🎶 May News from the JEN Research Interest Group

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

Greetings from Dublin as we finish up the first post-pandemic tour with my group Sheroes. It’s been such a treat to be able to perform together and share with audiences, let the healing begin. As a very difficult school year comes to an end, I hope everyone will find time to recharge this summer and light the creative flame.

We have a strong number of submissions to the fourth edition of JAZZ and Volume 4 is in the editorial process to be published by the 2023 JEN conference. 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.

The monthly series of webinars will continue on June 3 with Paul Roth’s “Teaching Jazz, Teaching Justice, blackness of Don Cherry's global communion” and 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.

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.

🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

Teaching Jazz, Teaching Justice, and the Blackness of Don Cherry's Global Communion
with Paul N. Roth

Friday, June 3 • 3pm ET

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

Join Paul N. Roth, a musician and scholar whose work touches jazz, popular and improvised musics, Black study, critical theory, and arts and community advocacy for this informative session that proposes trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry as a pedagogical coordinate for approaching globally expansive jazz studies and social justice perspectives. Central are Cherry's philosophies on universality - at once musical, spiritual, and ethical - and the ways jazz functions as "glue" within his broad musical/geographic scope. While explicitly cosmopolitan, jazz here is anchored in its particular lineages of Black radical aesthetics (the blues, the necessity for improvisation and syncretism, etc.) and as such offers nuanced frames around Black universalities; those prefiguring and emerging through capaciousness of jazz's wide trajectories yet firmly situated in race, history, power, and the seemingly impossible ideal of a more loving, equitable, compassionate world. The totality of Cherry's breadth - musical and otherwise - both troubles the "universalism" of inherited philosophical (Western) consensus and provides compelling directions for how practitioners and educators alike can think and support a growing jazz globality that still centers ethical imperatives of the music's histories and embedded potentials.

Plus a Q & A with the live Zoom audience.

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

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.

If asked to pick the least likely jazz star in the music’s history, I wouldn’t need to mull it over for long. Even Toots Thielemans’s name is a jazz oddity. I’m not talking about his cumbersome birth name—the future jazz hero was christened Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor Thielemans back on April 29, 1922. Just try imagining that on a Blue Note album cover. But the nickname Toots was hardly an improvement.

Jazz musicians are supposed to have tough, gritty monikers. They borrow from wild animals, like Willie ‘The Lion” Smith, or actual battlefield weapons, such as Cannonball Adderley. It’s no coincidence that the best jazz sobriquets sound like the names of boxing moves—they didn’t call those jam sessions “cutting contests” for nothing. Hence a litany of soloists known as Punch, Slam, Jabbo, Spike, Pops, and Snap Crackle.

Even the insulting nicknames, of which there are plenty—Fats, Shorty, Shifty, Sharkey—fit the bill, provided they convey a dangerous underworld pose. When they described Miles Davis as the “Prince of Darkness,” which is about as Luciferian as they come, he happily featured it as a song title. Miles understood that your jazz identity ought to inspire a wary respect, perhaps bordering on fear.

Sad to say, Toots doesn’t even get you in the door of the jazz club, let alone up on the bandstand. And growing up in Brussels didn’t help his street cred much—that Belgian city is famous for many things, from chocolates to international diplomacy, but none of them have much connection to jazz.

Once, at a Miles Davis concert, Flora Purim was sitting alone. Janis Joplin took the seat next to her, and a friendship was born. Upon moving to New Jersey, Purim discovered that she was neighbors with João Gilberto. He invited her over, and beat her at Ping-Pong. In 1965, at the João Sebastião Bar in São Paulo, Brazil, Purim was installed as the singer with a band called Sambalanço Trio; on drums was her future partner, Airto Moreira. Chance, one could say, has played an outsize role in her life.

But skill — not luck — is what made Purim a star of the 1970s jazz scene. A nimble, inventive vocalist steeped in the mystical, Purim made a near-immediate splash when she moved to New York from Brazil in 1967. After an ill-fated run with Stan Getz — for one thing, she didn’t want to sing “The Girl from Ipanema,” feeling it belonged to Astrud Gilberto — Purim became the frontwoman of Return to Forever, Chick Corea’s innovative jazz-rock-Brazilian-flamenco fusion band.

Alongside Corea, Moreira, the bassist Stanley Clarke and the saxophonist Joe Farrell, Purim recorded fusion classics like “500 Miles High” and “Light as a Feather.” After splitting with Return to Forever in the early ’70s, Purim’s ascent was threatened by a drug conviction that landed her in a California prison. But while Purim was behind bars, both George Duke and the band Santana released albums featuring her vocals, and not long after her release at the end of 1975, she signed a major-label deal with Warner Bros. A slowdown was not in the cards.

Work with Dizzy Gillespie and the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart followed. Grammy nominations came for the 1986 and 1987 awards, and the following decade saw the flourishing of Fourth World, a collective including Moreira and the Brazilian guitarist José Neto. But in terms of studio albums, Purim went silent after “Flora’s Song” in 2005. The music returns on Friday with “If You Will,” a pressing, luminous album featuring Moreira on percussion and a song each by Duke (“If You Will”) and Corea (“500 Miles High”), both originally recorded with Purim. The LP is both a glance at the past and a survey of the present, with what Purim once referred to as her “Brazilian Raw Approach” still in effect.

Ron Carter is one of the most prolific and influential bassists in jazz history. During his six-decade career, he has recorded more than 2,000 records, and he has no plan on slowing down.

"Age has not made me think slower," Carter says. And it's not made me refuse gigs. What it's made me do is be thankful I got this far playing an instrument with four strings."

Next Tuesday, May 10, For the Love of Ron Carter and Friends will take place at Carnegie Hall - which is a one-night 85th birthday celebration. Carter will lead three different bands performing highlights from his career.

The University of the Arts Helsinki will host the Performance Philosophy network’s biennial conference - Performance Philosophy Problems: How Does Performance Philosophy Collaborate?

Dates: 15 – 18 June 2022

Venue: You can attend the event either onsite in Helsinki at the University of the Arts Helsinki Theatre Academy or online with the Ventla App.

Programme and registration: PPP2022

What are the problems?

Our times have generated problems, the scope, depth, complexity and ubiquity of which are surpassing traditional procedures for solving them. As the problems we face change in nature so too must our ways of dealing with them. One obvious change concerns modes of organisation: global problems require new modes of collaboration, transversal combinations and inclusiveness, enabling all kinds of agents from different fields to unite their experiences and efforts. At the same time, existing organisations are compelled to rethink their reasons for existence, their values and ways of functioning. Performance Philosophy is not immune to this challenge

As the alliance between two heterogeneous but deeply interconnected dimensions of practice, Performance Philosophy was born in order to formulate and elaborate problems that neither performance nor philosophy can tackle alone. The very ethos of the association, which gathers together artists, philosophers, researchers, performers, spectators, educators, curators and activists, implies an idea of inter- & transdisciplinary collaboration. Therefore, one might argue that the association is particularly well disposed to face specific problems of our times. But what is the exact nature of these problems and how does Performance Philosophy address them?
The Performance Philosophy Biennial, which will take place in Helsinki from June 15 -18, 2022, deliberately takes the widest possible scope. Instead of focusing on any specific theme or topic, it simply asks: what kinds of problems does working in the field of performance philosophy lead us to encounter and to articulate, and what tools does it provide to deal with them? The conference invites its participants – artists, philosophers, scholars, artist-researchers and performance philosophers, regardless of any particular genre, school or discipline – to articulate the range of performance philosophy problems, whose treatment calls for dialogue and collaboration between philosophy and the performing arts.

How do we set a problem? One distinctive feature is that it might open up to several possible or effective solutions. Yet no particular response can exhaust or resolve it. Once articulated, the problem does not cease to haunt us. At the same time, in all our doings and undoings, we cannot cease to seek an answer to it. One could argue that all kinds of practices, bodily and institutional arrangements, all modes of behaviour, levels of organisation and existential choices are born as potential solutions to some kind of problem that they seek to address historically and locally but never definitively. A fertile problem, both wicked and benevolent ones, calls for creative thinking and action. Furthermore, problems and arguably solutions have a history. Indeed, solving problems is but one of the many different things we can do with them – we can also intensify them and turn them into aporias (unsolvable dilemmas) or paradoxes (that turn solutions into other problems).

Have a paper, speculative essay, media review or creative work in need of an outlet? Looking for a fast and efficient editorial process? The Journal of Jazz Studies is actively seeking submissions for issues to be published in 2022 (and beyond) and would love to work with you!

The Institute of Jazz Studies seeks manuscript submissions and proposals for 2022 issues of the Journal of Jazz Studies. An open-access, peer-reviewed online journal published by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, the Journal of Jazz Studies (JJS) is dedicated to publishing leading-edge research on all aspects and iterations of jazz. The journal welcomes contributions from myriad disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to musicology, ethnomusicology, history, cultural studies, music theory, and criticism. In addition to traditional peer-review research articles, the JJS invites submission of oral histories, photo essays, media reviews, pedagogical essays, creative works (poetry, fiction), and reflections from jazz practitioners and industry professionals. Submitted manuscripts should be accessible to a broad jazz audience.

The JJS has recently undergone a reinvigoration to reflect the diverse and inclusive nature of jazz studies, broadly defined. We seek to expand the journal’s scope to include scholarship that cross-examines a range of issues connecting music, politics, race, class, gender, and other realms of social practice.The editorial team is committed to providing potential contributors an efficient review process (peer-review when applicable) and communicating publication decisions and/or requests for revisions in a timely manner.

CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE EXTENDED
PROPOSALS NOW DUE – MONDAY 30 MAY
We warmly invite proposals for papers, presentations, panels and themed sessions on any topic of music research for our 2022 conference.

When: 1–3 December 2022
Where: online
Host: MSA National Executive

Conference Organising Committee: Michael Hooper, Liz Kertesz, Fred Kiernan, Andrew Callaghan
Program Committee: Liz Kertesz (chair), Helen English, John Gabriel, Michael Hooper, Fred Kiernan, Simon Perry, Jason Stoessel, Cecilia Sun, Tsan-Huang Tsai
Conference Organisers: Liz Kertesz, Andrew Callaghan (email msaconf2022@gmail.com)

Deadline for Proposals: Monday 30 May
Proposal Outcome: Friday 1 July
The 2022 MSA conference will be held online and welcomes papers on any topic of music research.

We note that it will take place concurrently with the 1st Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Indigenous Music and Dance and the 21st NRPIPA Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance (see Call for Papers). It also coincides with the International Day of People with Disabilities on 3 December 2022.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Proposals for individual presentations should include the following:
paper title,
abstract of no more than 250 words,
name of the presenter,
a short biography of less than 100 words,
four keywords,
institutional affiliation if applicable.
Panels & themed sessions: please provide the information listed above for each presenter PLUS title and abstract/s for panel/session as a whole. Panel proposals should include a plan for how the 90 minutes will be used.

The Vilcek Foundation will award three Creative Promise Prizes of $50,000 each to young, immigrant musicians who demonstrate outstanding early achievement in music. Applications are open through June 10, 2022.

Eligibility Requirements
Applicants must:

Have been born outside the United States of America to non-American parents.
Not be more than 38 years old as of December 31, 2022 (born on or after January 1, 1984). Exceptions will be made for applicants who were born on or after January 1, 1982 and experienced career interruptions due to medical, military, parental or caregiving leave.
Have lived in the United States for at least four years (or immigrated to the United States on or before December 31, 2018).
Be one of the following: a naturalized citizen or a permanent resident of the United States; a H-1B or O-1 visa holder with a valid visa stamp; a H-4 visa holder with a valid EAD card; a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) relief; an asylee or an asylum seeker who has applied for asylum and has a valid EAD card.
Have at least five years of professional experience in music.
Not be enrolled as a full-time student.
Have released at least three singles or albums on major or independent labels.
Have lived in the United States for a total of at least four years.
Intend to pursue a career in the United States.
Not be a past recipient of the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in any category.

Application and Selection Process

Complete the application process. You will be required to:
Provide personal information.
Upload a PDF of your CV with a history of performances and other professional activities.
Upload a PDF with documentation of your valid immigration status and your date of birth.
Provide URL links of up to five work samples that do not exceed 15 minutes in total.
Provide up to five press clippings about your work.
Complete three essay questions
Please describe your most important projects. We are interested in learning about the intention behind each of those projects, your artistic foundations, and creative approaches you developed based on your personal or professional path. (2,000 characters max)
What do you hope to achieve through your work and how do you think it contributes to the development of music as an art form? (2,000 characters max)
Describe the circumstances of your immigration to the United States and how your experience as an immigrant informs and enriches your approach to music. (1,500 characters max)
Provide the names and contact information of two references.
Sign an age requirement self-attestation if you were born on or after January 1, 1982.
Submit a completed application by 5:00pm EDT, June 10, 2022.

There is a dramatic under-representation of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic music scholars at the academic professional level. The same is true throughout British academia. This full-tuition fee-waiver scholarship supports a student who intends to progress through postgraduate study and into an academic position. Like all our students, the successful candidate will benefit from the Department’s open, innovative, and supportive environment. They will also receive support from the Goldsmiths Careers Service, and will be offered extensive support in developing and completing an application towards fully-funded PhD study.
Potential candidates must first apply for and be offered a place on any of our Music Masters programmes. Please note that it can take several weeks for programme applications to be processed and places to be offered, and no late scholarship applications can be accepted. Candidates should indicate at the point of programme application that they also intend to be considered for the scholarship.

Once an offer of a place has been made (conditional or unconditional), candidates can apply for the scholarship.

To apply for the scholarship you will need to submit:
A 300-word statement describing the broad areas of musical work and research that you intend to explore at postgraduate level, including Masters work, and, if applicable, subsequent MPhil/PhD level study. This statement will not itself be formally evaluated, but will function as an overview of your interests and potential path into the academic profession.
A portfolio of work, the contents of which will vary according to the programme concerned. Applicants to MA pathways should submit a selection of 3-5 written pieces. At least two of these pieces should be academic essays of at least 2,000 words in length. The remaining pieces may be writings on music of any other form: journalistic, critical, reflective, and so on. Work on music in other media formats (video, audio-visual) can also be considered. Applicants to MMus pathways should submit a substantial portfolio of their creative practice. This may include examples of one or more of the following: performance, songwriting, production, documentation of audio-visual and/or site-specific/installation works, compositions/scores. These examples may be presented in whatever media is appropriate.

The portfolio should be accompanied by a contextual reflective commentary of 300-500 words, which will outline the ideas and creative methods underpinning the creative work.

Antonio Caldara (1670-1736) was one of the pre-eminent composers of his generation. Born in Venice, he was successively court composer to Duke Ferdinando Carlo of Mantua and Prince Ruspoli in Rome, and finally deputy music director and favourite composer to Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in Vienna. He was at least as famous, respected and influential in his own time as contemporaries such as J.S. Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, yet he has been neglected in the historiography of the period, in part because his service as a court musician precluded wide dissemination of his works during his lifetime but also because his role as court musician has been read as a marker of conventionality, in contrast with the teleological narratives of innovation and self-actualisation which have dominated much of the discourse about his contemporaries. As a consequence he remains substantially under-researched.

This symposium aims to explore Caldara’s expertise and creativity and expose his decisive contribution as a composer and rhetorical craftsman within the context of the Baroque court. In particular, his expressive techniques call for further analysis, together with their role in propagating the powerful, affective-rhetorical musical style distinctive to the late Italian-Viennese Baroque, characterized by an all-encompassing regime of corporate authority – what Harry White has aptly called ‘the musical discourse of servitude’. At the same time, there remain significant lacunae in our knowledge of Caldara’s life and career, particularly in relation to his musical formation, his personal and professional connections, and the dissemination of his music – aspects essential to accounting for the specific characteristics of his music and assessing its meaning. The time is now ripe for Caldara’s re-evaluation as a major creative force in late Baroque culture.

Papers are invited on all aspects of Caldara’s life and music in their political, social and cultural context. Topics may include, but are not limited to
Analytical, interpretive and comparative studies of Caldara’s compositions
Studies of the cultural, social and political environments and the ideological constraints within which he worked
Studies of his life and career
Sources for Caldara studies
Performance practices relevant to Caldara’s music
The transmission and reception of Caldara’s music from his lifetime to the present

The symposium will be hosted by the University of Sydney, Australia, and conducted in ‘hybrid’ mode. Proposals for both in-person and online presentations are very welcome. Sessions will be scheduled to accommodate a variety of time zones.

London, August 29 – September 4, 2022

This edition of The Listening Academy aims to bring together participating scholars, researchers and artists, to share knowledge, practices, and research activities, and to collectively investigate creative and critical questions of listening. Listening is emphasized here as a transdisciplinary subject, one that moves across the humanities and society, and which contributes to fostering interpersonal and community relations. Listening is more than the hearing of audible signals; rather, listening supports a range of relevant processes and projects, including emotional growth, social recognition, attunement across human and more-than-human worlds, co-learning, and decolonial, eco-feminist initiatives. This is not to overlook the violations listening can equally cause; rather, it becomes imperative to consider the extent to which listening heals as well as harms, supports as well as captures, thereby requiring greater critical and creative inquiry and sensitivity. How might we think further about listening as a critical, discursive field or modality? What forms of emergent practices can be developed and deployed by way of listening, which may impact onto current social, planetary challenges? What potentialities and limitations does listening carry, and what might an acoustic literacy offer in terms of contending with the ongoingness of colonial (epistemic) violence?

The Listening Academy wishes to draw out these critical perspectives through a transdisciplinary gathering of views from across the arts and humanities, as well as from a diversity of communities. Integrating individual presentation, lectures and collective group work with invited guests, listening sessions and creative methods, the Academy adopts a collaborative and collective approach, supporting a transversal sharing of knowledge across theory and practice, thinking and doing. Through individual and group reflection, the Academy will capture key perspectives while opening toward areas of future work and collaboration.

We invite participants to submit letters of interest to contribute to the Academy. Please include a CV and a brief overview of your research interests and / or ways of practicing. Letters of interest should be sent by June 10, 2022, to: listeningaca@gmail.com

Convenors and organizers of The Listening Academy, London:

Lucia Farinati, curator, researcher and writer, co-author of The Force of Listening (2017), and curatorial advisor for The Listening Academy

Brandon LaBelle, artist, writer and theorist, author of Acoustic Justice: Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation (2021), and artistic director of The Listening Biennial

With contributions from invited guests including Leah Bassel, Arendse Krabbe, Kate Lacey, Bhavisha Panchia, Blanc Sceol, among others, including participants from past editions of the Academy.

The Listening Academy will take place at Iklectik, a creative platform and space dedicated to experimental music and sound practices. Iklectik is located in South London, as part of a compound of creative studios and labs, allowing for a diversity of indoor and outdoor locations for gathering and working together.

This issue’s featured articles are concerned with aesthetics, politics, and community formation. Ayo Adeduntan’s manuscript starts things off, and situates Yoruba hip hop within larger history of Nigerian popular music forms like ju`ju´ and highlife. In so doing, Adeduntan argues that Yoruba hip hop is a cultural site of hidden transcripts that critique the dominant milieux. Continuing the theme of rap and nationalism, Alena Gray Aniskiewicz explores works by Polish rapper Mister D, the hip hop persona of writer Dorota Masłowska. Specifically, Aniskiewicz posits that Mister D draws on the sampling logics of collage and pastiche in order to critique norms of authenticity and tradition that have come to frame Polish national identity. Moving from one rap technique to another, Ben Duinker’s article analyzes the work of flow and timing. Importantly, Duinker reads the performance of flow in rap as not only a part of, and informed by, other African American musical vernacular traditions, but one that also taps into the long history of Black people and Black culture’s relation to the human. And it’s on this topic of relationality and the human that we find John R. Eperjesi’s article on famed techno group Drexciya. Bridging Black popular music studies, Afrofuturism studies, blue cultural studies, and eco-criticism, Eperjesi locates Drexciya as a groundbreaking band that uses themes and sounds of the ocean in ways that trouble the human/nonhuman binary and that offer “an aquatopian civilization” through which to imagine and make possible “offshore tomorrows.” Lastly, Bradley Rogers closes out the peer-review section with an exploration of the racialized, gendered, and sexual dimensions of Lawrence Welk. Through an analysis of Welk’s earlier “champagne sound” to his later “big band sound,” Rogers illustrates how Welk’s work both dovetailed with and deviated from national political norms of the family.

We, of course, end the issue with our book reviews section, which extends the issue’s main threads of power and identity. In Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, Runchao Liu finds a meditation that’s not simply, or solely focused on music, but instead a book that considers food, kinship, gender, and death in Korean American identity formation. Amber Musser’s astute reading of Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds lays bare the ways in which sonic and vibrational forces can produce and make space for Blackness’s radical and liberatory potential. And finally, James G. McNally praises Felicia Angeja Viator’s To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America as a book that provides a nuanced account of the relationship between race and power in the development and popularity of gangsta rap.

Now available for the first time ever, we’re proud to present an official collection of 33 Lyle Mays compositions written for all C instruments in an easy-to-read, adjustable, multi-staff format. Over three years in the making and done with Lyle Mays’ intense involvement every step of the way, The Music of Lyle Mays is a comprehensive tribute to one of the most important composers and innovators of our time. This collection includes compositions from all of Lyle’s solo records, Pat Metheny Group records as well as collaborations with other artists. Also included is text from the author, a table of contents, biography, detailed guidance from Lyle Mays describing the conception of several of his compositions, plus a plethora of Lyle’s own writings on composition, creativity, and beyond. Over 250 pages in length, this long-awaited, landmark release is absolutely essential for all Lyle Mays fans! Titles include: Alaskan Suite, Are We There Yet, August, Au Lait, Before You Go, Before You Go (Samba), Bill Evans, Chorinho, Close to Home, Either Ornette, Episode D’Azur, Feet First, Feynman, Fictionary, The Gathering Sky, Highland Aire, Hangtime, Hard Eights, Let Me Count The Ways, Lincoln Reviews His Notes, Long Life, Mirror of the Heart, Newborn, Ozark, Possible Straight, Sienna, Slink, Something Left Unsaid, Street Dreams, Teiko, What It Takes, Where Are You From Today, Yolanda You Learn

Few musical genres inspire the passionate devotion of jazz. Its mystique goes far beyond the melodies and rhythms, with its key players and singers discussed by aficionados with a respect that borders on reverence. Some books on jazz offer little more than theory or dry facts, thereby relinquishing the 'essence' of the music. This book is different. One of the most influential and internationally known writers on the subject describes, through vivid personal contacts, reminiscences and zesty anecdotes, his life in jazz as a player, broadcaster and observer. Alyn Shipton recalls friendships with legendary musicians, while revealing fresh discoveries about such luminaries as Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Abbey Lincoln and Geri Allen. On Jazz powerfully evokes the atmosphere of clubs and dancehalls, and takes us behind the scenes and up onto the stage, so that this electrifying world is unforgettably spotlighted as never before.