February News from the Jazz Education Network Research Interest Group

Dear Friends,

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

In a recent newsletter we shared an article on Milford Graves who used rhythmic exercises to battle the progress of congestive heart failure. Unfortunately, he lost his battle on February 12 just short of his 80th birthday. We also mourn the loss of jazz giant Chick Corea also a few months short of his 80th birthday. Below is one of the many recent articles and programs remembering Chick’s music, energy, virtuosity, and most of all joyous stage presence and camaraderie. He was certainly one of my idols and inspirations and when I wrote my book Experiencing Chick Corea: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), it was an overwhelming task to put the breadth of his output into one work. Thank you for all the music and inspiration!

It’s that time of the year to submit proposals for presentations, clinics, and concerts for the 2022 JEN Conference in Dallas. Submissions are open until March 31 on the JEN website. Note that you need to be a member to apply. If you’re applying for a research presentation also consider a poster presentation - it’ll increase chances for inclusion and is a great way to connect with attendees in an informal setting.

Submissions for the third issue of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) are also open at the journal portal until April 15. The journal features a wide variety of contributions from full research articles, to quick tips, reflective essays, and book reviews. Please consider sharing some of your work to be included in this double-blind peer reviewed journal. Also, please share the callout with your colleagues and students, a great way to build portfolios!

The second issue of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) has arrived! It features 200 pages of research articles, case studies, tips, essays, and reviews, all peer-reviewed and edited throughout this past year. JEN membership includes full access on the JEN website, find it here. Please encourage your libraries to order a subscription to this invaluable resource for teachers and students alike from this link. And of course, consider a hard copy for your personal library.

I’m still hoping to get more feedback on possible strategies and initiatives for the JEN Research Interest Group. Here is a quick survey - click here and share your input and how you might want to be involved/ support the JEN Research Committee or the Journal Editorial Board, and any suggestions for future directions of our committee. Thank you so much for your input. You can also email me at mherzig@indiana.edu.

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.

Best Wishes for the start of a new semester and lots of positive news in 2021.

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair

Editor, JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice)

The first concert, “Legacies of Excellence,” will premiere on Feb. 20. Featuring the vocalist Catherine Russell, it explores the contributions of jazz legends through an educational lens, and is presented as part of an initiative called Let Freedom Swing. For the remaining three shows, guests will join the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis.

On March 26, the ensemble will present “Voices of Freedom,” a celebration of four eminent 20th-century jazz singers: Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone. A lineup of contemporary vocalists, including Melanie Charles and Shenel Johns, will offer renditions of these figures’ famous works.

The orchestra returns on May 21 with “Freedom, Justice, and Hope,” a program featuring new compositions by two rising musicians: the bassist Endea Owens, who will debut a suite honoring the pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells; and the trumpeter Josh Evans, who will present a work in response to the 1919 Elaine massacre in Arkansas. The compositions were written in collaboration with the racial-justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who will participate in the concert.

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Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies. But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.

A number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, marked by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies.

By the late 1960s, Mr. Corea, still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with. He gigged and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two albums as a leader, “Tones for Joan’s Bones” (1966) and “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968), earned rave reviews. Both are now thought of as classics. But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.

Soon after leaving Davis’s group, he helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and recording with the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era. Mr. Corea continued to be an innovative force in the music for the rest of his career.

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In September of 2008, an unusual performance took place at downtown New York club Le Poisson Rouge. At stage right, opposite fellow six-string adventurer Marc Ribot, sat Lou Reed, conjuring clouds of free-rock energy from his guitar. Behind them, avant-garde mainstay John Zorn sent forth piercing, impassioned blasts of alto sax. And at the center of it all, churning with the fury of a whirlpool and dancing across his hand-painted drum kit with the control and flair of a flamenco master, was Milford Graves — the percussionist, healer, and interdisciplinary seeker who Zorn had once called “basically a 20th-century shaman,” and who died on Friday at 79 after a battle with amyloid cardiomyopathy, NPR confirmed.

“Lou was cool, man,” Graves recalled in 2015, looking back on a then roughly 50-year career in which he’d also worked with jazz liberators Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock, and the New York Art Quartet, as well as South African vocal giant Miriam Makeba, and honed one of the most distinctive and arresting drum-set conceptions on the planet, in any genre.

“I think he liked me, because at Le Poisson Rouge, that was the first time I met him, and he looked over to me and said, ‘It’s great for a change playing with a drummer that’s got some rhythm,’ ” he continued with a laugh. “That’s all he said. And I know what that’s about, because other musicians want to be fed too! The worst thing is to be up there playing with some guy that’s just boring.”

“Boring” would be the last descriptor ever used by anyone who ever stepped onstage with Milford Graves — or, for that matter, descended the basement stairs of his Jamaica, Queens home and found themselves in a combination of music studio, apothecary’s storehouse, and DIY cardiac-research facility. His collaborators and admirers ranged from jazz trailblazers like Jason Moran and Steve Coleman to rock-world seekers such as Thurston Moore and current Alice in Chains vocalist William DuVall. “Never before have I encountered anyone so innovative in so many fields of endeavor, every one of them self-taught,” DuVall said of Graves in 2013. “This man possesses sacred ancient knowledge but applies it to cutting edge working methods in a way that could literally change the world.”

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Young, ambitious and highly talented musicians and music students from Europe and around the world form a 5-piece band for one year. The band is regularly taught by the most famous and successful international jazz musicians. This one-year program is a career boost for the participants and supports them in developing their own and outstanding voice as artists. The 4-6 training phases per year last about one week and consist of various modules, such as workshops, individual lessons, concerts and recording sessions.

The program is perfect for those who are already established in their home music scene and want to stay in touch with it while at the same time expanding their international network and deepening their artistic skills.

The training phases are free of charge for the band members. The prerequisite for membership in the Gutenberg Jazz Collective is the successful completion of an audition.

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13th International Jazz Research Conference, Graz (Austria)

November 18th-21st, 2021

Hosted by the Institute for Jazz Research and the International Society for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz

Founded in 1971, the Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) is a historic cornerstone of academic jazz research. Along with similar institutions, like the Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies (founded 1966), the Institute helped to pave the way for and profoundly shape the discipline known as “jazz studies”, bearing witness to its transformation from a decidedly musicological to an inter-, even transdisciplinary investigation into what has been understood as jazz in their respective times.

Not only have the people, practices, sounds and settings of jazz changed considerably since then, developments such as the increasingly capitalist character of academia, the globalization of knowledge and the blurring of disciplinary boundaries continue to influence the present and future of jazz studies.

On the occasion of its 50th anniversary and as host of the 13th International Jazz Research Conference, the Institute for Jazz Research invites the submission of papers that celebrate, reflect, enhance and advance the study of jazz, both within and outside academia. We welcome papers addressing the conference theme from multiple perspectives, including musicology, cultural studies, jazz history, media studies, sociology, music analysis and practice-based research. Within the general theme, we have identified several sub-themes:

Re: Fwd: Jazz Research
The Jazz in Jazz Studies: Boundaries and Synergies
Jazz Studies and Gender
Sites of Jazz (Research)

Please clearly identify which you are referring to in your proposal.

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The 6th Doctoral Symposium in Arts and Cultural Management continues a tradition of fostering a community of scholars and expanding dialogue and communication among the next generation of Arts and Cultural Management scholars. As the biennial AIMAC conference has been postponed, the 6th Doctoral Symposium will be held virtually, hosted by Kent State University. The symposium will provide students with the chance to receive feedback on their research from leading researchers in the field, along with opportunities for networking, guidance, and learning focused on conducting and publishing research on the arts and cultural industries. Applications are encouraged from second- and third-year doctoral students or those whose thesis is well underway but not yet finished. Proposals from any relevant discipline will be considered, provided they make an original contribution to the study of arts and cultural management.

To facilitate successful online interactions, the symposium will be limited to 24 participants. Please note that there will be a symposium fee of $25 US per participant. To apply, please combine the following into a single PDF file:

1000-word summary of your research proposal, including the research question, theoretical framework, methodology, findings, and contribution
Curriculum vitae
Letter of recommendation from your supervisor or dissertation chair

All documents, abstracts and papers should be written in English. The same guidelines apply for oral presentations at the symposium. Academic organizers will select application proposals according to the following criteria:

Originality, novelty and creativity
Clarity of the problem
Rigor and appropriateness of the methodological approach to the research question
Potential contribution to research in Arts and Cultural Management
Writing style
Quality of references

Please submit your application by March 15, 2021 to Symposium Chair Jennifer Wiggins at jwiggin2@kent.edu. Please direct all inquiries to the same email address.

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Topology is to an equal extent an over- and under-determined topos. It exists nearly independently in various individual disciplines, refers foremost descriptively to the arrangement of things in space-time, takes the surface as its point of departure and seems to be an optimal location for carrying out seemingly objective measurements, rather than being perceived as a formable matrix.

The conference highlights the potential to develop thinking and acting in complex topological-relational networks. It seeks proposals, statements, perspectives and speculations for the intersection of existing knowledge spaces. Superficial cartographies of order are to be unsettled and re-mapped, subjectivized toward the layers that underlie them.

What we offer
A landscape extending from Lucerne to Valais and Ticino, encompassing suburban, slightly urban, rural and alpine sceneries. Contributions/interventions can be positioned within or engage with this landscape, either in real terms on site or by taking these settings as a metaphor; an imaginary space or starting points for a narration that leads somewhere else. Proposals may suggest interacting with real locations from afar, relating to them physically or virtually.

What we wish for
We invite you to create collaborative experiments and rituals in physical and virtual space, to respond to topological conditions together with real and virtual others, and to interact with the landscape that is offered.

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For this special issue we invite contributions which explore connections between improvisation and mindfulness in a range of performance forms; including the various lineages of ‘impro’ and ‘improv’, comedy, longform storytelling, music, and movement. Besides critical scholarly articles, we would also be delighted to receive reviews of books, productions or companies as well as interviews with individuals working in these fields. We would also be interested in sharing practises developed by improvisers which assist in mindfulness; as well as mindfulness-based exercises which might be useful to improvisers.

The Journal of Performance and Mindfulness publishes articles on a rolling basis. Volume 4, Issue 1 will be published during January to December 2021, with a final editorial published in early December.

Submissions can be uploaded to the journal at http://www.performanceandmindfulness.org.uk between 1 October 2020 and 30 June 2021.

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What an extraordinary year it has been! As we breathe a collective sigh of relief and prepare to enter 2021, it is my great pleasure to welcome our readers to issue 46: a collection of articles and reviews produced against the backdrop of multiple lockdowns, extended periods of remote work, tightening budgets, and restricted access to libraries and archives. In spite of these and countless other challenges, Context has remained steadfast in its support of high-quality music scholarship from Australian and international contributors.

Our first article comes from John Whiteoak, who revisits the content of his seminal text Playing Ad Lib (1999) in consideration of the ever-expanding Trove database, still two decades away at the time of his original research. In addition to situating new findings within the field of contemporary jazz studies, Whiteoak makes a convincing case for treating digital search engines as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, manual archival work.

Özgecan Karadağlı then takes us back to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, to detail its promotion and performance history of Western art music, particularly opera. She shows how the Empire and its dynasty embraced Western traditions long before the formation of the Turkish Republic, and that it was common for composers of the period to combine Western and Ottoman elements in their work.

Third, Maria Mannone and Federico Favali remind us once again of the profound links that exist between mathematics and music. Their article investigates this relationship with reference to Qwalala, an installation produced by Pae White for the 57th Venice Biennale, whose structures Favali subsequently ‘translated’ into musical forms. By employing various mathematical transformations and techniques, the mathematician-composer duo shows how visual elements can theoretically be rendered as abstract musical ideas.

Context’s commitment to promoting Australian music research is again emphasised in our final article, in which David Irving and Alan Maddox urge us to reconsider the modes typically used to study Australian musical societies from the beginning of colonisation (1788) to Federation (1901). Having identified ten approaches favoured by scholars thus far, Irving and Maddox provide a critical overview of each, and call for an increased use of a reflexive paradigm in future studies. Such an approach has the potential, the authors argue, to open the study of music in colonial Australia to new directions, reinstate agency in marginalised groups, and incorporate the position of the researcher in twenty-first-century contexts.

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An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's universally acclaimed history of jazz, with a wealth of new insight on this music's past, present, and future.

Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz has been universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time. Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music.

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Scotland's National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived.

BESSIE SMITH was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith's life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of 'bathtub gin', got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan. As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.

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Jazz Education in Research and Practice explores diverse topics of jazz scholarship and its applications to pedagogy. The journal provides a forum for interaction and exchange between researchers and practitioners grounded in scholarship. It was developed by and is an extension of the Jazz Education Network Research Interest Group (JENRing) founded in 2014 under the umbrella of the Jazz Education Network (JEN). The journal aims to be inclusive of a wide range of perspectives, from musicology to cultural studies, from psychology to business, that can be applied in the field. In this respect, the editors particularly welcome articles that provide models, resources, and effective techniques for the teaching and learning of the art form.

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