Recreating Duke Ellington: HIP in jazz and popular music

The relative short history of jazz has such a rich narrative of lineages and canons one might associate it with a much older musical tradition. Although the tradition is conventionally portrayed as a definite and logical succession of styles, with their master performers and their idealized renditions, the history of jazz has not been so clear cut or logical. Indeed jazz has exhibited and continues to exhibit a far more complex musical development, reflecting the multitude of socio-economic issues surrounding its origins and transformations. Given this rhetorical obsession with the past, this paper considers whether representations of the past in jazz could shed understanding to the controversies surrounding its practice. Drawing on collective memory theory and the literature of nostalgia, this paper will offer an introductory survey on this subject. Based on ethnomusicologists work before me (Bithell 2006; Seeger 1991), and recent musicological scholarship concerned with collective memory and African American musical forms (Muller 2006; Solis 2005; Ramsey 2003), this paper considers how representations of the past is constructed through musical performance as well as through the rhetorical activities surrounding that practice. Although there are many different narratives or texts of the past, this paper focuses on two opposing themes, which seem to immediately emerge from a review of the literature. The first concerns narratives that associate African American ancestry with innovation and the other with nostalgic and primitivist sentiments often associated with musical revivals and neoclassicist movements.

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2006

International Review of The Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 2023

n this article I discuss jazz historiography from a criti- cal perspective, namely: the troubled acceptance of its practices and discourses within American society; the complex relationships between jazz, the canon, and academia; the processes of construction and dissemination of local aesthetics and practices; the key issues of race and gender; analytical approaches; and artistic creation in the context of performance. I argue that traditional historical readings (identification of styles and »artistic schools«, for example) should be combined with analytic, cultural and musical approaches focused on the impact of practices and discourses of musicians, critics, historians, and other agents of the milieu, as an echo and at the same time agent of social and aesthetic transformation.

Philosophy and Literature, 2002

The Editors invited a collection of musicologists from various institutions to engage in an e-mail discussion with Daniel Barolsky over the summer of 2012 on the topic of how music historians engage students with issues of performance in their classes. As Barolsky states in his opening essay, “The music in our existing histories is restricted to past compositions, as mere museum artifacts. Yet the identities of the wonderful performers who brought these pieces to life (and many of whom we can still see and hear today!) are relegated to the liner notes, their presence and interpretive contribution repressed and ignored.” Included in this exchange are Sara Gross Ceballos (Lawrence University), Rebecca Plack (San Francisco Conservatory), and Steven M. Whiting (University of Michigan).

Journal for Popular Music Studies, 2021

Beatles tributes come in many forms and guises, but look-alikes are arguably the most popular type. Because of their focus on replicating the band's iconic costumes and hairdo, they usually limit themselves to an easily reproducible core repertoire, forgoing the elaborate post-1966 studio productions. By contrast, sound-alikes strive for complete aural accurateness, often recreating the heavily produced compositions the Beatles never performed outside of the studio. One of the industry’s top-tier Beatles sound-alikes are the Analogues. Neglecting all mimetic visual effects, they re-animate the albums created after 1966, using the same orchestrations and instrumentations as the Beatles, including rare vintage instruments such as the Mellotron. Their approach bears parallels to historically informed performance (HIP), a common practice in Early Music, yet it operates within an entirely different framework. Informed by sound recordings, the Analogues deconstruct and re-record the Beatles’ music to construct their own performance, in the process conceiving a modern technology-based type of HIP. This article begins by establishing a typology of Beatles tributes before examining the process of staging an Analogues performance. It argues that the Analogues’ approach to historical recreation allows them to transcend criticism typically aimed at tributes and, paradoxically, lay claim to an “authentic” performance of what is inherently inauthentic, a live imitation of a recording. Overall, this article demonstrates how HIP can be used effectively outside of its mainstream classical context as a tool for popular music researchers and performers.

This paper provides an overview of the scholarly literature related to jazz performance practice with a view to highlighting theoretical orientation and identifying gaps in the literature. In this particular survey, I am primarily focusing on scholarly work - as a result, this paper only tangentially deals with the gigantic mass of pedagogical aids and trade journalism.

hardback) $60. ISBN 978-0-19-981131-1(paperback) £18.99.

2017

978-3-95983-124-6 (Paperback) 978-3-95983-125-3 (Hardcover)

2020