News, callouts, conferences, jobs, and more...

March 2023

Friends,

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

Get ready to submit the 2024 conference applications, open April 1-30 on the JEN website for JEN members. For research presentations, consider offering a presentation and poster presentation to increase chances of acceptance.

Also, submissions to Volume 5 of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) are open until May 1 on the JAZZ portal. Articles, case studies, quick hits, reviews, are all welcome and the editorial team is happy to help and answer questions, contact Martin Norgaard or Monika Herzig. JAZZ Volume 4 is published, you can purchase copies with your JEN membership discount for $15 here.  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. Please make sure your school library has a subscription to JAZZ.

JENRing Mentoring is under way! Mentors and Mentees interested in participating in the JENRing Mentoring Initiative may sign up at this link. We are seeking mentors with experience in publishing peer-reviewed articles or books to assist those seeking mentoring for their research projects, particularly with an emphasis on writing for our Jazz Education in Research and Practice journal. Mentor/Mentee sign up sheets and mentoring guidelines will also be available in the research room at the JEN Conference in Orlando. Questions may be directed to Dr. Tish Oney, JENRing mentoring chair, at tishoney@gmail.com. Thank you for your support of JEN's new mentoring initiative!

The monthly series of webinars will continue on April 14, 3pm EST  with Kim Teal - Highlighting Collaboration in the Music History Classroom Through the Duke Ellington Orchestra 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/orFacebook page. Remember to check the updated job listingshere. 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.

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair

Newsletter Sections

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🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

Highlighting Collaboration in the Music History Classroom Through the Duke Ellington Orchestra
with Kim Teal

Friday, April 14 • 3pm ET
Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-Members)

In order to strengthen perceptions of jazz as high art, early jazz criticism, and later the young field of jazz studies, often presented Duke Ellington as a remarkably strong individual composer. While this narrative served an important twentieth-century purpose in celebrating his art in particular and the broader arenas of jazz and African American music in a cultural environment that often positioned such music as primitive, unrefined, or overly commercial, it bears revisiting in a twenty-first-century context, especially as it does not easily account for Ellington’s well documented practice of collaborative composition. This project explores how Ellington’s music can can be used to teach jazz history students about the role of community, collaboration, loss, and healing in Ellington's musical practices through close readings of works as performed before and after the deaths of featured Ellington Orchestra members. It draws on multiple recordings of various solos in reference to the soloists’ written part books housed in the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian to tease out the relationship between Ellington’s written and sounding music. In this context, Ellington’s reliance on the creativity of others will be revisited as a strength rather than a liability, an aspect of Ellington’s musicianship that allowed him and his orchestra to survive and flourish and one that makes them more human and relatable for contemporary audiences, explaining rather than diminishing the strength that has afforded them a place in the canon.

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.

Have a question you don't see covered above? Once registered, you will be invited to submit any questions you would like answered.

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.

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NEWS

A Dave Brubeck Cantata Boasts Star Soloists: His Sons

“The Gates of Justice,” a large-scale 1969 choral work about relations between Black and Jewish Americans, is being performed in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — “Want to give us a blast?” the bassist Chris Brubeck asked the young woman in a music studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Wednesday morning.

Remy Ohara lifted a long, corkscrewing shofar to her lips and blew a resonant call. Brubeck had brought a few other shofars with him as options, but it was clear from the moment Ohara, a sophomore trumpet student, started playing that this one had what he was looking for.

The call of a shofar, the ancient instrument usually made from a ram’s horn and best known for its use in Jewish worship, opens “The Gates of Justice,” a grand 1969 choral cantata by the eminent jazz musician Dave Brubeck, Chris’s father.

On Sunday and Tuesday, U.C.L.A. will present the work — with Chris and two of his brothers, Darius and Dan, forming the central jazz trio — as the main offering of a series of events devoted to the intersection of music and social justice, and to finding common cause between Black and Jewish communities in America.

Wayne Shorter, Innovator During an Era of Change in Jazz, Dies at 89

Wayne Shorter, the enigmatic, intrepid saxophonist who shaped the color and contour of modern jazz as one of its most intensely admired composers, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 89.

His publicist, Alisse Kingsley, confirmed his death, at a hospital. There was no immediate information on the cause.

Mr. Shorter had a sly, confiding style on the tenor saxophone, instantly identifiable by his low-gloss tone and elliptical sense of phrase. His sound was brighter on soprano, an instrument on which he left an incalculable influence; he could be inquisitive, teasing or elusive, but always with a pinpoint intonation and clarity of attack.

His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.

He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.

Mr. Shorter wrote his share of compositions that became jazz standards, like “Footprints,” a coolly ethereal waltz, and “Black Nile,” a driving anthem. Beyond his book of tunes, he was revered for developing and endlessly refining a modern harmonic language. His compositions, sleek and insinuating, can convey elegant ambiguities of mood. They adhere to an internal logic even when they break the rules.

His recorded output as a leader, especially during a feverishly productive stretch on Blue Note Records in the mid-1960s — when he made “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several others, all post-bop classics — compares favorably to the best winning streaks in jazz.

An Open Letter To The Next Generation Of Artists – by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter

Below is the introduction to Herbie and Wayne’s powerful message to young musicians: follow the link above to access the entire letter.

To the Next Generation of Artists,

We find ourselves in turbulent and unpredictable times.

From the horror at the Bataclan to the upheaval in Syria and the senseless bloodshed in San Bernardino, we live in a time of great confusion and pain. As an artist, creator and dreamer of this world, we ask you not to be discouraged by what you see but to use your own lives, and by extension your art, as vehicles for the construction of peace.

While it’s true that the issues facing the world are complex, the answer to peace is simple; it begins with you. You don’t have to be living in a third world country or working for an NGO to make a difference. Each of us has a unique mission. We are all pieces in a giant, fluid puzzle, where the smallest of actions by one puzzle piece profoundly affects each of the others. You matter, your actions matter, your art matters.

We’d like to be clear that while this letter is written with an artistic audience in mind, these thoughts transcend professional boundaries and apply to all people, regardless of profession.

For pianist Dan Tepfer, improvisation is the mother of Bach's Inventions

In the early 1720s, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a set of Two-Part Inventions to help his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, learn to play the keyboard.

Now, 300 years later, jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer has extracted the framework and narrative from these deceptively simple exercises to guide new improvisations for an album he calls Inventions / Reinventions. "The musical content, what's going on underneath the surface is so profound that it's really this wonderful way of introducing children to what the greatest music can be," he tells NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer.

Bach's pieces help the learning pianist master harmony, rhythm and technique. They are called Two-Part Inventions because there are two separate voices distributed between the pianist's two hands. "So not only is there a dialogue between two voices here, but there's also a dialogue between two hands," Tepfer explains.

The New York-based pianist initiated a conversation with Bach across the centuries by emulating the composer's narrative structure: A musical idea, or theme, is like a protagonist, introduced before experiencing various adventures — expressed musically through modulations — and ultimately returning to the home key.

"The chief goal here is to be in conversation with Bach and to stay in my shoes — not to be playing on his turf, but to be using his ideas on my turf, which I think is what any good conversation is," Tepfer says. And in doing so through improvisation, Tepfer is also drawing from the beating heart of Bach's music. The Baroque master was renowned in his own time as an improviser, one people would travel from all over Europe to hear.

Q&A: Behind The Blue Note Brand And Rich Legacy Of Great Jazz

After his father, Danny Bensusan founded the first Blue Note club in 1981, Blue Note President Steven Bensusan grew up in the world of jazz legends, from Chick Corea to McCoyTyner.

So even as the brand has expanded globally, to having clubs in Milan, Rio, Napa, Japan, Hawaii and more, the core of the Blue Note brand remains the same — creating a community for artists and showcasing the rich legacy of jazz music.

That belief system is found throughout the lineup for the just announced Blue Note Jazz Festival in New York City this June. From headliners Grace Jones and Robert Glasper, with Lalah Hathaway and Bilal, to Ron Carter, Sergio Mendes, Manhattan Transfer and Buddy Guy and up and comers like Julius Rodriguez and Brandee Younger, the lineup is eclectic and represents generations of jazz and beyond.

Sage Bava and I spoke with Steven Bensusan and director of programming Alex Kurland about the history of Blue Note, expansion into L.A., the brand's globalization, the festivals in New York and Napa and more.

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CALLOUTS & CONFERENCES

FROM MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY TO MULTIDIRECTIONAL MOMENTS

November 2022

We are pleased to announce the launch of From Multidirectional Memory to Multidirectional Moments (MDM), a new long term inquiry and artistic research project organized with the department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Die Angewandte). With Palais des Beaux Arts Wien (PdBA) as a starting point, MDM will bring together a core team of artists including Bernhard Garnicnig (founder, PdBA) and Seth Weiner (current artistic director, PdBA), Antoine Turillon and Stephanie Misa (University of Applied Arts Vienna, Artistic Strategies), and Sarrita Hunn (co-founder/editor, MARCH) to research geographically dispersed examples of how “multidirectional” approaches to memory challenge assumptions and what new forms are emerging within contemporary art.

While decentralization, decolonization, immateriality, and appropriation have long been topics of discussion within the fine arts, MDM considers how they remain mostly absent from more official and politically visible forms, spaces and institutions dedicated to remembrance. As Michael Rothberg suggests, memory should work productively through negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing to “allow marginalized groups to create counter-memories that challenge hegemonic memory regimes.”

A launch event, “Loops, Multiplication & Remembrance'' on November 16th (18h) at Die Angewandte, will bring together the MDM core team for an evening of discussions with PdBA’s most recent commissioned artists Hannah Marynissen, Rafal Morusiewicz, Chris Dake-Outhet, and nathan c’ha. Further on and offline MDM public presentations will be announced later in 2023.

Hosting a collection of commissioned artworks and texts, the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien surrounds an Art Nouveau building of the same name from 1908 with a cloud of data. Creating a conceptually unmarked space between the history of the building in Vienna and its environment, data becomes the interface for the reproduction and representation of art and institutionality in the post-digital age. The Palais des Beaux Arts Wien is more-or-less always open, and can be copied, carried around in your pocket and even deleted.

AJIRN 6 - 2023 Conference

Roads, Bridges, and Intersections

May 2023

Friday 19th:  6pm - 9pm

Saturday 20th: 9am - 5pm & 7 - 9pm

Sunday 21st:  9am - 1pm

University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The theme for the 2023 AJIRN conference theme is Roads, Bridges, and Intersections. Broadly speaking, this theme asks participants to think about infrastructure: the systems put in place by individuals, communities, presenters, governments, funding groups, and other organizations, that enable artists to communicate, collaborate, and develop their careers. We hope that this theme will motivate discussions at the local, national, and global level over the practical challenges and possibilities associated with the current political and cultural economy. Importantly, this theme is intended to encourage critical perspectives that question established assumptions and attitudes, as well as words and music that reveal the transformative possibilities of a more inclusive network for jazz and improvised music – one that values and promotes the expressions of, and collaborations between, practitioners from diverse personal, social, and cultural backgrounds.

We welcome proposals for individual papers, performances, panel discussions, and mixed formats that engage this theme. We are planning for a hybrid conference with robust on-the-ground activities but also opportunities for remote participation.

Proposals that connect with one or more of the following sub-themes are especially encouraged:

Roads

·       Access

·       Pathways into jazz/improvisation

·       Trajectories of creative practice

·       Experimentation: a road to new ideas

·       Technology:  Now and Future

Bridges

·       Intercultural exchange and cultural hybridity

·       Polystylism

·       Bridging the divide between practice and theory

Intersections

·       Identities 

·       Intersectionality: Gender - Culture - Ableness 

·       Mind/Body relationship(s)

·       Creativities / Cognition

·       Collaboration

Places, spaces, and institutions

·       Boundaries

·       Governance

·       Community in Improvisation

·       Community Music

·       Jazz Scenes

·       Colonisation

·       Environment

·       Academia

Roadworks

·       Barriers to practice

·       Fixing problems in the improvisatory environments

·       Stop/Go: pathways to moving forward

·       Funding

·       Future proofing- fit for purpose/fit for practice

·       Collisions

Call for Papers: Musicology Australia

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.

A new read and publish agreement between Taylor & Francis and the Council of Australian University Libraries will allow an increasing number of articles to be published Open Access in Musicology Australia. 

Call for Proposals – Sound, Meaning, Education: CONVERSATIONS & improvisations

University of Guelph/IICSI

October 20–22, 2023

Proposal Deadline: May 15, 2023

Sound, Meaning, Education (SME) invites researchers, artists, and/or teachers to submit proposals for an in-person conference to be held at the University of Guelph, October 20–22, 2023. The conference will gather all manner of curricular innovators to share research/scholarship, pedagogical strategies, narratives/stories, performances, and imaginings for the purpose of building infrastructures that support sound and meaning explorations within teaching and learning contexts.

As an organization, SME responds to and is part of: 1) the sensory turn in the academy, 2) recent technological and experiential shifts in how music and sound are created/heard/disseminated, and 3) the re-orienting of human existences toward ecological resonance (SME Guiding Statement).

The 2023 conference continues in these veins via a partnership with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) at the University of Guelph and will co-convene with the fourth annual Improvisation Festival (IF). As such, the conference will emphasize improvisations, as related to sound theory/research and pedagogical practice, along with CONVERSATIONS, as related to sound theory/research and pedagogical practice. To that end, three session types comprise the conference schedule: research talks (15 min + 15 min Q&A), interactive workshops (60 min), and improvisational performances (60 min). Keynotes and guest artists are forthcoming.

SME is, by nature, interdisciplinary. As such, we encourage proposals/projects of all methodologies; please be specific in that regard. 

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RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Research Focus Cultural Analysis in the Arts. Zurich University of the Arts:

INSERT #3 Participatory Critique: Transversal Boundary Crossings

The third issue of INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries is dedicated to artistic, curatorial and mediating practices that conceive partaking (German: Teilhabe) in a relational way. They seek to deconstruct inclusions and exclusions on a level of immanence to decidedly situate themselves in the given powerful, sociocultural, political, economic and media-technological conditions and have a transforming effect on them. With contributions by Amalia Barboza, Marcel Bleuler, Ana Longoni, Rachel Mader, Eduardo Molinari/Archivo Caminante, Mariel R. Rodríguez, Sally Schonfeldt, Pascale Schreibmüller, and an introduction by the editors Elke Bippus and Julia Wolf.

Kansas City Jazz

A Little Evil Will Do You Good

Con Chapman

The brand of jazz that developed in the Kansas City area in the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is recognised as both a distinct stylistic variation within the larger genre and a transitional stage between earlier forms of African-American music, such as ragtime and blues, and later, more modern forms, up to and including bebop. Kansas City’s brand of jazz has been described as “the most straightforward and direct style which has been developed outside New Orleans,” by Hughues Panassié and Madeleine Gautier in their Dictionary of Jazz. Kansas City jazz has inspired the creation of a museum and has been the subject of a feature-length film, Robert Altman’s 1996 “Kansas City,” and even a sentimental rock song, “Eternal Kansas City” by Van Morrison.

The first comprehensive work on the subject in over 15 years, this book draws on new research to delve deeper into music of the American Midwest that evolved into Kansas City jazz, and includes profiles of individual musicians who developed very different styles within or beyond the framework of the sub-genre. Kansas City Jazz focuses on the broader themes and the stories of the major personalities whose individual talents came together to create the larger whole of Kansas City’s distinctive brand of jazz.

Experimentation in Improvised Jazz. Chasing Ideas. 

By Andrys Onsman and Robert Burke

Many books have been written about Jazz, with few approaching their readers with a sense of curiosity, inclusion, and passion for the artform of Free-Jazz. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz. Chasing Ideas, by Andrys Onsman and Robert Burke offers a refreshing insight into the universe that is jazz, and more specifically Free-Jazz. The approachable, discussive, and at times cheeky tone of this book propels the reader through Hichcockian twists and turns from science to drama, Plato to the bordellos of new Orleans, offering insightful points of view from jazz critics, academics, jazz lovers, and importantly the musicians themselves.

The authors offer a wide- ranging and at times wilfully exuberant examination of the performance of free jazz from within its creation, surveying its conceptual paradigms of research; acknowledging its theoretically bounded knowledge, and the embodied nature of performance, sociality and identity, without losing focus on what makes the music jazz.

The authors ricochet off creativity, indeterminacy, neurological functioning, exploration, and free will, creative processes, agency, idea generation and development- and the mastery and mystery that exists in the melding of these behaviours, encapsulating how free jazz musicians create and respond to each other in the moment. In so doing, the authors lay an inviting catalogue of ideas that would resonate with those who are interested in how the music that is made is heard and responded to by practitioners, with many insights offered by the people who make it.

The authors discuss through the voices of many including their own, that free jazz is both product and process, and that it continues to be a collective endeavour of creation culturally, socially, experientially, and situationally. Jazz and improvisational creativity inhabits its own communities of practice, evolving its own ecologies, and offering its own palette of togetherness, expression, and meaning making

The book explores how improvisation is a base human trait, based on trust, communion, cohesion, momentum, and collectivity to the common rather than singular good. No doubt improvisation relies on a wealth of learned, embedded material, however the authors challenge the reader through various theories in considering what is brought to the performance arena that is predetermined, and what is wholly of spontaneous complex unity. How musicians resist and react to primal impulses- known vocabulary, reflex, entrainment, swarming, and how they reside in/within/beyond both the mainstream and free-jazz canons are explored.

Memories of Musical Lives: Music and Dance in Personal Music Collections from Australia and New Zealand

Music-lovers from Australia and New Zealand have collected and bound sheet music and handwritten music since the earliest years of settlement. In these nine essays, the authors discuss music and dance collections found in libraries, historic houses, archives and homes, explaining what these cherished artefacts reveal about the owners, their emotional life and their musical practice. Beautifully illustrated, and with suggestions for how these collections might be further explored or disseminated, this is a landmark book in the history of music in private life.

“This multifaceted collection uses the material traces of music making—the music books that were treasured by their makers and owners and often handed down through families over generations—as a springboard to explore the vibrant musical cultures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Providing fascinating insights into patterns of migration, sociability, gender roles, professionalism and more, the authors make a convincing case for why these books should still matter to us today”.

Linked auditory and motor patterns in the improvisation vocabulary of an

artist-level jazz pianist

By Martin Norgaard, Kevin Bales, and Niels Chr. Hansen

New research published in the journal Cognition with contribution from Aarhus University and Georgia State University investigated how expert jazz musicians improvise, and what makes their solos so fascinating to listen to. The findings point to a ‘personal music library’ and can help us understand human creativity, and why some musicians are more successful than others.

World-renowned jazz musicians are often praised for their creative ingenuity. But how do they make up improvisations? And what makes artists’ solos more enticing than those of less skilled players? These questions continue to puzzle not only jazz aficionados, but also psychological researchers. Two leading theories have dominated so far: Either musicians learn to master

rules telling them what they can and cannot play – a sort of “secret language of jazz.” Or, each musician build up a personal library of melodic patterns – “licks” – that they can draw upon and recombine in new and interesting ways. Over the years, musical scholars have collected many such volumes of “licks” for learners to practice. Yet, the fact that a certain combination of notes recurs many times is no proof of an underlying movement pattern stored in the brains of musicians—it could just be a

sheer coincidence.

The ‘library theory’ of jazz improvisation

A new scientific study, just published in the journal Cognition, provides the first solid psychological evidence for the library theory of jazz improvisation. For the first time ever, researchers from Aarhus University and Georgia State University found that

expert jazz musicians play certain note combinations with much more consistent timing and force than others. Regardless if these “licks” were played fast or slow, loud or soft, the relative rhythms and accents remained very similar. This stronglysuggests that each player possesses a collection of patterns that are directly grounded in their own body and brain. Many jazz

experts have called it their personal “vocabulary.” Interestingly, the new study found that these improvisation vocabularies vary between different players.

Martin Norgaard, born and raised in Denmark, now Associate Professor of Music Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta comments further: “It is fascinating that expert jazz musicians store linked audio and motor representations in the brain – that is both the sound of licks and information about how to play them. As a jazz violinist myself, I often hear licks I want to play while improvising but the motor representation is not complete so the lick doesn’t come out right. Based on our research, that should happen less as expertise develops.”

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