1990s to Today

Latin jazz artist and educator Bobby Sanabria and Columbia Professor of Music Chris Washburne discuss the recent elimination of the Latin jazz Category in the Grammy Awards. Surveying a broad panorama of the struggles and many triumphs of Latin jazz through the last century, they consider the implications of the Grammy Award decision for the future of this vibrant and interculturally expressive music.

Click here for Part II.

This talk presents the basic tools of audio signal analysis for music information retrieval, and discusses the prospects for their useful application in jazz music collections. This work is part of a project led by the Center for Jazz Studies to build a collaborative online resource for information on jazz recordings known as J-DISC. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a young field that applies tools from machine learning and signal processing to obtain information about musical items.

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.

Bernstein asks why poets would read their work aloud and what happens when they do. He views the performance of poetry as a "competing realization" of the written work and explores the possibilities for tonal, rhythmic, and phrasing dynamics that performance adds to poetry. That in turn suggests a comparison with jazz performance, and specifically that of Thelonious Monk for his pauses and silences.

Since their emergence from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the 1960s, the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago have created a distinctive multidisciplinary performance practice centered on collective improvisation. In this article, Steinbeck conceptualizes Art Ensemble improvisations as networks of group interactions, and he analyzes an excerpt from a 1972 Art Ensemble concert recording using a phenomenological perspective informed by his conversations with the group about the performance and by my own experience as an improvised-music practitioner.