🎶 January News from the JEN Research Interest Group

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

It was wonderful to see many of you in Dallas and all the presentations and posters were stellar and well-attended. Covid is disrupting our lives and many were not able to travel, let’s aim for January 4-7 next year to gather at the Omni Orlando Resort in Florida. Submissions for the 2023 conference are open February and March. Article submissions for Jazz Education in Research and Practice Volume 4 are open now until May 1 - info and submission guidelines here. Volume 3 is now available, the Table of Contents is below and of course Volume 1 and 2 also include a wealth of articles. Please consider including some of them in your courses this semester and access or order copies through your libraries. As a JEN member, you can claim a discounted yearly subscription for $15 if you order directly from IU Press here and follow the subscription links. And of course, as a full JEN member you have access to reading all editions on the JEN website for free.

We have several new initiatives in consideration for the JEN Research Interest Group. We will have a committee meeting on Friday February 25, 3pm EST to discuss options and assign group leaders and members. If you’d like to stay updated about the upcoming meeting and possibly get involved please send me a note with your contact info. For those of you who were notified about our summer meeting, no need to send me info, you’ll get the invitation for the winter meeting. If you’d like to provide input for possible initiatives, please take the survey.

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)

🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

Mary Lou Williams Gender & Jazz with Josiah Boornazian

Friday, February 4 • 3pm ET

Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-members)

Join Josiah Boornazian, jazz saxophonist, composer, researcher, and an Assistant Professor of Jazz and Applied Saxophone at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley for this exciting webinar!

Since at least the 1940s, jazz musicians, scholars, journalists, and historians have expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward pianist, composer, and educator Mary Lou Williams. Though she undeniably experienced significant hardships throughout her career at least in part due to gender-based discrimination, Williams has also been recognized and celebrated as an important figure in jazz history in a variety of ways since at least the 1970s. Recent scholarly and mainstream discourses dedicated to Williams reveal an apparent widespread tendency within jazz culture to celebrate the pianist as a noteworthy historical figure at least in part due to her gender, and some institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center have tried to demonstrate that jazz culture reflects certain currently prevalent progressive values, namely diversity, equity, and inclusion. Such narratives encounter the problem that jazz culture has historically been a male-dominated field that has rarely treated its female practitioners equitably. The contradictions between the apparent facts of jazz history and more recent narratives celebrating the contributions of women such as Williams raise important and potentially uncomfortable historiographical and ethical questions for the jazz community. This article suggests that practical trial-and-error efforts aimed at actively engaging more women performers in jazz culture might be more promising projects for institutions as opposed to investing resources in continuously attempting to revise narratives about the role of women in jazz history, regardless of whether the aim of historical analysis is to point out past sexism or to try to obfuscate it or atone for it.

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

Plus a Q & A with the live Zoom audience.

Have a question you don't see covered above? Once registered, you will be invited to submit any questions you would like answered.

PLEASE NOTE:

JEN Members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join the Zoom Room.

Non-members & youth (under 18) members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join via Facebook Live. Click here for membership information.

The story of Japanese jazz is about music and a movement, but also a nation’s state of mind – a daring vision of a better future after the second world war, sounded out on piano, drums and brass. Jazz is a distinctly American art form – the US’s greatest cultural achievement, in fact, along with hip-hop – and a healthy scene had formed in the 1920s and 30s as American players toured the clubs of Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka. But Japan had historically been an insular nation – its policy of sakoku, which for more than two centuries severely limited contact with the outside world, had only ended in the 1850s – and an increasingly nationalist government, feeling jazz diluted Japanese culture, began to crack down. By the second world war, “the music of the enemy” was outlawed.

It’s one of the most romantic stories in music: the jazz star rejecting fame to practise on a New York bridge for two years. Now 91, Rollins recalls those long cold days – and how he has coped after losing the power to play.

If you happened to be gazing idly from a window of New York City’s J train crossing the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge, most days between the summer of 1959 and the autumn of 1961, you might have glimpsed a lone saxophonist huddled into a cranny of the gigantic steel skeleton.

Travellers on the footway might have got close to the sound of him, too: an astonishing tumult of fast tumbling runs seeming to echo the chatter of the wheels on the subway tracks, honking low-tone exclamations exchanged with the hoots of the riverboats, snatches of blues, pop hits, classical motifs, calypsos. Few witnesses to those torrential monologues will have shrugged him off as just another busker; this was an intuitive master of his instrument who, for some reason, had chosen to tell this multitude of stories to the sky instead of a rapt roomful of fans.

“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” reflects that saxophonist today, 91-year-old Sonny Rollins. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”

He climbed the steep iron steps within two blocks of the apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille, at 400 Grand Street in Manhattan, and was thrilled by the space, light and noisy solitude they led to. Rollins was 28 and already one of the undisputed giants of the subtle and sophisticated modern-jazz advances known as bebop that had taken off in the 40s – even though Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were close on his heels with radical new approaches to how melody, harmony and rhythm could dance spontaneously together.

In 1961, Sandra and Allan Jaffe stopped in New Orleans on their way home to Philadelphia from an extended honeymoon in Mexico. They heard music playing all around them in the French Quarter and stepped into an art gallery on St. Peter Street where a combo was playing traditional jazz.

The Jaffes, then in their 20s, were transformed by what they heard. They came back a few days later to hear the combo again. The gallery’s owner, Larry Borenstein, told them that he was moving his business next door and offered to rent the couple the modest space (31 by 20 feet) for $400 a month.

“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Mrs. Jaffe told the alumni magazine of Harcum College, from which she graduated, in 2011. “‘Of course,’ we said, and that was the beginning of Preservation Hall. We never left New Orleans.”

Preservation Hall — which serves no alcohol, seats 50 or so on six benches and had no air-conditioning until 2019 — has celebrated jazz for 60 years in a city widely regarded as its birthplace. It defied segregation laws in the early 1960s. It survived Mr. Jaffe’s death in 1987, and it survived Hurricane Katrina. The coronavirus pandemic shut it down, but it reopened triumphantly in June.

Mrs. Jaffe died on Monday in a hospital in New Orleans. She was 83.

Her son Ben, the creative director of Preservation Hall, confirmed the death.

The Jaffes played different roles at Preservation Hall. Allan Jaffe, who played the helicon, a brass instrument, was the link to the musicians and sent them out on the road as the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Mrs. Jaffe, who shared management duties with her husband, was usually stationed at the hall’s front gate, basket on her lap, collecting money from the patrons.

James Mtume, the musician, songwriter, producer, bandleader and talk-radio host whose 1983 hit “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled in more than 100 songs, died on Sunday at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 76.
His cause was cancer, his family said.
Mr. Mtume started his career as a jazz percussionist. He was in Miles Davis’s band for the first half of the 1970s, appearing on Davis’s landmark 1972 jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors.
But in the late ’70s he pivoted to R&B: He co-wrote hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, produced albums and formed a group, Mtume, which had major hits with his songs “Juicy Fruit” and “You, Me and He.” His sparse, sputtering electronic beat for “Juicy Fruit” gained an extensive second life in hip-hop when it was sampled on the debut single by the Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy,” a No. 1 rap hit in 1994.

James Mtume was born James Forman on Jan. 3, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was the jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath, but he was raised by his stepfather, James Forman, a jazz pianist, also known as Hen Gates, who had played with Charlie Parker, and his mother, Bertha Forman, a homemaker.

Jazz musicians were frequent family visitors — Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and John Coltrane among them — and the young James Forman grew up playing piano and percussion. His biological uncle, the jazz drummer Albert (Tootie) Heath, gave him his first conga drum. The rest of his legacy jumps off from here.

Application period: 10 February – 24 February, 2022 (noon, CET) / Programme start: October 2022

The University of Applied Arts Vienna invites potential candidates to apply for the Artistic Research PhD Programme (PhD in Art). In addition to providing proof of qualification in terms of artistic development candidates must also submit a written exposé outlining their planned activity within the field of artistic research. The six-semester programme of study in the field of art, conducted in English, is set up around themes and practices of artistic research. The thesis consists of an artistic work as well as a reflexive documentation of the knowledge gain yielded by the project.

Of particular importance among the selection criteria are up-to-dateness, innovation potential and the potential social relevance of the planned artistic research activity, as well as the demonstration of knowledge of the national and international research context. Doctoral candidates are overseen by professors at the Angewandte – who are recommended by the same commission that is responsible for their selection:

The application (CV, portfolio, exposé, all in English, compiled into a single PDF file no larger than 50 MB) has to be uploaded online via the Angewandte Application tool. The application tool is open from 10 February to 24 February, 2022. The PDF may contain links for downloading relevant material in widely used digital formats. The results of the application process will be communicated to applicants by August 2022 at the latest.

SKH welcomes applications for doctoral studentships, starting January 2023. Last date for application is 14 February 2022.

We are announcing seven new doctoral studentships in the third–cycle subject area Performative and Media–Based Practices – with specialisations in film and media, choreography, opera and performing arts.

Performative and Media–Based practices is an artistic doctoral programme which offers possibilities for artists to reflect in, on and through artistic practice.
The aim of the programme is to enable doctoral candidates to independently and reflectively plan, execute and document an artistic enquiry which creates insights and methodologies through - and in relation to - artistic practice, and which are articulated and disseminated in ways that are publicly accessible. The education emphasizes the vital role transdisciplinary discourse plays in the development and articulation of new knowledge in contemporary art practices and processes.
The specialisations within the subject area are film and media, choreography, opera and performing arts.
Within the specialization area Film and Media, SKH is currently developing research in new narrative formats and innovative use and/or design of audiovisual technology as well as practices that enable participatory, immersive or other experimental formats. This year’s call is in this area.

Within the specialization area Performing Arts, SKH is currently developing research in audiovisual design with a focus on sustainability. This year’s call is in this area.

Within the specialization areas Opera and Choreography the call this year is open (no particular research area specified).

The Dr.artium Programme at the Doctoral School for Artistic Research KWDS of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz KUG, in collaboration with Zürcher Hochschule der Künste ZHdK, offers highly individualised doctoral studies on freely chosen topics in music and theatre. Evolving around epistemically oriented artistic practice in the fields of music and performing arts and related interdisciplinary practices, doctoral research at KWDS systematically integrates reflection through artistic experimentation with scholarly/scientific reflection.

Submission deadline: 28 February 2022

University of Utah and Iona College are pleased to announce the Call for Papers and Scores for the second annual Issues in Contemporary Jazz Conference, being held virtually on April 30th, 2022. The proposal deadline is February 25th, 2022. This event seeks to gather performers, scholars, and pedagogues to share, explore, and discuss issues in contemporary jazz through the multifaceted scope of work represented within the field of jazz studies. The conference welcomes submissions from the academic sector, performance practitioners, as well as organizations with a vested interest in the present and future of the discipline.

While we are interested in all submissions that reflect an emphasis or focus in contemporary jazz, this year we especially welcome proposals that deal with understandings of jazz communities.

Topics for presentations may include, but are not limited to:

Community formation, development, and re-formation
Musical scenes, sub-communities, and subcultures
Physical and digital venues, concert series, and festivals as organizing entities
Digital Communities
Aesthetic and stylistic commentary
Narrativity in communal performance practice
Musical networks
Social and/or cultural contextualization of space, place, race, and intersectionality within the jazz community

Proposals are invited in the following formats:

Individual Papers (20 mins duration plus 10 mins Q&A, up to 250-word abstract). (Up to 2 pages for figures, tables, diagrams, and bibliographic information are optional as appropriate to clarify and contextualize proposal, which will not be counted against the 250-word limit). Joint papers (2 speakers max. Same format).
Themed Sessions (3 papers totaling 90 mins, up to 250 word per paper plus 250 words outlining content and rationale for the session).
Roundtable Discussions (90 mins, max. 6 speakers. Up to 750 words outlining the format, content and rationale for the session).

Prerecorded Performances and/or Lecture Recital with Live Q&A (no longer than 30 mins). Sample performance of proposed performance should be no longer than 5 minutes.

Composers Forum (each composer shall have 20 mins to present a composition with score and recording available prior to Conference Date). Composers should submit a description of the piece of no more than 250 words, as well as the score and parts of their composition within a single PDF. Recordings are preferred but not required.

Proposals should include:

Title for the paper, session, performance, and/or composition.
An abstract with all identifying information about the author removed as a PDF attachment.
Name, contact details, and affiliation of the speaker(s)/performer(s)/composer in the body of the email.
In the case of themed sessions and round-table sessions: the panel convener.

Please send proposals to ICJConference2022@gmail.com by February 25th, 2022 at 11:59PM EST. The conference committee will examine all abstracts and contributors will be informed immediately thereafter.

Please feel free to contact the conference organizers with any questions about the conference.

Conference Organizers:

John Petrucelli, University of Utah – u6027228@utah.edu

Adam Rosado, Iona College– arosado@iona.edu

Women in Jazz: Musicality, Femininity, Marginalization examines the invisible discrimination against female musicians in the French jazz world and the ways in which women thrive as professionals despite such conditions. The author shines a light on the paradox for women in jazz: to express oneself in a "feminine" way is to be denigrated for it, yet to behave in a "masculine" manner is to be devalued for a lack of femininity. This masculine world ensures it is more difficult for women to be recognized as jazz musicians than it is for men – even when musicians, critics and audiences are ideologically opposed to discrimination. Female singers are confined by the feminine stereotypes of their profession, while female instrumentalists must comport themselves into traditionally masculine roles. The author explores the academic and professional socializations of these musicians, the musical choice they make and how they are perceived by jazz professionals as a result. First published in French by CNRS Editions in 2007 (and later reissued in paperback in 2018, with the author’s postscript that "nothing much has changed"), Women in Jazz: Musicality, Femininity, Marginalization expands the conversation beyond the French border, identifying female jazz musicians as a discriminated minority all around the world.

This is a subscription journal but the Editorial is Open Access and includes Executive Summaries of the contents.

Michael Allemana – “The Gatekeepers’ Puzzle: Programming diversity and inclusion in a jazz festival”
José Dias and Beatriz Nunes – “Festa do Jazz: A case study on gender (im)balance in Portuguese jazz”
Sean Foran – “Diversity of Programming for Audiences in Australian Jazz Festivals”
Sarah Raine –“Gender Politics, UK Jazz Festivals, and COVID-19: Maintaining the momentum for change during a time of crisis”
Sonya A. Grier – “On the Sunny Side of the Street: Sidestepping race for inclusion at the New Orleans Jazz Fest”
George McKay – “Further Thoughts and a ManiFESTo on Jazz (Festivals) and the Decolonisation of Music"

This special edition of Riffs focuses on autoethnography and qualitative research in relation to popular music. The journal publication is twinned with a forthcoming book entitled: Popular Music Ethnographies: practice, place, identity. The intention of these studies is to uphold the principle that ‘music is good to think with’ (Chambers 1981: 38). Riffs was founded in 2015 to promote experimental writing on popular music, with a strong DiY ethos and space to offer flexibility and diversity of outputs through challenging interdisciplinary boundaries. At the same time there is a degree of similarity with specialist popular music magazines including Mojo, fRoots (1979-2019), Rolling Stone, Record Collector, Prog, Mixmag, and Uncut, through a focus on visuals and creative images. This suggests that there has been an increased growth at the ‘popular’ end of biographical and autoethnography within popular music. Critically, popular music autoethnographies work across and within disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, social anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and popular music studies.

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.

Issue 25 contains 7 contributions in 4 languages:

Em Vasco Alves ‘A∴418: Um Contributo para a Pesquisa Artística em Música’, é introduzido o método, A∴418, orientado ao estudo da interpretação musical. Através da aplicação de duas técnicas de análise, é descrita a narrativa sonora que o intérprete constrói a partir do texto musical original do compositor. Finalmente é apresentada uma partitura na qual aparecem os detalhes tanto do compositor quanto do intérprete.

‘Vox Spatium’ de Sofía Balbontín describe dos exploraciones sobre la acústica del espacio urbano y arquitectónico. En el proceso de exploración, comienza a forjarse una narrativa que trasciende de los espacios humanos a los espacios no humanos, planteando cuestiones en torno a la entropía urbana y la actual era geológica del Antropoceno.
In ‘Aubiome: A Collaborative Method for the Production of Interactive Electronic Music’ Joel Diegert and Adrián Artacho investigate the potential of integrating the saxophone with real-time electronics. The six-stage, iterative working process that emerged during the aubiome project is broken down and described.

Ulvi Haagensen’s ‘Cleaning in progress: the line between art and life’ explores the connections and overlaps between art and life through a multi-disciplinary art practice that combines installation, sculpture, drawing, performance and video, and merges this with everyday experiences, examining the more mundane aspects of everyday life.
In his exposition, ‘Future Earth Scream Now - The Solresol Birdsong Translator’, Jim Lloyd presents a ‘speculative fabulation’ on communication with birds. He describes a device built to ‘listen’ to birdsong and translate it into human speech utilising the obscure musical language Solresol (François Sudre, 1866).

Tabea Rothfuchs führt in ‘I lost time and space. Where am I? – Erzählen von chronischen Schmerzen’ eine Reihe von Dialogen mit Schmerzpatienten und Fachärzten. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, was mit der inneren und äußeren Welt eines Menschen geschieht, wenn kein medizinisches Verfahren den Ursprung eines anhaltenden Schmerzempfindens (weiter) entschlüsseln kann.

Helga Schmid & Kevin Walker’s ‘The Atemporal Event’ describes the process, outcomes, and analysis related to a twenty-four-hour event they organized in London, investigating the question of how to change perceptions of time by treating it as a malleable material. The research brings together the authors’ research on ‘uchronia’ (temporal utopia or non-time) and anthropological perspectives on designing embodied experiences.

About the Book: Things have changed, to say the least. The arts field is resizing, recombining, rethinking. Gone are the days of long term subscribers and reliable audiences. Arts organizations must become more flexible, adaptive, and nimble to survive and thrive in today’s world. Arts managers must engage, adapt, and innovate. Great management invites creativity. Vibrant artistry welcomes strong management. Managing Arts Organizations can help.

In Managing Arts Organizations, David Andrew Snider provides a playbook for navigating arts management in this new era and seeks to inspire a new generation of arts managers. Each chapter is focused on a specific topic, with principles, stories, exercises, advice, and best practices related to that topic. The appendix includes eight case studies, each illuminating issues in arts management via a real world scenario or organization. These narratives will enhance the reader’s understanding of topics including financial management, marketing, programming, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts, and accessibility across multiple disciplines. Learn more about the book at the link above.

Those who choose to make the orchestra enterprise their life's work face a host of challenges that have beset orchestra managers since the very beginning of the art form, alongside new challenges that continue to arise in the twenty-first century. Written for those who are contemplating jumping into the orchestra management realm, the Orchestra Management Handbook will provide a significant head-start for people entering this complicated, exciting, and challenging line of work. Whether short-term, long-term, internal, external or existential, an intentional approach to building, maintaining, and sustaining relationships must be at the core of the orchestra manager's daily routine. Few arts organizations have more potential for building community than orchestras. With a typically large permanent complement of artists, a high volume of performances, and a need for large audiences, building community should be central to the internal and external operations of the modern orchestra.

Each chapter of this handbook provides practical strategies, tools, and a variety of resources to workers in the orchestra management field, always with an emphasis on building relationships. Throughout the book, author and experienced orchestra manager, violinist, and professor Travis Newton regularly features illustrative case studies highlighting innovative practices being undertaken at orchestras across the country, providing the reader an opportunity to learn from the experiences of others. Additionally, each chapter concludes with a series of discussion questions to ponder, teasing out some of the key concepts.

Quyền Văn Minh (b. 1954) is not only a jazz saxophonist and lecturer at the prestigious Vietnam National Academy of Music, but he is also one of the most preeminent jazz musicians in Vietnam. Considered a pioneer in the country, Minh is often publicly recognized as the “godfather of Vietnamese jazz. ” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam tells the story of the music as it intertwined with Minh’s own narrative. Stan BH Tan-Tangbau details Minh’s life story, telling how Minh pioneered jazz as an original genre even while navigating the trials and tribulations of a fervent socialist revolution, of the ideological battle that was the Cold War, of Vietnam’s war against the United States, and of the political changes during the Đổi Mới period between the mid-1980s and the 1990s.

Minh worked tirelessly and delivered two breakthrough solo recitals in 1988 and 1989, marking the first time jazz was performed in the public sphere in the socialist state. To gain jazz acceptance as a mainstream musical art form, Minh founded Minh Jazz Club. With the release of his debut album of original compositions in 2000, Minh shaped the nascent genre of Vietnamese jazz.

Minh’s endeavors kickstarted the momentum, from his performing jazz in public, teaching jazz both formally and informally, and contributing to the shaping of an original Vietnamese voice to stand out among the many styles in the jazz world. Most importantly, Minh generated a public space for musicians to play and for the Vietnamese to listen. His work eventually helped to gain jazz the credibility necessary at the national conservatoire to offer instruction in a professional music education program.

For anyone from beginners to professionals.

• Rooted in practical skills and going far beyond theory, The Jazz Saxophone Book will improve your ability to construct beautiful, flowing solo lines.
• Videos - The book includes access to over 30 videos of the author demonstrating ideas in the book.
• Transcriptions - Includes hundreds of examples of solo phrases by the masters of jazz saxophone.

• For the beginning improviser, we cover:

— Creative ways to work on sound, time and building a jazz vocabulary
— Connecting your soloing with your internal singing voice
— Foundational jazz harmony - what you need to know!

• For intermediate players, the book offers:

— In-depth treatment of jazz harmony, with copious examples from the masters of the tradition
— Ideas for becoming a musical storyteller
— Skills needed to show up at a jam session and confidently perform a tune

• For more advanced players, the book discusses:

— Using advanced harmony to build and release tension
— Taking jazz vocabulary, harmony and form into the realm of freedom
— How to practice efficiently to become a well-rounded, continually improving soloist