🎃 🎵 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.

The first JEN Research webinar with Toni Garcia from Virginia Commonwealth University on effective soundcheck techniques for Big Band is now available for replay for JEN members at this link. The monthly series of presentations will continue 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. After all we named the journal Jazz Education in Research and Practice to build a bridge between knowledge and teaching practices. Please look for links and invitations to the webinars on the JEN website and on the 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.

Here is the upcoming schedule, all webinars are at 3pm EST:

November 5 • "Developing Linear Vocabulary for Jazz Vocal Improvisation: Utilizing the Melodic Language of Chet Baker" with Suzanne Pittson - REGISTER

December 3 • “Deconstructing Modal Jazz Piano Techniques: The Relation Between Debussy's Piano Works and the Innovations of Post-Bop Pianists” with Sergio Pames

February 4 • “Mary Lou Williams Gender and Jazz” with Josiah Boornazian

March 4 • “Connections Between Speech Acquisition and The Jazz Language” with Patrick Brown

April 1 (no joke) • “Patterns in Music: How Linguistic Corpus Analysis Tools Can Be Used to Illuminate Central Aspects of Jazz Improvisation” Martin Noorgard

May 6 • “A Method for teaching interaction in small jazz ensembles" with Jeffrey Benatar

June 3 • “Teaching Jazz, Teaching Justice, blackness of Don Cherry's global communion” with Paul Roth

All of the articles are available in the previous two editions of JAZZ, accessible as a JEN membership benefit for full members at the links below, or in the upcoming third volume, to be published January 1, 2022.

Jazz Education in Research & Practice Volume 1

Jazz Education in Research & Practice Volume 2

For subscriptions or purchase of single articles follow this link. Libraries can provide any articles for free through interlibrary loan. Ask your library to subscribe to the journal by sharing the following link https://iupress.org/journals/jazz-education-in-research-and-practice/. Please note that JSTOR is discontinuing their journal program and JSTOR links are not working at this time. However, your library may add the subscription through their EBSCO and Proquest or similar services anyway but do share the link above initially. A suggested note or request script to your library may read as follows:

Please add a subscription to Jazz Education in Research and Practice (JAZZ) to our library resources. JAZZ explores diverse topics of jazz scholarship and its applications to pedagogy and is an essential knowledge source for our students and faculty. Ideally our students will have access to the print copies as well as the electronic version in our library. It is extremely affordable (institutional print and electronic subscription only $85, single issues starting at $20, here is the complete pricing chart) - please follow this link to subscribe.

Registration is now open for the January 5-8 Conference in Dallas. Please note that all research presentations will be on Wednesday, January 5. Plan on arriving Tuesday or Wednesday morning in order to benefit from the wealth of scholarship and insights that is scheduled throughout this first day. Info on registration and hotel reservations is here. In the newsletters leading up to the conference I’d like to feature this year’s research presenters - if you are scheduled for a research presentation, please send me paragraph that describes what you will share and the importance of your work and we’ll include it in the upcoming newsletters.

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.

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair

Editor, JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice)

Join jazz vocalist & Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Jazz Studies at the City College of New York, Suzanne Pittson, for this webinar. In addition to being a great trumpeter, Chet Baker was also one of the finest scat singers in the history of jazz, and, like Louis Armstrong, his scat solos contain the same musical ideas he played on the trumpet. In this regard, Baker has become a model for aspiring jazz singers. In addition to analysis of Baker's language, this presentation will establish a methodology that assists vocalists in assimilating jazz vocabulary from recordings, using the piano as an aural and intellectual guide.

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

Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, a saxophonist, composer, and arranger who was best known for his work in funk and R&B but equally adept and revered in jazz, died September 23 at his home in Somerset, England. He was 80.

His death was announced in a statement by his family on September 24. Cause of death was given as “complications with his heart.”

A member, and eventually leader/music director, of the James Brown Revue, Ellis was an essential pioneer in the creation of funk, fusing his jazz sensibility with Brown’s soul stylings in the singer’s crucial mid-1960s period. He cowrote Brown’s groundbreaking hits “Cold Sweat” (1967) and “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968). His solo composition “The Chicken,” first released as a Brown B-side, became a jazz-funk standard associated with bassist Jaco Pastorius. In the early 1990s, Ellis worked with Brown alumni the JB Horns and Maceo Parker as a saxophonist and arranger. He spent two decades (1979-99) collaborating with Irish singer/songwriter Van Morrison, frequently returning for guest performances with Morrison thereafter.

However, Ellis also had a profound jazz pedigree. He was a student and protégé of Sonny Rollins, whom he met by chance in 1957, and played as a teenager with Ron Carter and Chuck Mangione. In 1969, after his four-year tenure in the Brown band concluded, Ellis worked as musical director at CTI/Kudu Records, where he arranged and played on sessions by Esther Phillips, George Benson, and Hank Crawford. As a freelancer, he worked with Sonny Stitt, Shirley Scott, Leon Thomas, Brother Jack McDuff, and Jimmy Cobb; co-led a West Coast-based band with saxophonist Dave Liebman; and recorded 13 albums under his own name, moving back and forth between jazz and funk and occasionally combining the two.

In 1919, William Grant Still was in his 20s — many years from the eminence he would later enjoy as the widely acknowledged “dean” of Black American composers.

But he had already begun to write operas, and he boldly approached the nation’s most important company: the Metropolitan Opera in New York. We have no evidence he got an answer.

Two decades later, Still was far more established, with his “Afro-American Symphony” widely performed. In 1935, he sent the Met “Blue Steel,” its music infused with jazz and spirituals. “Not worthy of consideration,” a company official wrote in an internal submissions ledger.

Then Still wrote another opera, “Troubled Island,” about the Haitian revolution, with a libretto by the poet Langston Hughes. “The Metropolitan was our first target, logically enough,” he later recalled. That, too, was dismissed.

“It would be a mere waste of time,” a 1942 entry in that submissions ledger went, “to go into details about this opera which is an immature product of two dilettantes.”

The Met, the country’s largest performing arts institution, opened in 1883, and in its 138 years has put on some 300 titles. Not one has been by a Black composer.

Until now. Closed for a year and a half by the pandemic and rocked by the nationwide uprising for racial justice, the company will reopen on Monday with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” by Terence Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter and composer best known for scoring a host of Spike Lee films.

Lonnie Smith, a master of the Hammond B3 organ and a leading exponent of the infectiously rhythmic genre known as soul jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.

His manager and partner, Holly Case, said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Smith, who began billing himself as Dr. Lonnie Smith in the mid-1970s, could draw an audience’s attention with his appearance alone: He had a long white beard and always wore a colorful turban. (The turbans apparently had no specific religious significance, and he did not have an advanced degree in anything and never explained why he had adopted the honorific “Dr.”) His playing was every bit as striking.

He began his career at a time when organists like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff were blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues. Mr. Smith was very much in that tradition, but his playing could also display an ethereal quality that was all his own. His music later reached new generations of fans when it was widely sampled by hip-hop artists.

Reviewing a 2015 performance at the Jazz Standard in New York, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times praised Mr. Smith’s sense of dynamics. “When he is quiet, he is very quiet,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “During a gospelish song with the singer Alicia Olatuja, he started a solo passage at a level that almost couldn’t be heard and stayed there for quite a while, unspooling jagged, alert phrases that you had to strain to listen to: an easy trick but a powerful one.”

Two critics discuss Terence Blanchard’s “Fire,” the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer.

“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week, was a milestone: the company’s first work by a Black composer. The music, by Terence Blanchard — a jazz trumpeter also known for his scores for Spike Lee films — has earned praise from both classical and jazz critics.

The New York Times’s chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini described “a compositional voice dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.” The jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote for NPR that “the smooth deployment of extended jazz harmony, often in breathing, fleeting passages, marks the piece as modern — as does the work of a rhythm section nestled within the orchestra.”

The Times sent two more critics to the second performance on Friday. Seth Colter Walls, based on the classical desk, and Giovanni Russonello, who specializes in jazz, have both covered figures who cross with ease between concert halls and jazz clubs. But “Fire,” based on a 2014 memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow, was their first night at the opera together, the spur to an extended discussion.

With generous support from The Garner-Glaser Foundation, Inc., the Erroll Garner-Martha Glaser Archive Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh supports research into the Erroll Garner jazz collection held by Archives & Special Collections department within the University Library System. The research award is designed to offer a researcher intense use of the collection in order to produce a scholarly article, professional presentation, help prepare to teach a class on jazz, produce a video or documentary, write a book (or chapter), or some other body of work. The scholar will be expected to share his/her research with the University Library System in order to build a body of work around the use of the Erroll Garner collection. The successful applicant will also be asked to make a presentation (in-person or remote) to ULS staff on his/her work in the archive.

The Erroll Garner Archive includes correspondence, sheet music, legal documents, photographs, memorabilia, awards, sound recordings, and moving images documenting the life and work of pianist and composer Erroll Garner (1921-1977). It also comprises a large amount of material related to Martha Glaser’s own career. Information about the collection can be found here.
In their application, research scholars should indicate the length of time the project requires. The amount of the award will be granted based on the length of stay and will provide funding for reimbursement of receipted expenses for travel, housing and meal expenses while doing research into the collection in Pittsburgh; award may not exceed $2,500. Applicants at the University of Pittsburgh may equally apply for a stipend rather than travel funding.

Award recipients are asked to share their finished product in some professional manner, whether that be in a publication, presentation or some other appropriate venue. There is no deadline to receive applications; rather the award program operates under a rolling deadline and will review applications as they are received.

Each application will be review by an independent review committee, consisting of archivists, music librarians, and music teaching faculty, based on the applicant's research topic and the availability of relevant material in the Erroll Garner Archive. The committee will make its decision within 4 weeks of receiving the completed application.

Submission deadline: November 5th, 2021

Artistic Research is in a unique position to address uncertainty. The dire grievances brought on by COVID-19 and the climate crisis demand more than utopic gestures or hopeful technologies. Challenged by the tensions of our times, artistic researchers are tasked with applying diverse forms of embodied knowledge to craft new tools and methodologies for post-crisis conviviality and radical kindness. Using the three attractors, MEND, BLEND, ATTEND, we are seeking future-oriented responses to current social, cultural, ecological and economic challenges through high-level, practice-based research in the arts.

The 13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research will take place from March 29th to April 1st, 2022 for the first time in Germany at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The conference will kick-off with a 24-hour online sprint followed by three days of live, on-site events with the possibility of moving completely online if necessary.

Please register or login to the Research Catalogue to view the full call for proposals.

Artist-researchers working with space are welcome to contribute to our new Archive of Shared Perceptual Spaces, an online presentation of expanded approaches to spatial practices within the field of artistic research.

Examples from all fields are invited, focusing on specific aspects, processes, approaches or methods; ways of working, constellations of activities or framing patterns, particular projects or lines of enquiry-in-practice.

Now, after a year of lockdowns and Corona reflections, the awareness of space seems to have affected all kinds of systems, including academic discourses and art, to subordinate their targets under a new paradigm within a wide range of empirical, deductive, discursive, historical, scientific and intuitive methods.

However, even basic spatial descriptions, terms like “close”, “closed”, “narrow”, “high”, “low”, “far”, or “open” have drastically changed their meanings due to daily experiences with mediated campuses and online-conferences, online exhibitions and concerts as streamed events, and computer camera views of private homes.

Thus, it is still unclear what this means for cultural practice in terms of perception, composition, aesthetics, engineering and culture.

Deadline for submissions: November 8, 2021.

Guest Editor: Jenny Ann Cubin

a posthumous collaboration with jacques derrida

the ear is uncanny

(large or small)

it is the most open organ.

i tell my life to my self

(i recite and recount)

but become what i am

through the ear i borrow

(through the ear you lend).

we proceed

seeking out the edges

(the inner walls, the passages).

these labyrinths come down

to the ear you hear me with

(to the ear I hear you with).

we recite and recount

and become what we are.

This poem is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s theory of otobiographies and the role of listening as a mediator between self and world. In this issue of Riffs, we ask you to attend to your relationship with music and the various listening practices you have developed and adopted as you write, play, perform, dance, or compose, and/or the impact of sound upon others involved in your creative practices.

We welcome all creative responses to this prompt, from all individuals and collectives, from any sector or discipline. Feel free to include written, visual, and/or musical elements, and to propose work that emerges from collaborations between writers, poets, musicians, composers and visual artists (etc).

Deadlines – October 31st. 2021 proposal deadline: to include a title and 300-word synopsis, your name(s), a short bio and contact email. Full submissions (2000-4000 words / visual (to not exceed 8 A4 pages) are expected by February 28th, 2022. All visual and audio content must have a Creative Commons License, be owned by the contributor or with full owner permissions. All proposals submitted to Riffs will be considered by the editorial panel.

Commission Prize – $2,500

Plus A world premier performance at the 2022 Jazz Composers’ Symposium & A $500 travel allowance

May 12-14, 2022 Butler School of Music, Austin, TX.

ISJAC eagerly anticipates its 2022 Symposium in Austin, TX, where the international community of jazz composers will, once again, gather together. But we also recognize the concerns many of our members have expressed regarding new laws passed by the Texas State legislature.

ISJAC is not a political organization. Our mission is to serve the international community of jazz composers. But through the generosity of our members, with a lead gift initiated by Kelsey Shiba and support from many others, ISJAC is pleased to announce a special commission that will debut during the conference.

Through this new commission opportunity, we are delighted to offer yet another creative opportunity for our members, while we strongly reaffirm our commitment to social justice, inclusivity, and equal opportunity.

Eligibility: The commission is open to all women jazz composers regardless of age or nationality.* There is no application fee; but all applicants must be full (paid) members of ISJAC. To join www.isjac.org

*Please be aware that if the commission recipient is not a US citizen, the prize amount may be different owing to governmental fees and taxes

The work: The piece should be no longer than 8 minutes and scored for any instrumentation made up from the members of a standard big band – 5/4/4/PBGD (woodwind doubles are allowed). Soloists or instrumentation outside of this MUST be provided by the composer for the performance at their own expense. Please recognize this limitation is observed so that the piece may be performed at a Symposium with the resident jazz ensemble.

Lead Researcher: Professor Roger Dean

About the project
The MARCS Institute, and in particular its music science endeavour, invites applications from highly motivated graduates seeking to undertake a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree to work with Professor Roger Dean, Dr Sandy Evans (UNWS), A/Prof Liam Magee and Dr Simon Chambers. This will concern selected aspects of a newly-funded Australia Research Council project that aims to investigate the nature and development of Australian improvised music since 1970. In particular, the project will examine the evolving relationships which emerge between the social networks of musicians and the musical styles they draw upon in their improvisatory practise. The project utilises both quantitative (temporal network modelling, music feature analysis) and qualitative (focus groups, interviews, surveys, as well as musicological analysis) research methods. The project is thus at an interface between social science, music and musicology and candidates will develop critical understanding of these facets. The project will allow scope for innovation by the PhD candidate beyond the prefigured bounds of the ARC project.

The MARCS Institute studies the scientific bases of human communication. Due to be mainly consolidated in one new institute building in Western Sydney University’s campus in Westmead in early 2022, MARCS research on brain, behaviour and development encompasses such areas as how we learn language and handle foreign accents, how to program robots for human interaction, how we can enhance communication with infants, those with hearing impairments, and the elderly, and how music and dance communicate universally. We apply our work to advanced technology, biomedical engineering, and improving physical and mental health by designing electronics inspired by neural systems, building better biomedical devices, analysing heightened performance in the creative arts, and addressing impaired performance in developmental delay and sensory deficit.

We’re pleased to announce the publication of an impressive new book, Go To Jail: Confronting a System of Oppression, edited by Students at the Center (SAC), an independent English and Social Studies program working within public schools in New Orleans.

For this project, SAC staff & teachers—including IICSI researcher Dr. George Lipsitz—invited young people to examine the prison system in their own community of New Orleans. This city puts more people in jail than any other city in the United States, a country which puts more people in jail than any other country in the world. This project resulted in young people reflecting upon the criminal justice system from an intimate, first-hand perspective.

Go To Jail is a volume of student writings about the impact of the criminal justice system on their lives, authored by young people who have participated in the improvisation pedagogy classes conducted by Students at the Center in McDonogh #35 and McMain high schools in New Orleans. It is a volume in which, to quote Dr. Lipsitz, “young people and their adult allies tell stories about the ways in which they use improvisation and imagination to refuse the unlivable destinies meted out to them by predatory policing and mass incarceration.”

What emerges from this work is a cry for change and a mighty assertion that these stories matter, that this system impacts all of us, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. As SAC teacher Kalamu ya Salaam exclaims in the introduction: “Let’s holler loudly about the criminal justice system and how it affects our lives. Let’s tell how each of us are affected, not just inmates but also family and friends. Let’s hear all the voices. Let’s look at the total picture. Let’s work together to find a solution to our problems of poverty.”

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, open-access and peer-reviewed journal that disseminates artistic research from all disciplines. JAR invites the ever-increasing number of artistic researchers to develop what, for the sciences and humanities, are standard academic publication procedures. It serves as a meeting point of diverse practices and methodologies in a field that has become a worldwide movement with many local activities.

Here at JAR we are somewhat obsessed with the importance of articulation. Rather than asking what art is and what knowledge is, we are concerned with the processes through which ‘art’ and ‘knowledge’ become qualified. Although it might well be true that discourse has been developing in large historical cycles, we are acutely aware that those cycles have never properly represented what has been happening on the ground – neither in terms of art history, nor criticism, nor epistemology. This implies that difference and ultimately change can not only be sought and found between different versions of history, different knowledges and different schools of art, but also and most importantly between these histories, knowledges and schools and the practices that they offset – elevating some and repressing others.
‘Research’ in this sense is the singular term for the many directed processes of human and non-human articulation by which knowledges and also practices change. When we talk about ‘artistic research’ we mean to suggest radical inclusivity of a kind that challenges the gate-keeping set up around definitions of research, that is, the presuppositions that regulate who is allowed to speak and how. As the term suggests, this includes first of all artistic practices, but beyond this it includes potentially any kind of practice – given how little we know of the art of the future. Provocatively put, the aim of artistic research is not to add artistic contribution to the field of research, but to liberate research through the symbolic power of art. The moment at which this happens is precisely when practice is exposed as research, in an act of articulation.

In terms of ontology there are many problems attached to this, for while the conditions shape the knowledge that is possible, the knowledge that has become possible also inscribes itself into the conditions – doing so in order to heal the wound that originality inflicts on historical continuity. In artistic research then, as part of the so-called practice turn, the pragmatics of making knowledge in articulations has replaced the grounding of research in historical discourse, such as it is offered by disciplinary knowledge. So, yes, anything is possible, but, no, only that will be possible that can be articulated.

The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms, ties between the music and the past play an important role in defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.

Since March 14, 2020, Spanish citizens have been confined to their homes due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participating in musical activities has been associated with reduced anxiety and increased subjective wellbeing. The aim of this study is to analyze how Spanish citizens used music during the lockdown period. We also study perceptions of the impact music has in everyday life, in particular examining the respondents’ insights into the effects of listening to music in situations of isolation. The study was conducted using the MUSIVID19 questionnaire administered to a total of 1868 Spanish citizens. The results indicate that during lockdown, respondents perceived an increase in the time they devoted to musical activities such as listening, singing, dancing or playing an instrument. The participants also reported using music to cope with the lockdown, finding that it helped them to relax, escape, raise their mood or keep them company. The findings suggest an improvement in their perception of the value of music in personal and social wellbeing during the lockdown. However, the study reveals significant differences in the use and perceptions of music according to respondents’ personal situations. Age and feelings of vulnerability may lead to more conservative uses of musical practice and to more moderate perceptions of the positive values of music.

The influence of music therapy (MT) as a support intervention to reduce stress and improve wellbeing in Clinical Staff (CS) working with COVID-19 patients was evaluated. Participants were enrolled as a result of spontaneous agreement (n = 34) and were given remote receptive MT intervention over a 5-week period. Their levels of tiredness, sadness, fear and worry were measured with MTC-Q1 before and after MT intervention. An immediate significant variation in the CS emotional status was observed. The results seem to confirm that in an emergency situation, it is possible to put in place a remote MT support intervention for CS exposed to highly stressful situations.

Understanding music has nothing to do with reading notation, playing an instrument, or knowing technical terms. If you love and can remember whole performances by your favourite players, then you do understand music.

While this is true of all music everywhere, it is especially important for jazz players. A jazz musician personally decides on every note s/he plays, so any attempt to play jazz without the requisite understanding in place is the wrong thing to be doing!

There is even more to this issue of personal choice, though. It is because you choose what to play, that you don’t have to have a virtuoso technique in place before you engage with the process. As long as the understanding, (or taste as it is also called), is there, you can start with any level of competence. And without it, you can’t start at all, no matter how ‘competent’ you are.

All that the technical terms, the musical analysis – and even the historical background – are for is to explain the understanding that you already have.

The achievement of this book is to have identified what it is necessary to explain up front, and to have discovered that the amount of knowledge you need is unbelievably small – as well as being very easy to learn.

This book works by separating out the pre-requisites. It doesn’t clutter and confuse the learning process by mixing them up. And it always places ‘theory’ after practice.
It starts with the problem of understanding. And from there, but entirely without the paraphernalia of technical language, leads you from just listening to jazz, to a deep appreciation of the processes involved.

It then shows you the tiny knowledge components you need to be able to translate thought into action, separately and clearly so you can see the ‘theory’ for what it is.

Applying the knowledge (practising) is where the playing begins. So you will find a lot of deeply practical help about what and how to practise. This book will give you:

A thorough understanding of the jazz repertoire as a whole.
The ability to play anything you know in any key, with no effort.
Matters for further thought as you grow into a more rounded player.
The most thorough programme of playalong material you will find anywhere.