pianist and his family's participation in the Great Migration to generate an ethnographic method that positions family narrative at the intersection of racial identity and musical expression.