⛄️ 🎵 December News from the JEN Research Interest Group

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

I can’t wait to see many of you in just a few days in Dallas, January 5-8, for the JEN conference. On Wednesday, January 5, starting 9am, we will have a day of research presentations in the Shawnee Trail room, third level. You can find me there all day, please say hello and happy to get together for lunches and dinners and coffee throughout the conference, here is my email. On Thursday, January 6, 3-5pm, visit the poster sessions in the Marsalis Foyer/ Exhibition Level. The 20 presenters will be available to share about their research and answer any questions in an informal setting with plenty of time to network. This will also be a great opportunity to pick up a hard copy of JAZZ Volume 3 in the JENeral Store, hot off the press - below is the table of content. Of course, reading access to all the articles is also a membership benefit for full JEN members. The complete conference schedule is online as well as registration and hotel info.

Articles

Martin Norgaard and Ute Römer

Patterns in Music: How Linguistic Corpus Analysis Tools Can Be Used to Illuminate Central Aspects of Jazz Improvisation

Josiah Boornazian

Mary Lou Williams and the Role of Gender in Jazz: How Can Jazz Culture Respect Women’s Voices and Break Down Barriers for Women in Jazz while Simultaneously Acknowledging Uncomfortable Histories?

Case Studies

Paul N. Roth

Teaching Jazz, Teaching Justice, and the Blackness of Don Cherry’s Global Communion

Benjamin Nichols

Melodic Rhythms and Intervals in Selected Works of Jerry Bergonzi

Reflective Essays

Lee Caplan

Jazz Historiography, Eurocentric Philosophy, and the Problem of Hegel and Aristotle

Sergio Pamies Rodríguez
Some Remarks on the Pedagogy of Advanced Jazz Improvisation in the 2020s

Patrick Brown
Connections between Speech Acquisition and the Jazz Language

Quick Hits

David Detweiler

Treatments of the ii-V7-I Chord Progression in Jazz Improvisation: An Analysis of Phrases Used by Hank Mobley, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Dexter Gordon

Fumi Tomita

Teaching Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Enhance the Jazz Curriculum

Reviews

Sergio Pamies Rodríguez

Experiencing Chick Corea: A Listener’s Companion

The monthly series of webinars will continue in February 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.

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

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 three editions of JAZZ, accessible for reading as a JEN membership benefit for full members here. For subscriptions or purchase of single articles follow this link - JEN members can claim a special discount price. 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 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)

The annual JPN (Jazz Promotion Network) conference took place this year as a hybrid of online and in-person events at the Southbank centre in partnership with the EFG London Jazz Festival. The two-day event saw guest speakers including Orphy Robinson MBE and journalist Kevin Le Gendre discuss the challenges with inclusion in jazz today across the music industry.

I was only able to attend the first day, where we were treated to a special talk hosted by Wim Wabbes, artistic director at the Handelsbeurs Concert Hall in Ghent and president of Europe Jazz Network. Wabbes is a passionate climate change activist and so much of his presentation analysed how the jazz sector can respond to the climate change emergency. During a Zoom call that mostly featured festival organisers and venue managers he focused on how the Handelsbeurs is run as a renewable and sustainable venue. He gave details of how printed brochures have been replaced with public announcements and how bike repair stations are provided on site for all audience members who travel by two wheels.

The webinar continued throughout the afternoon with breakout rooms that we were able to enter. These smaller groups covered topics such as freedom of movement post-Brexit, class crisis in jazz and reviving jazz after Covid-19. Tomorrow’s Warriors also presented a discussion about jazz beyond education and how Janine Irons MBE shares her approach to working with young people.

Even the big-statement albums made by jazz musicians this year had a feeling of intense closeness: of large-scale problems being worked out within an enclosure, with limited tools and just a few compatriots. No surprise there, I guess. Twelve months ago, the year began with promise, but we’ve hardly returned to old comforts. Rather than breaking out, we spent 2021 getting used to a feeling of unquiet, making the most of being mostly alone. The best improvised music of the year understood that, and met us there.

Follow the link above for NYT’s list of the year’s best jazz albums, including Pharoah Sanders, Esperanza Spaulding, Jason Moran, etc.

There's a key metaphor nestled near the midpoint of ...(Iphigenia), the audacious, iconoclastic new opera by Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding. A revisionary take on a canonical tale — mainly Euripides' Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, a storm of bloodlust, retribution and obligation — the opera seeks to imbue its namesake character, a young woman sentenced to ritual sacrifice, with some semblance of a soul. As for the metaphor, it arrives when someone exhorts Iphigenia to "open the cemented way by your dandelion sprout." The chorus instantly seizes on that image:

seeded in you

in you seed the cracking of cemented myth

illumine our clay

A seedling, sprouting through a crack in the firmament: it's a useful way to envision what ...(Iphigenia) is trying to accomplish, with respect to its source material. At the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston last month, during the opera's first fully staged presentation, this hopeful struggle played out both in the music and its metatext. And as Shorter and spalding both freely admit, speaking separately by phone this week, the buried tensions in the production are far from resolved. On the cusp of two sold-out performances at the Kennedy Center this weekend, and before ...(Iphigenia) moves on to a pair of bookings in California (Cal Performances at UC Berkeley and the Broad Stage in Los Angeles), the opera's co-creators describe a work very much in progress — if not, as spalding might be the first to acknowledge, a piece at war with itself.

For Shorter, a saxophonist who at 88 belongs to the first rank of living jazz legends, ...(Iphigenia) represents a continuation, rather than a culmination, of his lifetime inquiry. Earlier this fall, he spoke with NPR's All Things Considered about the circuitous life of this production, which fulfills an operatic ambition he first harbored in the 1950s, as a music education major at NYU. His career path led him instead through some of the most acclaimed small groups of the era, his deep instinct for enigmatic logic making him one of the most influential jazz composers of the last 60 years.

Thursday 7 – Saturday 9 July 2022
CFP: Deadline for submissions 17 December 2021
Keynote speakers: TBC

Music has been present in European universities from the thirteenth century, with degrees being granted as of the fifteenth century, and the professionalization of musicology taking place in the nineteenth century. However, the double nature of music as art and science has granted it a specificity that not only historically marked its singularity within the organization of knowledge but also challenges its position within the mission of the university in a changing world.

The institutional integration of music in higher education varies across the globe, as does the nature of the degrees offered, and the field uniquely defies established models of researching, assessing merit, and structuring careers. Furthermore, transformations in the ways in which technology and globalization have changed music creation, performance, and reception call for innovative university practices and curricula, as do societal challenges regarding issues of cultural diversity, identity, inequality, and empowerment.

Within this context, the conference is aimed at extending and advancing knowledge on music in the history of universities, contributing to current issues and debates, and to prospectively theorizing its transformation and social impact.

This conference is organised in association with the Universidade do Minho; City, University of London; and the University of Surrey. We gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from these institutions.

Featured Guest Artists
Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science
John Clayton
Jim McNeely with John Mills Times 17
Mizo Hazama
Miguel Zenon Quartet

Special Sessions By
Ryan Truesdell (Bob Brookmeyer Celebration)
Omar Thomas (Jazz compositional influences in writing for wind ensemble)
Adam Neely (Social media utilization for the jazz composer)
Meg Okura (Writing for strings)
Gail Boyd (Artist management for jazz composers)

Performances and Presentations
Performances of SONIC Award-Winning Works
World Premier of the ‘Fundamental Freedoms” Commission
Over 75 New Music Presentations, Posters, and Papers

May 6–8, 2022
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

The 2022 AJIRN conference theme ‘Space is the place’ invites participants to think about where improvisation occurs, where it might occur, how it interacts with its spaces and places, the movements and migratory patterns of improvising artists, what role locality
in any of its forms plays in improvisation studies, and more. Many forces today—not least the increasing awareness that international travel on a large scale is ecologically unsustainable—conspire to drive us to rethink ‘the local’ as the primary place of
our collaborative practices. Might this lead to a culture shift in which local agency replaces the traditional hegemonic centers of creative practice? Conversely, the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated many novel modes of creative collaboration via technologically-afforded
‘virtual’ spaces. So while ‘the local’ is being reclaimed as the foundational collaborative locus, it is simultaneously taking on new registers, since even disparate spaces and places can be conjoined to form new virtual localities. Here Sun Ra’s insistence
that ‘space is the place’ takes on dynamic new valences, from local place to cyberspace.

We welcome proposals for individual papers, performances, panel discussions, and hybrid formats that engage this theme. Assuming travel is possible in 2022, we are planning for a hybrid conference with robust on-the-ground activities but also opportunities for remote participation.

Editors: Liam Maloney, University of York; Nicolas Pillai, University College of Dublin

1964: Dizzy Gillespie begins his first presidential term.
1971: Nina Simone and Huey Newton marry.
1989: Kenny G’s smooth jazz is used in the Vatican siege forcing Noriega to surrender within four hours.
1990: Miles Davis and Prince release their collaborative album Motherfunker.
1996: Alice Coltrane institutes the Jazz at Lincoln Centre programme.
2016: Beyoncé Knowles releases her sixth jazz album GatorAid alongside her own bid for the
Presidency.

What if Dizzy Gillespie had actually been president? What if Miles Davis had produced a truly great hip hop jazz fusion record? What if…?

In recent years, speculative history has gained traction within academia as a provocative methodological tool. These imagined temporal junctures have allowed vivid (re)interpretations of sonic presents and futures. Furthermore, scholars have gone beyond simple speculation on possible alternate histories and into realms of fiction that reconceptualize the very nature of musical activity. In one of the landmark Afrofuturist texts, Kodwo Eshun (More Brilliant Than the Sun, 1998, Verso) leverages such approaches to ‘happily delete familiar names… and historical precedence,’ enabling partial or wholesale amendments to our musical landscape. More recently, Holger Schulze (2020) has further explored the possibilities afforded by sonic fictions; narratives and structures wholly reengineered to grant greater agency and affordances to certain cultures. Popular music has seen the impossible manifest in recent years with artists pressed into service from beyond the grave, reanimated holographically, or enjoined into
surprising (and sometimes inappropriate) collaborations (e.g. Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Maria Callas, Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur).

This special issue will interrogate the conjectural mode as a new beginning for the understanding of jazz and its culture. We contend that, despite the destabilizing intentions of New Jazz Studies, discourse has remained centred on ahistorical canon formation and racialized conceptions of genius. In this, the statues of jazz have remained firmly in place. We invite submissions to this issue which directly challenge these monolithic narratives.

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years’ worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians’ actual words.

Five of the interviewees—Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef—have received the National Endowment for the Arts’ prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people.

The musicians interviewed for the book range in age from their early seventies to mid-nineties. Older musicians started their careers during the segregation of the Jim Crow era, while the youngest came up during the struggle for civil rights. All grapple with issues of race, performance, and jazz's rich legacies. In addition to performing, touring, and recording, many have composed and arranged, and others have contributed as teachers, historians, studio musicians, session players, producers, musicians’ advocates, authors, columnists, poets, and artists. The interviews in The Jazz Masters are invaluable primary material for scholars and will appeal to musicians inspired by these veterans' stories and their different approaches to music.

The European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, Volume 11 (ISSN 2663-5771) has two new issues available!

In its latest publication of its popular scientific publication, ENCATC continues to stimulate debate on the topics of cultural management and cultural policy among scholars, educators, policy makers and cultural managers.
Based on a multidisciplinary perspective and with aims to connect theory and practice in the realm of the cultural sector, Volume 11 includes two issues. The first is a general issue on new advancements in the cultural and creative domains. It has five articles on the topics of:
"Governance of cultural heritage: towards participatory approaches" by Sakarias Sokka (Finland), Francesco Badia (Italy), Anita Kangas (Finland), and Fabio Donato (Italy)
"The art organisation’s societal engagement – do the artist’s values matter?" by Annukka Jyrämä (Estonia)
"Communicating the needs of a sector in times of crisis: European cultural networks, advocacy and forward-looking cultural policies" by Matina Magkou (France)
"Problematic issues in constructing the common space of “knowledge societies”: resources of international cooperation in the field of culture" by Daryna Zhyvohliadova (Ukraine)
"Representation Of Women In Art Museums: How Can We Improve Gender Balance In Exhibition Practice?" by Astrid Aspegren (Denmark)

Volume 11, issue 2 is also a general issue on new advancements in the cultural and creative domains with four articles covering hot issues in the field of cultural management and policy as well as the latest research trends on:
"Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in Uncertain Times: Insights from the Italian Actors’ Response to the COVID-19 Crisis" by Gemma Grau Pérez (Spain)
"Cultural diversity in Finland: Opening up the field for foreign-born artists" by Emmi Lahtinen (Finland)
"State of the Art Fair Post-Covid: Audience Development Strategies in a Post-Digital Context" by Alexandra Zagrebelnaia (Spain)
"Incredible Edible Todmorden: Impacts on Community Building, Education, and Local Culture. A Case for the Operationalization of a Sustainability-led Discourse" by Michelle Brener Mizrahi (Mexico)