Books and Writings

Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album

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.

URL: 
BMRJ Web site

Discontinuity in the Music of Django Reinhardt

Author: 
Ben Givan
Current Musicology

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.

Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz

Author: 
Christopher Washburne
Current Musicology

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. He argues that the persistent and varied influence of Latin jazz is inconvenient for standard unilinear accounts of jazz' history, but that it ought to be included in the name of diversity and the central role that principle plays in the creation and renewal of jazz.

The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz

Author: 
Lawrence Gushee
Black Music Research Journal

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.

URL: 
BMRJ Web site

The History, Myths, Values and Practices of Jazz Journalists

Author: 
Howard Mandel

Mandel offers his thoughts about the calling of the jazz journalist and critic: the skills the work requires, the responsibilities it entails, and how it enriches our experience of the music. He sees his craft as a difficult, even elusive quest: "jazz journalists . . . are so struck by the glories and multiple dimensions of the art as to need to struggle to describe what we perceive, and to understand our reactions to the sensations."

URL: 
Jazz Research Journal Web site

Tripping on Wires: The Wireless Body: Who is Improvising?

Author: 
Pauline Oliveros
Critical Studies in Improvisation

"We are in the transhuman age," declares composer Pauline Oliveros, referring to the extension of human capabilities through technology. Oliveros tells how her own early improvisations with tape recording and editing anticipated many current creative uses of sound technology, and asks how further advances will bring new tools to experiment with and new realms to explore.

URL: 
Critical Studies in Improvisation Web site

Musical-Verbal Performance and the Negotiation of Ethnically Segregated Social Space

Author: 
T.M. Scruggs
Current Musicology

In "'Come on in North Side, you're just in time': Musical-Verbal Performance and the Negotiation of Ethnically Segregated Social Space," Scruggs explores the ways that tenor saxophonist Von Freeman used both music and speech to create a sense of community and shared tradition through his performances at Chicago's Enterprise Lounge during the 1970s and 1980s.

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