🦃 🎵 November News from the JEN Research Interest Group

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

Only five more weeks until we gather in Dallas, January 5-8 for the JEN conference. Make sure to arrive on Tuesday or early Wednesday as all research presentations will be on Wednesday, January 5. The complete conference schedule is online as well as registration and hotel info. I would love to connect for input on the research committee initiatives, questions about journal submissions, jamming, sharing stories - find me all day Wednesday at the research presentations or send me an email.

The first two JEN Research webinars with Toni Garcia from Virginia Commonwealth University on effective soundcheck techniques for Big Band and with Susanne Pittson on developing vocabulary for vocal jazz improvisation are 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:

December 3 - Sergio Pamies Rodriguez “Deconstructing Modal Jazz Piano Techniques: The Relation Between Debussy's Piano Works and the Innovations of Post-Bop Pianists” - Register
February 4 - Josiah Boornazian “Mary Lou Williams Gender and Jazz”
March 4 - Patrick Brown “Connections Between Speech Acquisition and The Jazz Language”
April 1 (no joke) - Martin Norgaard “Patterns in Music: How Linguistic Corpus Analysis Tools Can Be Used to Illuminate Central Aspects of Jazz Improvisation”
May 6 - Jeffrey Benatar “A Method for teaching interaction in small jazz ensembles
June 3 - Paul Roth “Teaching Jazz, Teaching Justice, blackness of Don Cherry's global communion”

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.

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 Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cincinnati's College -Conservatory of Music (CCM) for a webinar that examines the relation between Claude Debussy’s harmonic and melodic techniques and those of post-bop jazz pianists through the analysis of selected piano pieces and transcriptions of important recordings that helped establish new aesthetics in jazz during the late fifties and early sixties. Similarities between Debussy’s modal techniques and hallmark traits of post-bop jazz harmony are discovered within the contributions that Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner made to Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s small groups. The analysis presented in this article is intended to serve as a model on how jazz research can develop into pedagogical tools for jazz educators and performers aspiring to reach new levels of sophistication in their playing.

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

One recent November morning, after months, even years, working apart, a chamber ensemble, jazz trio and more than a dozen opera singers finally have an opportunity to rehearse together, in person, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz picks up a microphone and acknowledges the Los Angeles-based jazz elder who couldn't make the trip east.

"I just wanted to just take a moment to register the momentousness of this, that we are all here together just to call up the name of Wayne Shorter in this space," Blain-Cruz says. "Let's give it up for Wayne Shorter!"

The room erupts in hoots and applause.
Shorter's first opera, ... (Iphigenia), is set to premiere in Boston this week. The work then travels to three further cities: Washington, D.C., and Berkeley and Santa Monica, Calif.

It's taken literally decades to get to this moment. Shorter started thinking about a long-form, dramatic work when he was a 19-year-old music student at New York University.

"This opera was going to be based on motorcycle gangs," he said via Zoom from L.A., "like the movie The Wild One that Brando was in." Then Shorter heard Leonard Bernstein was working on a musical about gangs, called West Side Story, so he put his idea aside.

After graduating in 1956, and then two years in the army, Shorter proceeded to transform American music with other jazz pioneers, including Art Blakey and Miles Davis, and in the fusion group Weather Report. His Grammy-winning acoustic quartet, formed in 2000, endured for two decades.

But through all those years, opera still lingered in the composer's imagination – until he met composer, singer and bass prodigy Esperanza Spalding.

"I noticed that she would attack things that no one else would," Shorter recalls of Spalding's singular way of playing.

The two jazz revolutionaries, who came up in completely different eras, connected deeply, and Shorter eventually told Spalding about his long-held operatic fantasy. He thought it might involve taking a 2,400-year-old play by the Greek writer Euripides and turning it into something new and unbridled.

"When I first looked at a good opera book, the first thing I saw was a sentence that said, 'In opera, anything goes," Shorter recalls. "Me and Esperanza, we started talking and talking – and then she said, 'Let's do it. Come on."

Application deadline: Monday, November 29, 2021 at 11:59PM (EDT)

New Music USA and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice have announced the launch of Next Jazz Legacy, a new program focused on increasing opportunities for women and non-binary improvisers who are underrepresented in the art form. According to a study of the NPR Music Jazz Critics poll, women made up only 16% of the core band personnel for the albums in the 2019 poll, and the majority of jazz albums ranked included no women musicians at all. Next Jazz Legacy will address these statistics by supporting early-career-stage artists whose access to resources has been limited. By offering creative and professional experience through long-term apprenticeships, financial support and promotion, Next Jazz Legacy aims to inspire change that will benefit everyone in the jazz community. Thanks to funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this program represents a major investment in 20 artists and band leaders over the next 3 years.

The inaugural class of Next Jazz Legacy artists will include six candidates chosen by an esteemed panel of musicians, chaired by Terri Lyne Carrington, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles. The overall direction of the program is being shaped by New Music USA and Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, with guidance from the advisory board, and in alignment with The Andrew W Mellon Foundation’s current priorities and values.
Candidates must be U.S. residents, fully vaccinated, and not enrolled in an academic institution during the duration of the program from January 2022 to December 2022 or contracted with a third party recording company. Selected artists will be announced in January 2022.

The seventh Rhythm Changes Conference, Jazz Then & Now, will take place at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from August 25-28th, 2022. This conference marks the twelfth anniversary of the Rhythm Changes project.

We invite submissions for Jazz Then & Now, a four-day multidisciplinary conference bringing together leading researchers across the arts and humanities and others interested in jazz studies. The event will feature academic papers, panels, and roundtables.

Jazz is an urgent music that responds to or addresses contemporary crises. Its history is inseparable from struggles over civil rights, racial and gender identities, cultural politics, social hierarchies, artistic significance, and new technologies. The music has defined itself through debates around inclusion and exclusion, exemplified by iconic phrases such as ‘This Is Our Music’ (Ornette Coleman) or ‘What Jazz Is – and Isn’t’ (Wynton Marsalis). The sounds of jazz have often been heard as strident, edgy, unexpected, demandingly presentist – as urgent. Or is jazz perhaps more about its ‘then’ than its ‘now’ once we move outside circles of scholars, musicians, and fans? Jazz Then & Now seeks to critically explore how this sense (or absence?) of urgency plays out in jazz and how it contributes to our most compelling contemporary debates.

We welcome papers addressing the conference theme from multiple perspectives, including cultural studies, musicology, cultural theory, music analysis, jazz history, media studies, and practice-based research. Within the general theme of Jazz Then & Now, we have identified several sub-themes. Where relevant, please clearly specify which sub-theme you are referring to in your proposal.

Sub-themes include:
Jazz in pandemic times
Environment and sustainability
Decolonisation
Jazz Now?
Jazz Then, and Now

Please submit your proposal (max. 250 words), including a short biography (max. 50 words) and institutional affiliation, as a Word document to Loes Rusch and Walter van de Leur (Conference Directors), at rhythmchanges@ahk.nl.

The deadline for proposals is February 15th, 2022; we will communicate outcomes to authors by mid-March 2022. The conference committee consists of Loes Rusch, Walter van de Leur, Christa Bruckner-Haring, Nicholas Gebhardt, George McKay, Catherine Tackley, Sarah Raine, and Tony Whyton.

37 years in the making, Gary Carner’s long awaited study of saxophone virtuoso Pepper Adams is finally available.

Featuring never-before published interviews with Phil Woods, Hank Jones, George Mraz, Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath, Mel Lewis, Frank Foster, Louis Hayes, Bob Wilber, Rufus Reid, Charlie Rouse, Ron Carter, George Coleman, Bob Cranshaw, Pepper Adams, Sonny Rollins,Horace Silver, Kenny Burrell, Curtis Fuller, Johnny Griffin, Roland Hanna, Arthur Taylor, Lew Tabackin, David Amram, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, Ira Gitler, Yusef Lateef, Tommy Flanagan, Buddy DeFranco, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.

The Ebook includes links to thousands of hours of rare Adams recordings with Thad Jones, George Mraz, Hank Jones, Mel Lewis, Elvin Jones, Duke Pearson, Roland Hanna, Tommy Flanagan, Roger Kellaway, and many others.

The story of African-American jazz musician Westray’s life journey – striving for knowledge, opportunity, acceptance and understanding.

Written in reverse, the chapters go backwards. The book starts from present (approximately Chapter 50, 2020, back 30 years, to Chapter 20, 1990). The story coincides with an imbedded “road itinerary.” Years are rarely mentioned in the text; and, in most cases, only initials are used for all characters. People, places and things are all real in relation to the timeline. The work involves the interpolation of common conversations—from sources such as texting and emails—to shed light on the fallibility of human relations. To a large degree, and within reason, the length of conversations are meant to be overbearing, countered by other aspects of the writing. Ron Westray’s father and grandfather’s stories are imbedded in the work. His mother’s free-verse-poetry is the muse/soul that binds the work together like a second, invisible narrator.

Issue six of VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research has now been released, with the theme “Contagion”. The editor of the issue is Anna Lindal.

When the Editorial Committee of the journal picked the theme in March 2020, contagion felt like a very relevant subject. But no-one could have predicted at the time just how much contagion would come to influence society – or how many issues about art and contagion that would suddenly turn up and become deeply influential.

“Today, we can’t help but see the term contagion in a different light – in part because we are exhausted after 1.5 arduous years of pandemic, and in part because of the overuse and unilateral associations of the term,” writes Anna Lindal, the editor, in the introduction to the issue.
The global pandemic, initially just one of many ways to approach contagion, touch, reference and transmission within the issue, has during the last year grown to become a truly fateful issue for the arts and shaken up many artists’ understanding of their own practice. It has also become one of the starting points of several of the expositions presented in the issue.

“Biological infections and ‘artistic contagion’ happen in similar ways – both require touch, nearness, vulnerability,” Anna Lindal writes.

“Transmission cannot happen from afar, or when one is isolated. Art and artistic practice have undergone enormous changes during the pandemic, and this issue of VIS offers evidence of some of these changes and adaptations.”

The issue consists of five expositions of artistic research that in various ways approach contagion and touch: in process, in observation, via analogies and in examples of nearness and touch as invaluable components of music and performance. In addition, a conversation is included between three of the members of the Editorial Committee that addresses issues about the arts during the pandemic and beyond.

Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the musical’s journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement. A variety of colorful characters, from Broadway impresarios to gang-connected managers, surface in the compelling storyline.

During the Cold War, the US State Department enlisted some of America’s greatest musicians to serve as jazz ambassadors, touring the world to trumpet a so-called “free society. ” Honored as celebrities abroad, the jazz ambassadors, who were overwhelmingly African Americans, returned home to racial discrimination and deferred dreams. The Brubecks used this double standard as the central message for the musical, deploying humor and pathos to share perspectives on American values.

On September 23, 1962, The Real Ambassadors’s stunning debut moved a packed arena at the Monterey Jazz Festival to laughter, joy, and tears. Although critics unanimously hailed the performance, it sadly became a footnote in cast members’ bios. The enormous cost of reassembling the star-studded cast made the creation impossible to stage and tour. However, The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation caps this jazz story by detailing how the show was triumphantly revived in 2014 by Jazz at Lincoln Center. This reaffirmed the musical’s place as an integral part of America’s jazz history and served as an important reminder of how artists’ voices are a powerful force for social change.