🎶 September News from the JEN Research Interest Group

Welcome to the September edition of the JEN Research Interest Group newsletter. Below please find a variety of news items, announcements, callouts, new publications, and job opportunities.

We lost some legends during the last few weeks - Ramsey Lewis, Pharoah Sanders, Boston radio’s voice Eric Jackson, Sue Mingus, Ruben Alvarez - below are only a few of the wonderful media remembrances.

The Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice under the direction of Terri Lyne Carrington released a powerful new compilation: New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers. I encourage everyone to order a copy for themselves and their libraries. The music spans a century of music from Lil Hardin Armstrong up to now. I’m honored to have one of my compositions in the collection from my 2018 Sheroes album: Just Another Day in the Office. In addition to the book, Terri Lyne and her colleagues also recorded an initial album of some of the music and other activities include an exhibition at Detroit’s Carr Center as well as educational outreach programs and future recordings. Congratulations to the team for this groundbreaking project!

Our annual meeting of the Jazz Education Network Research Interest Group (JENRing) will be this Friday, September 30, 3pm EST on zoom. Please join us for an hour of networking and planning new initiatives for the Research Committee. Last year we were able to launch the webinar series on the first Fridays of every month. Hopefully this year we will be able to launch the mentoring initiative and start working on more ideas. Please join us at this zoom link.

The conference schedule is published, check it out and make plans to attend January 4-7 in Orlando. Volume 4 of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) is in the editorial process to be published by the 2023 JEN conference. The monthly series of webinars will continue October 7, 3pm EST with Jeff Snedeker - Expanding Comfort Zones and on the first Friday of every month featuring one of the authors published in JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice). The goal of the presentations is to share the findings as well as ideas for practical implementations in the classroom and curricula. Please look for links and invitations to the webinars on the JEN website and Facebook page. They’ll be live streamed on Facebook, but those who register for the zoom webinar will be able to ask questions and interact with the panelists. All previous presentations can be accessed here.
Please feel free to share this news compilation and invite colleagues to join the mailing list and/or Facebook page. Remember to check the updated job listings here. If you have new books/ articles/ dissertations published, send me the info to be included in the newsletter. Also send over ideas on how JENRing can help you in your jazz research and networking. Items of interest related to jazz research may also be shared on the Facebook page.

🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

Expanding Comfort Zones:
An Improvisation Curriculum for Applied Studies
with Dr. Jeff Snedeker

Friday, October 7 • 3pm ET

Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-members)

Join Dr. Jeff Snedeker, Professor of Horn at Central Washington University, for this LIVE webinar that provides an example of how improvisation can be integrated into applied study in a broad sense. It will address obstacles experienced by students who do not have the traditional opportunities to improvise (e.g., a middle school or high school French horn player), and then provide a sequential, progressive curricular approach that encourages all students and their teachers to walk together on a path to wider personal expression and freedom to just play. The improvisation skills addressed are not confined to jazz styles; this webinar will first address improvisation in a general sense and then show how jazz styles can be included. This webinar is directed at all teachers, but especially applied teachers who are concerned about how improvisation can be included in applied study.

Plus a Q & A with the live audience.

A presentation from the Jazz Education Research and Practice Journal, a publication of the Jazz Education Network.

PLEASE NOTE:

JEN Members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join the Zoom Room.

Non-members & youth (under 18) members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join via Facebook Live. Click here for membership information.

For the first half of the 20th century, jazz musicians would interpret the popular music of the age, with Tin Pan Alley hits, Broadway showtunes, blues songs and Latin dance numbers providing the basis for every jazz musician’s set list. But by the mid-60s, many jazz musicians felt cut adrift by the ascent of rock’n’roll, Motown and the British invasion. Almost uniquely among jazz musicians, Ramsey Lewis – who died this week aged 87 – didn’t see this as a problem. Instead of just revisiting the showtunes of previous decades, his piano trio would play the hits of the day, setting each one to a funky backbeat. It proved enormously successful.

“I always thought it was a shame when jazz stopped being a music you could dance to,” said Lewis. “It’s why we always liked to feature a few butt-shakers and toe-tappers.” In 1965, after a recommendation from a waitress in a Washington DC coffee shop, his trio took a Motown-style Top 20 hit by Dobie Gray called The In Crowd and played it in a DC club called the Bohemian Caverns. The recording of that performance was released as a 7in single and, amazingly for a jazz instrumental, it entered the US Top 5 and sold 1m copies. You can hear the audience whooping, cheering, singing and clapping along. “They were literally dancing in the aisles,” said Lewis. “I love how an audience can completely transform a performance like that.”

Live radio is the most ephemeral of media. But its resonances are unpredictable.

When you are an on-air host, you sit in the studio, say what you think is appropriate or witty or profound into the mic, fire the CD player or the computer file, and wonder. Your words go off into the ether. You never know who is listening. And the later your shift is, the more you wonder if ANYONE is listening.

You rarely think you’re doing something that anyone will remember.

I have been astounded when people I’ve never met before say, “I remember you. What did you call that show? Spaces? I loved that theme song you played.”

It’s been 40 years since I did my last jazz show on the radio, and people still remember my paltry 10 years. How many more people did Eric Jackson touch in his four decades on WGBH?

How many tens of thousands now keep Eric Jackson’s voice alive in their hearts? You’re one of them, aren’t you? You can hear his voice right now if you listen with your inner ear.

Pharoah Sanders, the revered American jazz saxophonist, has died aged 81. The news was confirmed by Sanders’ label, Luaka Bop, on Twitter.

“We are devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away,” the label’s statement read.

“He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace.”

Born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940, Sanders’ career began in Oakland, California. After moving to New York in the 1960s, he started collaborating with Sun Ra, before becoming a member of John Coltrane’s band; Sanders played with Coltrane until the latter’s death in 1967.

Along with Coltrane, Sanders was a key figure in the spiritual jazz scene. His 1969 album Karma, which incorporated influences from traditional African and south Asian music, is considered one of the major early documents of the form. Throughout the early 1970s, Sanders continued to release records as a bandleader, largely on the Impulse! label. In 1971, he performed on Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, another milestone in modal and avant garde jazz.
After leaving Impulse! in 1973, Sanders released albums on Arista and the avant garde jazz label India Navigation, before releasing a run of records on the Theresa label in the 1980s.

Although his output began to slow in the 90s, Sanders continued to tour and collaborate throughout the 2000s. In the mid-2010s, Sanders heard a composition by the British electronic producer Sam Shepherd, AKA Floating Points, and asked to collaborate with him. The resulting album, 2021’s Promises, recorded in 2019 with the London Symphony Orchestra, was Sanders’ first new album in more than a decade, and was widely acclaimed.

Paying tribute to Sanders on Instagram, Shepherd wrote: “My beautiful friend passed away this morning. I am so lucky to have known this man, and we are all blessed to have his art stay with us forever. Thank you Pharoah.”

Co-edited by Adrienne Callander, University of Arkansas and Johanna K. Taylor, Arizona State University

Submission Deadline: March 1, 2023

Arts entrepreneurs are continually reinventing their creative practice, the spaces in which that can happen, and the types of collaborators they engage along the way. Not only are arts entrepreneurs expanding platforms of connection with consumers and audiences, they are also innovating new ways of working that impact larger social, economic, and political structures. The papers in this issue will explore how and where arts entrepreneurship happens in our contemporary society beyond expected models.

Papers could address: new business structures beyond the 501(c)3; financial models such as social impact investing; new technologies changing how and where art entrepreneurs operate such as NFTs and blockchain; activism as structural transformation; institutional critique as entrepreneurial action; expanded fields which are collaborating with artists, from government to science; new cooperative models uniting artists in their individual goals; artists intentionally leveraging their creative practices in non-art spaces as consultants.

Contact special issue co-editors Adrienne Callander (ahcallan@uark.edu) and Johanna K. Taylor (johanna.taylor@asu.edu) with any questions.

Submit your article through the Artivate Authors’ page.

Music & Politics in the Moment (M&PITM) is currently accepting articles for our third biannual publication on the theme of music and identity. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2022.
Music has the potential to create profound connections to the formation and performance of identity, often reflecting myriad contemporary social tensions and communicating individuals’ personal notions of inclusion/exclusion, social belonging, and positionality. In this curated collection, we seek perspectives on the relationship between music—as performance, composition, analysis, as an object for listening, and any other form of musicking—and various expressions of identity. Possible topics could include how music can actively influence the formation of identities, how it relates to one’s own identity, how it communicates feelings of (non-)belonging relating to personal identities, how it can be a result of personal experiences of identity, or any other topic relating to the connection between music and identity.

Music & Politics in the Moment is a space for discussion on pressing contemporary events and music. It is an open-access website led by graduate students and designed as an excursus to Music & Politics, but with a particular emphasis on present-day politics. Its areas of interest include, but are not limited to, “the impact of politics on the lives of musicians and musical communities, music as a form of political discourse, the influences of ideology on musical historiography, and pedagogical issues and strategies pertaining to the study of music and politics in the classroom.” M&PITM negotiates the dual issues of accessibility in academia and the need for a timely avenue for critical conversation by taking the form of an open-access web-based journal.

M&PITM addresses pressing contemporary issues that would, in a typical journal publication process, lose their timeliness. Alongside blog posts that are accepted on a rolling basis, informal articles for the biannual, themed publication (such as the one advertised here) will be selected by our editorial board, which includes graduate students in the departments of ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and music theory at the University of Michigan and other affiliated scholars.

Establishing an intersection between the fields of traditional music studies, English folk music history and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this book responds to the problematic emphasis on cultural identity in the way traditional music is understood and valued.

Williams locates the roots of contemporary definitions of traditional music, including UNESCO-designated intangible cultural heritage, in the theory of English folk music developed in 1907 by Cecil Sharp. Through a combination of Deleuzian philosophical analysis and historical revision of England’s folk revival of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Williams makes a compelling argument that identity is a restrictive ideology that runs counter to the material processes of traditional music’s production. Williams reimagines Sharp’s appropriation of Darwinian evolutionary concepts, asking what it would mean today to say that traditional music ‘evolves’, in light of recent advances in evolutionary theory. The book ultimately advances a concept of traditional music that eschews the term’s long-standing ontological and axiological foundations in the principle of identity.

For scholars and graduate students in musicology, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, the book is an ambitious and provocative challenge to entrenched habits of thought in the study of traditional music and the historiography of England’s folk revival.

"Listening to Iris Murdoch’s focus on the sonic, which in literary criticism is often treated like a poor relation to the visual, is most welcome. Through perceptive close readings, Gillian Dooley uses the lens of music, sound and silence to draw out gender, sexuality, Irish politics, domestic conflict and much more in Murdoch’s novels. It will delight Murdoch fans but will also be of great interest to those who are attentive to sound studies and the relationship of music to literature."
—Hazel Smith, Author of The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship, Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University

"In this sensitive and insightful analysis of music and Iris Murdoch, Gillian Dooley certainly broadens the field of Murdoch scholarship but also demonstrates the rich and beautiful possibilities when one opens one's eyes, heart, mind and ears to the lyricism, musicality, and silences in Murdoch's work."
—Lucy Bolton, author of Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (2019)

When we think of Iris Murdoch’s relationship with art forms, the visual arts come most readily to mind. However, music and other sounds are equally important. Soundscapes – music and other types of sound – contribute to the richly textured atmosphere and moral tenor of Murdoch’s novels. This book will help readers to appreciate anew the sensuous nature of Iris Murdoch’s prose, and to listen for all kinds of music, sounds and silences in her novels, opening up a new sub-field in Murdoch studies in line with the emerging field of Word and Music Studies.
This study is supported by close readings of selected novels exemplifying the subtle variety of ways she deploys music, sounds and silence in her fiction. It also covers Murdoch’s knowledge of music and her allusions to music throughout her work, and includes a survey of musical settings of her words by various composers.