Archie Shepp

This paper will examine Arnold Schönberg’s influence on modern jazz through the teachings of one of its most respected theorists and pedagogues Dennis Sandole, mentor to John Coltrane, James Moody, Art Farmer, Randy Brecker, Jim Hall, Rufus Harley, Pat Martino, and many other important jazz artists. Through the analysis of musical examples, this paper proposes that important conceptual links exist between some of Schönberg’s key compositional concepts and Sandole’s pedagogical literature and practice which would go on to influence John Coltrane and many other jazz practitioners for decades to follow helping to solidify Schönbergian ideas and concepts within the syntax of modern jazz. Schönberg’s utilisation of various segmentation schemes such as trichords, tetrachords and hexachords, use of interval cycles particularly that of interval cycle 4 or major thirds, and the compositional practice of stating the complete chromatic collection within a relatively short musical space have provided jazz practitioners such as Sandole and Coltrane with a new conceptual framework for employing the total chromatic harmonically and melodically in modern jazz practice.

2018

The emergence of free jazz music in the 1960s presented a significant challenge to the jazz canon. Free improvisers such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, and Sun Ra pushed the boundaries of jazz. For these performers, bebop, hard bop, modal, and other jazz innovations of the 1940s and 1950s were too restrictive. They abandoned fixed chord changes and tempos. For some listeners, it sounded innovative and exciting; others found the music chaotic and threatening.

Musical Quarterly, 2013

John Coltrane was at the forefront of many important directions in jazz in the 1950s and 1960s, including 'hard bop', 'modal jazz', 'avant-garde jazz', and 'world music'. One interest that became an increasingly dominant focus for him in his later years was the study of Indian music and spirituality. While Coltrane's music remained firmly rooted in jazz, this exploration was an important part of the development of Coltrane's personal style from the early 1960s to the end of his life in 1967. A number of factors inspired Coltrane to explore Indian music and thought, and an investigation of specific applications of these ideas in his music will present some insight into his stylistic motivation. His incorporation of Indian ideas also inspired many other musicians, such as John McLaughlin, Dave Liebman, and Jan Garbarek, to pursue this direction, and it remains an important part of his legacy.

2020

As a principal musical figure of the twentieth century, John Coltrane created a legacy that still resonates with listeners. Similarly, the blues may be regarded as one of the most iconic genres of the twentieth century. This dissertation examines Coltrane's shifting stylistic tendencies to the blues and explores structural relationships with reductive voice leading analysis. As a variation form, the blues poses issues of continuity since every chorus may be regarded as self-sufficient and internally closed. Voice leading analysis provides a powerful explanation for the fact that Coltrane's blues solos may be perceived as structurally unified. I also develop a topology of Coltrane's use of sentence structures and analyze how they express and reinforce deeper structural levels on the middleground and foreground. While voice leading analysis à la Schenker has been applied to jazz, no publications exclusively explore Coltrane and his blues output. The scope of the dissertation ranges across Coltrane's entire career, including his earliest recordings, which are virtually unexplored in scholarly research. Since Coltrane's blues output has not been systematically addressed, I hope that my project will lay the groundwork for further discourse. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is a humble attempt to gain deeper understanding of certain aspects of the music of John Coltrane, whose diligence, knowledge, and music still resonates with and inspires so many. I am indebted to his art and black artists like him, who have lived their lives in pursuit of this art form in the midst of unimaginable adversity. I feel extraordinarily privileged to have had the opportunity to pursue my Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, where I have learned more than I could have ever anticipated. I would have not been able to pursue this degree and complete this dissertation without the graduate center fellowship and the generous support of the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund. I also want to thank my advisor Prof. Chad Jenkins, who has mentored me since my M.A. studies at CCNY and helped me to keep this dissertation focused and consistent according to the highest possible scholarly standards. His insights and feedback were absolutely indispensable. I also would like to express my sincere gratitude to the other members of my dissertation committee, which consisted of Prof. Norman Carey, Prof. Jeffrey Taylor, and Prof. Henry Martin. Their profound knowledge and diverse perspectives have enriched this project enormously. I am also indebted to scholars who have pioneered the application of Schenkerian theory to jazz such as

Studies By Undergraduate Researchers at Guelph, 2009

2000

Journal of Musicology, 2021

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, little understood even today, was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released commercially in 1961, the album—with a title that later became synonymous with the new music—contains a single 37-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism of its artists and their supporters. By the mid-1960s, the “new thing” was taken as a dissenting provocation, and some writers bemoaned the presence of radical (racial) politics and acts of protest in a music that should be devoted to universalist “colorblind” ideals. This article does three things. It takes a close look at the most prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music: that it was an attack on the universalist strivings of modern jazz, that it relied on narrow identity politics for its aesthetics, and that the music’s lack of tonal order was nihilistic. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Along the way, I consider the symbolic differences between heterophony and tonal polyphony—the prevailing musical episteme available to music writers of the time. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, more decentralized musical texture of collectivity and simultaneity. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple subjectivities (i.e. different sonified identities) to be heard at the same time, interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly-shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”