Of Icons and Iconography: Seeing Jimmie Blanton

Philosophy and Literature, 2002

The Art of Jazz, 2020

The Art of Jazz, by Alyn Shipton, explores how the expressionism and spontaneity of jazz spilled onto its album art, posters, and promotional photography, and even inspired standalone works of fine art. John Edward Hasse contributes a Foreword.

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.

Perspectives in musicology: Inaugural lectures of the Ph.D. Program in Music at the City University of New York, 1972

ICONOLOGY of music deals with the lessons that pictures can teach the music historian. A more sophisticated definition would be: the analysis and interpretation, by the historian of music, of pictorial representations of musical instruments, their players, singers, groups of performing musicians, and all other kinds of musical scenes.

Studies By Undergraduate Researchers at Guelph, 2009

Artistic Research in Jazz: Positions, Theories, Methods, 2021

This book presents the recent positions, theories, and methods of artistic research in jazz, inviting readers to critically engage in and establish a sustained discourse regarding theoretical, methodological, and analytic perspectives. A panel of eleven international contributors presents an in-depth discourse on shared and specific approaches to artistic research in jazz, aiming at an understanding of the specificity of current practices, both improvisational and composed. The topics addressed throughout consider the cultural, institutional, epistemological, philosophical, ethical, and practical aspects of the discipline, as well as the influence of race, gender, and politics. The book is structured in three parts: first, on topics related to improvisation, theory and history; second, on institutional and pedagogical positions; and third, on methodical approaches in four specific research projects conducted by the authors. In thinking outside established theoretical frameworks, this book invites further exploration and participation, and encourages practitioners, scholars, students, and teachers at all academic levels to shape the future of artistic research collectively. It will be of interest to students in jazz and popular music studies, performance studies, improvisation studies, music philosophy, music aesthetics, and Western art music research.

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.