Sixty years ago, Impulse Records set a benchmark in jazz with a conscious, fervent sound that has endured, revealing subsequent generations of outstanding artists. We felt this legacy was the perfect conversation starter for Jazz United's second season.

Join us as we shine a light on the self-proclaimed label home for "The New Wave in Jazz" — describing its impact on us as listeners, its enduring significance on the musical landscape, and its cultural legacy of Black excellence and liberation.

In contrast with many of its peer companies, Impulse! appeared primed for success almost from the beginning. Its parent company was ABC- Paramount Records, a successful major label that provided sufficient budgeting to attract many of the top names on the scene. Its first resident producer, Creed Taylor, had some early success and a good instinct for commercially successful jazz recordings. And the fledgling company's graphic design, based on an orange-and-black color scheme and a logo that punctuated striking cover photography, stood out in the best way.

Follow the link below to listen to the podcast.

Roy Hargrove was a gateway into jazz. For younger listeners who respected the tradition but felt it lacked a tangible connection to the present, the jazz trumpeter — who emerged as a blazing talent in the 1990s — was able to delicately straddle hard-bop and hip-hop, serving as a generational translator for the genre.

Early in his career, he established himself as a seamless connector of different sounds without ever compromising the integrity of his musicianship. “If you grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, there’s no way you could avoid playing funk or hip-hop,” says bassist Christian McBride, one of Hargrove’s good friends and frequent collaborators.

“We got a lot of criticism from older musicians,” McBride continued. “It was from them where the words actually carried the most weight. But even still, we just kind of collectively looked at each other like, ‘Man, we got to do this. How are we not going to play with D’Angelo? How are we not going to play with the Roots?’ Everybody knows how much I love James Brown — I’m not ever going to avoid that, as a matter of principle. We’re ‘funk children.’ We can’t get rid of that.”

Alongside artists like McBride, Nicholas Payton, Marc Cary and Joshua Redman, Hargrove shepherded a new vanguard for the genre, one that could not be defined by the era in which it was created nor limited by it. Jazz itself is built on the careers of the musicians who pushed its boundaries; Hargrove and his contemporaries helped ensure that a new generation’s experiences were both valid and had a rightful place within this music’s continuum. Hargrove died in 2018 at the age of 49, and this month sees the release of “In Harmony,” the first archival recording released since his death. A collaboration with pianist Mulgrew Miller (who died at age 57 in 2013), the album serves as an opportunity to look at Hargrove’s sizable — and lasting and growing — legacy.

In 1956, a new weapon was unveiled in the cold war: jazz. That year, the US introduced the Jazz Ambassadors Tour, a showcase that sent American musicians overseas to parts of the world that were perceived to be under threat of Soviet influence.

While they initially intended to send ballet dancers and symphony orchestras, the State Department were persuaded that the jazz performers who were spearheading the civil rights movement would help generate a positive image of the US to newly independent nations (between 1945 and 1960, 40 countries gained their independence, representing a quarter of the world’s population). The department saw it as a way of silencing Soviet criticism that racial inequality was a stark issue in the US. The ethics were questionable, but the musicians saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to share their music directly with people in countries from Asia to Africa and beyond.

One of the countries the US focused on was Pakistan, which had gained its independence from British colonial rule less than a decade earlier, in 1947: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck were among the performers at state-funded gigs during the 1950s and 60s. These concerts wove jazz into Pakistan’s musical fabric and through its traditional instruments, resulting in sounds that remain relatively unheralded yet are still flourishing today.

In attendance at Duke Ellington’s 1963 performance in Karachi was a teenager, Badal Roy. He had grown up in the city and was informally learning the tabla, a twinned set of drums. “At that time of my life I was mainly into Pakistani classical music and rock’n’roll – I loved Elvis Presley,” he tells me over the phone from his apartment in Wilmington, Delaware. “But that concert was my first introduction into jazz music. I had no idea what to expect and it was incredible.”

The music industry is weighted against artists, with even successful pop stars seeing "pitiful returns" from streaming, a committee of MPs has said.

They are calling for a "complete reset" of the market, with musicians given a "fair share" of the £736.5 million that UK record labels earn from streaming.

In a report, they said royalties should be split 50/50, instead of the current rate, where artists receive about 16%.

The findings came after a six-month inquiry into music streaming.

"While streaming has brought significant profits to the recorded music industry, the talent behind it - performers, songwriters and composers - are losing out," said Julian Knight, MP, who chairs parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee.

"Only a complete reset of streaming that enshrines in law their rights to a fair share of the earnings will do."

There's a moment on "Oceans of Time," from a 2016 album by The Cookers, when alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, Jr. takes a solo full of swerving self-assurance. Swinging mightily behind him is the composer of the tune, master drummer Billy Hart.

As of today, both Hart and Harrison can be identified not only as members of The Cookers but also by a prestigious title: They are both 2022 NEA Jazz Masters, along with the magnetic singer-songwriter Cassandra Wilson and virtuoso bassist Stanley Clarke.

According to an announcement this morning by the National Endowment for the Arts, these four new inductees will be celebrated with a concert and ceremony March 31, 2022 at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. They will each also receive a $25,000 award, along with what is considered the highest honor reserved for a living jazz artist in the U.S.

"The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to celebrate the 40th anniversary of honoring exceptional individuals in jazz with the NEA Jazz Masters class of 2022," Ann Eilers, acting chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts, says in a statement. "Jazz continues to play a significant role in American culture thanks to the dedication and artistry of individuals such as these and we look forward to working with SFJAZZ on a concert that will share their music and stories with a wide audience next spring."

For more than half a century Anthony Braxton has played a key role in contemporary and avant-garde- music as a composer, multi-instrumentalist, music theorist, teacher, mentor and visionary. Inspired by Jazz, European art music, and music of other cultures, Braxton labels his output ‘Creative Music’. This international conference will be the first one dealing with his multifaceted work, discussing different research projects concerned with Braxton’s compositional techniques as well as his music-philosophical thinking. In addition to this we will also look at his legacy, taking this vast body of work as a unique example among many to offer a different perspective on the eurocentric canon of post-war Western art music.

The conference will take place from June 3rd. to 5th 2022 at De Singel International Arts Campus in Antwerp, Belgium.

How might the new field of global music history position itself in relation to current thinking about decoloniality and diversity? Can the practice of global music history avoid replicating the epistemic and political injustices of earlier colonialist and orientalist projects of knowledge extraction? Is ethical collaboration between researchers in the Global South and North possible in the face of large-scale structural inequalities?

The IMS Study Group “Global History of Music” seeks proposals for presentations that address these or similar questions, to be discussed within the framework of the study group session at IMS2022. Study group members are invited to propose short individual presentations of 10 minutes, or 60-minute roundtables with up to four speakers. (The proposer must be a current study group member; other participants do not need to be members but are nevertheless warmly invited to join.) Presentations do not need to be formal scholarly papers, but may be personal reflections, examples of good practice, or critical perspectives on current disciplinary debates. Proposals from or involving speakers who have not previously participated in IMS events are particularly welcome, and there will be the option for online or hybrid presentations.

Proposals for individual presentations should be no more than 150 words, and those for roundtables no more than 300 words. (Please note that this call for papers is independent from the general call for papers for IMS2022 and a submission to this session does not affect eligibility for other proposals at the congress.)

Please send your texts accompanied by a short biography of no more than 100 words for each speaker to globalhistory@musicology.org by August 15, 2021.

Responsibility intertwines with the essential questions of power, historicities, control, freedom, availability and care, which accompany the acknowledgement that we inhabit this planet with other people, species and materials. In the context of artistic research, collective or individual, responsibility can be understood as a standpoint or as an attitude that activate critical thinking and diversity of caring practices.

This issue of RUUKKU explores the various ideas, interpretations and possibilities of responsibility, as it is related to artistic research activities. The responsibility can be conceived in relation to artist-researcher themselves or to an artwork: what might it mean to revisit established ideas from a new perspective, or to produce thinking, knowledge, experience, perhaps new praxes and poetics from this perspective? Responsibility can be also considered as a topical attitude within a particular research process, or in relation to larger contexts and realms of art, politics and society. Alternatively the expositions can redefine the practices of responsibility: What might responsibility mean for everyday practices in the time when the entire life in the planet needs urgent reconsideration? What kind of caring activities the responsible life in this planet might entail? How does artistic research embrace the enmeshed relationship between humans and environment, including its difference from non-human actors?

Please submit your proposals (complete expositions) via RC ('submit to publication', 'submit unlimited publication to', and 'ruukku') no later than September 30th, 2021.


Making something public is intrinsic to art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on how art's publicity relates to artistic research. What kind of publishing artistic research needs, in order to generate something new? What is the effect of published artworks on their immediate surroundings, neighbourhoods or environments? What relevance have the changes and traces published artworks leave in public space? How can we bring forth artistic research in its diversity and variety? How can artistic research be made public?

To display a work in public means often to leave behind a singular piece or event in order to proceed further with the work. This could also mean that development on one theme ceases and another begins. Clearly the occasion of publishing initiates reflection on how the work was received and leads to new approaches for proceeding with the research. Art and artistic research are not only made for the public; they are also informed by their own publicity.

To what extent does making something public presuppose making it identifiable? Does this something have to be named? Does addressing the public always take the form of production? Are there alternative experimental or experiential ways of relating to matters of publicity? Could they be more relevant to publishing Artistic Research than declaring products (artworks, articles, etc.) as outcomes of research or end results of processes? Could publishing be seen as a live model, a prototype for learning processes that develop a relationship with the public?

Submit your full exposition by October 30th 2021.

Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies Fellowship Programs

ASCAP FOUNDATION/SYMPHONIC JAZZ ORCHESTRA COMMISSIONING PRIZE

PRIZE: $5,000 commissioning prize to compose a new work for the 68-member Symphonic Jazz Orchestra (“SJO”).

PURPOSE: To commission a new orchestral score for the SJO, blending the worlds of jazz & classical music – and beyond.

The newly commissioned work will be premiered by the SJO in 2022/23 and entered into the SJO’s catalog of symphonic jazz commissions.

Created in 2002, the 68-member SJO is dedicated to blending the worlds of jazz and classical music through its commissioning, performing and educational programs. Led by Music Director, Mitch Glickman, the ensemble has performed throughout Southern California with such leading guest artists as Dave Grusin, Christian McBride, Raul Midon, Lee Ritenour, Ernie Watts, The Yellowjackets, Miguel Zenon, and our former Co-Music Director and ASCAP board member, George Duke. The ASCAP Foundation/Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Commissioning Prize is made possible in part by a grant from The ASCAP Foundation Louis Armstrong Fund.

The composer agrees to assign the rental administration of commissioned work (the “Composition”) to Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Music (the “Administrator”), the publishing designee of the SJO. Administrator will print all orchestra parts and scores. The composer will retain the copyright of the commissioned work.