Dare Not to Compare

This chapter urges educators to think differently about identifying and serving young children in gifted education services. Embedded in the chapter are principles for creating equitable services for young children which include focusing on and respecting the strengths and talents that all young children bring to their early learning environments. Creating thinking environments maximizes opportunities to promote and strengthen intellectual engagement as well as social and emotional development. Described through the metaphor of a jazz musician, the author emphasizes the important roles that teachers play in implementing culturally responsive pedagogies that embrace teaching for social justice. The author concludes with a scenario that illustrates the principles for creating equitable services for all young students and reiterates the need to change conceptions of early childhood gifted education from comparative practices to strengths-based and appropriately challenging instruction for all.

The application of the teaching methods of Opher Brayer in the compositions of jazz pianist Yaron Herman: Developing a portfolio of original compositions based upon these concepts

<p>Yaron Herman is a talented and influential Israeli-born jazz musician, currently residing in Paris. At the age of 31, he has released six albums, the first when he was 21. What is more remarkable is that he only started learning the piano at the age of 16 (following a sports injury that curtailed his basketball career dreams), under the tutelage of Opher Brayer, who used a combination of philosophy, mathematics and psychology. The intent of this research is to firstly, identify and understand the key concepts of Brayer’s methods as applied by Yaron Herman, and secondly, develop a portfolio of compositions utilising these principles. A recital of these tunes will then be presented.</p>

The application of the teaching methods of Opher Brayer in the compositions of jazz pianist Yaron Herman: Developing a portfolio of original compositions based upon these concepts

<p>Yaron Herman is a talented and influential Israeli-born jazz musician, currently residing in Paris. At the age of 31, he has released six albums, the first when he was 21. What is more remarkable is that he only started learning the piano at the age of 16 (following a sports injury that curtailed his basketball career dreams), under the tutelage of Opher Brayer, who used a combination of philosophy, mathematics and psychology. The intent of this research is to firstly, identify and understand the key concepts of Brayer’s methods as applied by Yaron Herman, and secondly, develop a portfolio of compositions utilising these principles. A recital of these tunes will then be presented.</p>

Ben Ngobeni’s cosmo-dramas of the Afrofuture

The print series entitled Bridge of the Spirits (2017) by visual artist Ben Ngobeni is redolent with depictions of “the cosmos” or outer-space. In this series, the bull is a prominent motif as it is represented literally and in some works, indirectly. The bull, as we may know, is central to many cultural rituals in different African societies. Ngobeni’s metaphorical use of this animal is resonant with Afrofuturist visual tropes that often employ space allegories. Yet it also invokes what jazz musician and Afrofuturist Sun Ra refers to as cosmo-drama. When coining this term, Sun Ra was alluding to the sense of otherworldliness he sought to achieve by staging cosmo-dramas, that is, spaces that were meant to “awaken their audiences to the greater potentials of another kind of life” (Youngquist, 2017:204). Cosmo-drama is here a fitting description of the type of themes engaged with in this body of work. This article is orientated around the notion of cosmo-drama to locate, on the one hand, the Afrofuturist proclivities in Ngobeni’s work, which are found visually. On the other hand, it seeks to understand how these supposed Afrofuturist proclivities are informed by aspects of ancestry.

The Circumstances of Colour: The Jim Crow Translation of Jonny spielt auf

This article examines the American premiere of the German opera Jonny spielt auf as a form of what I call Jim Crow translation. As originally written and composed by Ernst Krenek, the opera centres on Jonny, a Black jazz musician, who disorders the logic of European cultural superiority. Although thoroughly modern in its original German staging, using stereophonic radios and film projectors, Krenek’s appropriation of Blackness relied on blackface baritones to play Jonny. When the opera came to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the history of minstrelsy and the legal system of Jim Crow haunted the production. While Jonny was depicted as thoroughly cosmopolitan and modern in Krenek’s conception of the opera, the American production, under the management of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, attempted to turn Jonny into a white vaudevillian in blackface, a publicity stunt that brought the opera further attention under the guise of protecting American morals against a narrative of interracial sexual desire. Though Krenek created an opera based on the value of Black modernity, Gatti-Casazza displayed American racial anxieties through the opera’s promotion. The proposed revisions to the text, through which racialist regimes demonstrated their power over cultural production, reflect the role that translation can play in reinforcing the colour line.

New Orleans Jazz

This chapter explores the emergence of jazz in New Orleans around the year 1900, and its first generation of performers. It examines the social and economic conditions in New Orleans, and the city’s rich musical traditions. The life and music of cornetist Buddy Bolden, often considered the first jazz musician, are examined in some depth, as are the contributions of other early jazz stars, including Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, and King Oliver. The chapter concludes with an account of the early career of Louis Armstrong, which is continued in the next chapter.

Sonic Becomings: Rhythmic Encounters in Interspecies Improvisation

David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor and Jazz musician, has been improvising with nonhuman animals for years, among his playing partners are birds and whales, known to be territorial animals. As Deleuze and Guattari propose that the origin of art is precisely the territorialising animal and more a function of nature than a specifically human cultural achievement, their concept of territory and rhythm offers a non-anthropocentric way of looking at these encounters. Rothenberg’s sonic experiments in resonance and interspecies interaction do not rely on language, thus I argue that the human and the nonhuman animals form a temporary joint territory via sonic rhythms and engage in a mutual becoming by forming a rhizome. His sound thinking practice thus also helps in decentralising further anthropocentric models of music and art.

The Authenticating Collaborators of White Jazz Autobiography

Most white jazz autobiographies credit another author or collaborator in addition to the autobiographical subject. This chapter considers the role of these other voices—the collaborator, amanuensis, or explainer—in shaping the process of authentication that is a central theme of these texts. How and for what purpose do they attempt to legitimate the autobiographical subject, to convince the reader of his worthiness as a jazz musician and also as a figure of cultural and literary significance? White jazz autobiographers represented a unique set of challenges for their collaborators, who responded by establishing ideological positions that resembled (with variations) those drawn by the contestants of the jazz wars of the 1930s to the 1960s. Central to these ideological expressions was an extraordinary concern with contesting the origins, meanings, and performance of jazz along racial and ethnic lines.