🎶 October News from the JEN Research Interest Group

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

With my new position as Professor for Artistic Research at the Jam Music Lab University in Vienna I’m co-hosting a conference February 23-25 of the International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz at the Jam Music Lab University. The conference will also be in hybrid format for those who are not able to travel to Vienna, the call for proposals is below in the callouts and at https://artisticjazzresearch.com/.

I hope to see many of you in Orlando, January 4-7 for the annual JEN conference. Please remember that the research presentations will be on Wednesday, January 4 only and poster presentations on Thursday, January 5, so plan your travel time accordingly. I will organize a JENRing BYO dinner meetup in the evening of January 4 as a networking opportunity, look for details in the November newsletter and let me know if you’re interested so I can get a preliminary count on what to reserve for.

JAZZ Volume 4 will be available at the JEN conference with a host of exciting new articles. This will be the last edition under my editorship as I will pass on the lead to Martin Norgaard at Georgia State University. JEN members have access to reading the JAZZ articles for free on the JEN website, but also have access for a discounted yearly subscription to the print or electronic edition for $15 through the IU Press website.

The monthly series of webinars will continue November 4, EST with David Detweiler - Treatments of the ii-V7-I Chord Progression in Jazz Improvisation 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 🎶

Treatments of the ii - V7 - I Chord in Jazz Improvisation
with Dr. David Detweiler

Friday, November 4 • 3pm ET

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

Join Dr. David Detweiler, Assistant Professor of Jazz Saxophone at Florida State University, as he explores treatments of the ii-V7-I chord progression in jazz improvisation. The art of jazz improvisation demands that jazz performers create musical ideas in real time based on the harmonic and melodic structure of a song. Jazz musicians are fortunate to have access to recordings made by noteworthy artists of the past and therefore can listen to and study the recordings of the jazz masters. The study and transcription of the jazz masters is crucial in understanding the art of improvisation. This presentation will show how master jazz performers Hank Mobley, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon use the ii-V7-I chord progression in improvisational practice. This chord progression is essential to jazz improvisation and has been handled by jazz musicians in many different ways. The proposed compilation of ii-V7-I improvisatory phrases will include a brief analysis of each idea. These analyses will display the artists’ similarities and differences in personal style.

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.

The podcast series, Jazz Backstory, is based on the holdings of the Fillius Jazz Archive located at Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York. Established in 1995, and dedicated in 2013 in honor of Milton F. Fillius, Jr. ’44 and Nelma “Nikki” Nenneau Fillius, the Fillius Jazz Archive holds a collection of over 440 videotaped interviews with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers and producers. The wide-ranging collection includes interviews with sidemen, soloists and band leaders who have performed from the 1920s through the present.

Jazz Backstory podcast episodes will feature interview excerpts focused on topics inherent to the creative life. Artists, both famous and unsung, relate these tales in their own jazz inflected vocabulary. Original music and commentary from the host help set the tone, both educational and swinging.

Monk Rowe, creator of the podcast series, Jazz Backstory, and the Joe Williams Director of the Fillius Jazz Archive, conducted the majority of the interviews and has presented programs about the resource at conferences for the Jazz Education Network, the Music Library Association, and the International Society of Music Educators. Monk co-authored with Romy Britell the book Jazz Tales From Jazz Legends on Hamilton’s Couper Press and created the edX online course, “Jazz: The Music, The Stories, The Players” in collaboration with members of the Library and Instructional Technology Services at Hamilton College. He is an active performer on saxophone and piano and has composed numerous works for both jazz and classical ensembles.

If the Fates of Jazz oversaw an accounting service that charted advanced metrics like the album that the most people had fallen in love with first, it’s a safe assumption that Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue would be at the top of the graphic. Not long after its release on August 17, 1959, it had already settled into its celestial slot as a record, the record, you could not be without. To precisely no one’s surprise, it appears and reappears on countless best-of lists, including JazzTimes’ recent online compendium of the 1950s’ top 10 jazz albums. We all know that person in possession of one jazz album, and this is, more often than not, it; or that hipster type who will solely, and can only, cite what became Davis’ most famous date, in a career of well-known dates, cited when the hipster is on a different kind of date, and it is time to get deep and impress a lady.

This is both good and bad. Davis buffs love to debate each other on the merits of the highly variegated components of his discography. Are you a First Great Quintet person or do you favor Great Quintet #2? Cool jazz or molten fusion? Proto-funk or slabby funk? But for the non-hardcore Davis people, Kind of Blue can function as a sort of trap, much like The Great Gatsby does for F. Scott Fitzgerald or Citizen Kane for Orson Welles. Items billed as THE BEST EVER can stop us cold, and even cause us to take them for granted, never reassessing them. Instead we gesture, often without thought, to where they sit in the corner, under a halo and backdrop of blue ribbons.

What does it mean to be a female musician in Japan in the 21st century? How do femininities and masculinities get performed, represented, transgressed, erased, and transformed on the musical stage? Are there musical genres which are more open to women, queer or non-binary people? How gendered are musical scenes, whether very commercial or not? If so, how does it work out within the musical industry?

A hyper-gendered norm remains dominant in the Japanese popular music sphere as illustrated by the popular figures of female idols. And this gendered norm is also to be found in the pre-war and post-war period with the development of music industry in Modern Japan. But more and more Japanese female and male, queer and non-binary people create new ways to play music transgressing gendered norms in contemporary Japan.

This seminar aims at questioning the presence of Japanese female, male, queer and non-binary musicians in popular and classical music in Japan. Along which processes has a hyper-gendered norm been trenched in the Japanese music industry? How do female musicians deal with those gendered restraints to enter the musical field? Do some confidential popular music styles enable women, queer or non-binary people to defy gendered expectations? How do masculinities and femininities get performed and transgressed in the daily interaction, how are they represented in the media as well as in discourses? How do gender, race and social class intersect when it comes to the Japanese musical sphere? Based on ten empirical studies conducted in Japan in many musical genres - rock, classical, jazz, J-pop, hip hop, tango and hardcore - this seminar will examine how Japanese female, male, queer and non-binary musicians construct their social positions and representations along gendered norms while also at times transgressing or subverting them. Inviting scholars who work in Japan, in Poland, in England, in France, in Switzerland and in the USA, this seminar will also be an opportunity to ask a more general question: how does Japan compare to other countries when it comes to assessing ways gendered norms are played out in the musical sphere?

This seminar will be held on-line, in English, and can be attended upon free registration at the link above.

Here is a litmus test for anyone looking to gauge their exposure to viral jazz. What's your favorite dance move from the "I'm Tight" video by Louis Cole? Perhaps you're partial to the simplicity of the "RIDLEY SCOTTZ," or its more kinetic variation, the "STEPPIN' RIDLEYZ." Or maybe you're more of a conceptual "HEIMLICHZ" type. Now, if your answer to the prompt is "What the hell are you talking about?" — then congratulations, you don't appear to have been seriously exposed. But that doesn't mean you're immune.

Cole is a stupefyingly proficient multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer and trickster whose bracing new album, Quality over Opinion, releases this Friday on Brainfeeder. He's been a major player in the musical online attention economy for the better part of a decade, as a solo act and as one-half of Knower, with singer-songwriter and producer Genevieve Artadi. Together with virtuoso oddballs like MonoNeon, an electric bass whiz and vocal funkateer, and DOMi & JD Beck, a sly keys-and-drums duo repping mayhem in the rhythm matrix, Cole stands at the center of a cohort whose identifying traits are easy to recognize and harder to define. Many of these musicians have at least a tangential connection to Thundercat, the bassist and falsetto warbler whose interstellar jazz-R&B has been a defining Brainfeeder trademark. Like him, they're known for jaw-dropping technical ability, jazz-inflected genre fluidity and an irreverent yet allusive savvy regarding image and platform. At this disorienting moment in our age of digital exchange, they can sometimes seem like the only ones who've gleefully cracked the code.

A few months ago, pianist and composer Vijay Iyer coined a good handle for this new musical phenotype. Taking to Twitter, he wrote: "latest subgenre: 'viral jazz'," adding a parenthetical: "(I don't think the term exists, but the music definitely does)." Iyer, who comes into regular contact with developing musicians at the conservatory level, took care not to name names or issue value judgments, then or since. But there's a set of natural assumptions to be made here, including the idea that even as viral jazz plays by its own rules, the style (if one can call it a style) has been bleeding over into mainstream jazz discourse (if one can call it jazz). DOMi & JD Beck — who recently released their debut album, NOT TiGHT, through an alliance between Anderson .Paak's unprintably named label, APES*** INC., and the venerable Blue Note Records — were ubiquitous on the jazz festival circuit this summer, while managing to squeeze in a Tiny Desk concert. For the next few weeks, they'll be flooring young crowds across the country on an 18-city tour.

Third Conference, February 23–25, 2023, Vienna

Call for Proposals

The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ), founded in 2019, will host its Third Conference, February 23–25, 2023, at the JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music, Vienna. The aim of the group’s conferences is to strengthen its network and establish a platform for advocacy for artistic research in jazz and popular music. The methodology of embodied research is still fairly new in jazz and popular music genres and INARJ was founded with the mission to establish guidelines and resources for the field. The specific goal for the third conference is to discuss and experiment with questions of methodology, rigor, knowledge exchange, and positioning. Some conference sessions will be provided in hybrid format, however we encourage participants to plan on in-person attendance for more effective engagement in discussions and projects. Presentations should address one of the following areas in the form of discussion forums, project presentations, or performance sessions.

Research of versus research with.
Is there/should there be a distinction between using practice as a vehicle to articulate and disseminate research findings solely through the medium of performance or applied projects compared to more traditional research methods that disseminate knowledge generated by practice through transcriptions text? In the case of the latter, what is the distinction between this and more traditional forms of musicology?

Demonstrating ‘rigor’ in improvised music.
How can we demonstrate and assess the rigor of research that uses improvisation as a central component? Is it possible to formulate quality guidelines? How can we position research with improvised and popular music genres in the field of Artistic Research with the goal of inclusion in the Frascati Manual?

Knowledge exchange via improvised music practice.
If we are to align ourselves with the broader field of jazz studies, what are ways to effectively communicate the knowledge gained from artistic research? What might those modes of communication be? How can artistic research methods be incorporated in jazz pedagogy and higher education curricula?

Value/application of knowledge to the wider research community.
How can we better ensure rigor and mediating between artistic research and the potentially subjective nature of artistic practice and improvisation practice? For a potential journal, what should be guidelines and review practices to ensure rigor but provide for the applied and creative nature of the research?

To contribute, please send a 250-word summary of your proposed presentation, and a brief biographical statement of 50 words to monika.herzig@jammusiclab.com by 30.11.2022. Proposals will be reviewed by the convenors and participants will be notified by 21.12.2022. Proposals should be positioned in one of the four discussion areas above and can be in the following categories:

Presentations - 20-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of Q&A and discussion
Performance Projects - 20 minute projects followed by 10 minutes of Q&A and discussion.

Projects can be shared via recorded materials or live. For live performances, the room allows for a basic combo setup with keyboard, bass and guitar amps, and drum set. However, it is not possible to allow for rehearsal time and space.

For further information please visit www.artisticjazzresearch.com Or contact monika.herzig@jammusiclab.com.

Fountains Failures Futures: The afterlives of public art- Call for contributions to symposium
Research and discussion of public art frequently focuses on conditions of emergence and production for public works. This symposium starts at the other end – thinking about the afterlives of public art with respect to processes of decline, decay, acts of reparation and reimagination, transformation and change. We are interested in questions of sustainability, custodianship and whether “failed” works can be revitalised and thought anew; how this raises implications for their authorship and ownership, and what challenges it presents for commissioners, artists, architects, and urban designers. How can producers, owners and custodians of public artworks and the communities and publics living with these works anticipate and accommodate complex afterlives of public art?

Our research draws connections to contemporary processes of revision and contestation of historic monuments. We relate these tensions to other, seemingly benign, artistic objects situated in city squares, urban parks, on redeveloped waterfronts and university campuses––objects that are often commissioned without consultation and with intentions of permanence or longevity. We also want to consider the changing terms through which futures are imagined – from progress narratives of the modern to crisis narratives of climate change – and what the implications are for commissioning public artworks and their evolution in the design of public space.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: We welcome case study contributions that help navigate the questions and complexities outlined above. Expressions of interest should be submitted as a short proposal (500 words with 2-3 images) together with a brief bio (150 words) to maddie.leach@hdk-valand.gu.se .

Submission deadline: 30 November 2022

Confirmed speakers include:
Lisa Le Feuvre - Inaugural Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New Mexico, USA, and previous Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute. Editor of the Documents of Contemporary Art edition Failure (2010).

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe - Associate Professor in Art History at Stockholm University and researcher on public art, sculpture, and feminist historiography.

Jes Fernie - Independent curator, writer, and initiator of the online resource Archive of Destruction – a research platform about public artworks that have been destroyed by rage, boredom, fear, greed and love.

Patrick Amsellem - Director of the Public Art Agency Sweden and former Director of Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art in Lund.

RESEARCH CONTEXT
This symposium is realized as part of a four-year research project called The fountain: An art-technological-social drama. Funded through Sweden’s Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS), it initiates a recommitment to a substantially state-funded public artwork after a 25-year hiatus, proposing a case study for the reimagination of a public object.
Our subject LTH-fontänen / The LTH Fountain was the collaborative vision of Swedish architect Klas Anshelm and sculptor Arne Jones. Inaugurated in 1970 at Lund Technical University, it was anticipated as a modern “artistic-technological cathedral of steel, glass and water without parallel in the world”. Yet LTH-fontänen proved frustrating as a fountain: leaking, fracturing and never effectively carrying water. Today it remains inert on campus; neither artwork nor ruin.

Some have suggested that we understand artworks retrospectively––fifty years on, what collective meaning does LTH-fontänen activate in changed social conditions? With a raft of nick-names, including “Laxtrappan”, “Döda fallet” and "Fontana di Träti", its cost and subsequent failures have been a source of ridicule and urban myth. As a creative endeavour, LTH-fontänen is not alone in falling short of its creators and commissioners’ ambitions, however it is unusual for having survived fifty years as a largely unrealised project. It offers us a unique platform from which to address broader questions of cultural heritage, duration and change in the design of public spaces, and the role of art works within them. Through this symposium, we wish to consider other cases of public artworks and commissions that raise similar and related issues.

The call is open for all artists and artist-researchers, regardless of the institutional or freelance status, mode of practice or medium. You can apply for only one of the three programmes. The deadline for the applications is 31 October 2022.

The Research Pavilion is an international and cross-institutional platform for processes, discussions, and collaborations in the field of artistic research, coordinated by the University of the Arts Helsinki. The fifth Uniarts Helsinki Research Pavilion will host a series of artist and artist-researcher residencies during spring 2023 and will culminate in an on-location event in June 2023 in Helsinki, Finland.

Uniarts Helsinki organises the residencies in cooperation with Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP) and the Saari Residence maintained by the Kone Foundation.

The call for the spring residencies is now open. There are three different residency locations in Finland: HIAP in Suomenlinna, Helsinki 17.4.–17.7.2023, the Saari Well in Mynämäki 16.–28.5.2023 as well as Kallio-Kuninkala in Järvenpää 8.–14.5. and 15.–21.5.2023.

One person or group can apply to only one of the three residencies. At the end of the page you will find the link to the application guide and from there to the application forms.

The Research Pavilion #5 aims to emphasize the continuum between experimental artistic practice and artistic research, as well as create spaces and opportunities for pluralistic research-oriented work within the arts. The residencies are open to all artists and artist-researchers, regardless of the institutional or freelance status, mode of practice or medium.

The tagline for the Research Pavilion #5 is “Puzzled Together” framed by our current global challenges: the ecological sustainability crisis, post-pandemic reconstruction and geopolitical tensions. Puzzled Together conveys the idea of artistic thinking is intrinsically characterised by pluralism and the capacity to create connections, giving art and artistic research a substantial potential for making a stand within the current situation.

The Research Pavilion #5 seeks to identify and reinforce underexposed areas of artistic research through collaborative processes and develop the ideas and agencies that emerge from therein.

Musicology Australia is now calling for submissions for consideration for our 2023 issues. Submissions are accepted at any time, and contributors are not required to write on Australian music or be Australian-based.

Musicology Australia is the scholarly journal of the Musicological Society of Australia. Since its inception in 1963, the journal has published articles on all aspects of music research, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music, indigenous music practices, jazz, theory and analysis, organology, performance practice, contemporary music and psychology of music.

Articles should normally be 6000-10,000 words (including footnotes and/or references), though shorter and longer articles will be considered. Solicited and unsolicited book reviews (2000 words) and review articles (4000 words) are considered for publication. All research articles are subjected to double-blind peer review.

The 13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research will take place from 30 June till 3 July 2022, for the first time in Germany at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The conference will consist of a 24-hour online event and three days of live, on-site events in Weimar. The SAR 2022 conference will present the state of the art in Artistic Research, as critically responding to the Frascati Manual and the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research: excellent research through means of high-level artistic practice and reflection; an epistemic inquiry, directed towards increasing knowledge, insight, understanding and skills. The declaration also states that artistic research fulfils the five criteria for research as defined in the OECD framework document for research, the Frascati Manual. With this document, the artistic research community has taken an important step towards a broader recognition of artistic research worldwide. The SAR 2022 conference program will give special attention to creating spaces of inclusivity and diversity. Submissions from BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), persons with disabilities, and from LGBTQIA+ communities are especially encouraged.

A Life In Music - A Chronicle is the story of Wulf Müller, a music fan with a preference for jazz and rock, and speaks about the songs, albums and artists in his lifetime. Written in form of a chronicle, its starts in 1955 and ends in early 2022, after Müller’s retirement from the music business.

From being an enthusiastic listener, he became a record business executive who worked with the Who Is Who of pop and jazz, helping countless artists to get their music heard. From his beginnings in Vienna at PolyGram, to working in London for Universal Music International and finally running OKeh Records for Sony Classical from his office in Madrid, the artist at all times stood at the centre of his activities.

Whether it was in marketing or A&R, Müller always had a global perspective and was open to new and experimental music. He calls many global jazz artists his friends and is a respected lecturer to young musicians.

After spending over 35 years in the music business, he has a lot of stories to tell – about the artists, how the business works and about personal experiences. From Sting to Ornette Coleman, from Status Quo and Deep Purple to Pat Metheny, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Chick Corea, all these artists played a role in his life. He left his marks first on the Austrian and then the Global jazz scene and was directly involved in the making and release of over 100 recordings.

Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister’s guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge.

King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (some 15,000 concerts in 90 countries over nearly 60 years)—in some real way his means of escaping his past. Several of his concerts, including his landmark gig at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, endure in legend to this day. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of color.

Daniel de Visé has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King’s inner circle—family, band members, retainers, managers, and more—and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby “Blue” Bland simply called “the man.”

This volume is a collection of miscellaneous essays never published before on Miles Davis, a milestone of jazz music’s history. The essays are heterogeneous and connected by the person of Davis as a trait d’union. Many aspects of his figure are analyzed: the vocal idioms by Miracle Amah; the cultural impact and racial issues by William Alderman; the positive or negative legacy on the posterity by Anthony Cincotta; the ability to use the influence of other cultures to create art by Gregorio Maria Paone; and how the media nowadays see Miles, by Afroditi Mitsopoulou.

What is immediately evident is that no matter from which angle you are looking at Miles, his figure will always be grand and almost impossible to ignore.

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard—and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop’s rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen.

In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City’s other boroughs, and beyond—from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.

Abrams has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop’s infancy, Edward “Duke Bootee” Fletcher describing the origins of “The Message,” DMC narrating his role in introducing hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A’s breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee recalling his Grammys boycott, and countless more key players. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music.

The Come Up is an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world—and an essential contribution to music history.