Intertextuality and the Construction of Meaning in Jazz Worlds: A Case Study of Joe Farrell’s “Moon Germs”

(Opening paragraph): In this article, I invoke the concept of intermusicality as defined by Ingrid Monson and develop its role in meaning-making in musical worlds. Her groundbreaking book, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996) offers a sophisticated criticism of jazz improvisation and the construction of meaning therein. In doing so, it explores methods by which to nuance and/or rupture traditional historiographies that construct the jazz canon. More than intermusicality, though, I look to a more general intertextuality as a hermeneutic window disruptive to the “great man” histories that have so often heretofore constructed the jazz tradition. I argue that the notion of intertextuality is particularly useful in mediating questions of essentialism in jazz (racial or otherwise) with considerations of practical competency and an artist’s particular situatedness in that body of texts. Working against positivist taxonomies resultant in definitions of what is/is not jazz, this perspective leaves space for the refiguring work of novelty and experimentation requisite therein. This resonates with Steven B. Elworth’s (1995) claim: “Far from being an unchanging and an easily understood historical field, the jazz tradition is a constantly transforming construction” (58). In my suspicion of linear ideas of history and “progress” (and therefore, telos), I prefer to interrogate and ratify instead the complicated relationship of novelty to tradition. The negotiation of these meta-categories is at the heart of the work improvising musicians do; combining disparate ways of being in the world with musical ideas and practices to create new musico-sociocultural wholes.

Sonic Grounding and Internalizing Structure: Themes of Continuity in the Music of John Coltrane

(Opening paragraph): Examining the musical development of John Coltrane, one often gets a deep sense of change. Respected Coltrane scholar Lewis Porter characterizes Coltrane’s career by the “fact that he was constantly developing and changing.” To account for this perception of change, the tendency is to divide Coltrane's music into segmented stylistic periods. This allows us a greater understanding of Coltrane’s developmental building blocks, and the specific elements that he focused on while creating his music. For example, Eric Nisenson divides Coltrane’s work into “Early Coltrane” including his work with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and his first recordings for Atlantic, a “Middle Period” including his work with Thelonious Monk and the early Impulse recordings, and finally a “Late Period” including Coltrane’s avant-garde albums. In The Dawn of Indian Music in the West Peter Lavezzoli states “Coltrane’s music went through more evolutionary stages during his ten years as a solo recording artist than many musicians realize in a fuller lifetime.” Historical and bibliographical references including the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians also characterized Coltrane’s development as moving from one period to the next.

Performing Authenticity “In Your Own Sweet Way”

(Opening paragraph): "In a 2001 interview for a PBS documentary titled Rediscovering Dave Brubeck, jazz critic Ira Gitler volunteered that the songs “In Your Own Sweet Way” and “The Duke,” both Dave Brubeck originals, became jazz standards “when Miles Davis played them, that gave them the official stamp of approval.” When interviewer Hedrick Smith asked Gitler why Davis could give the songs a stamp approval that Brubeck himself could not, Gitler responded, “Well because Miles Davis, in giving his stamp of approval to these Brubeck compositions by recording them, here was a black jazz man who was respected in both the black and white circles, and when he did it black people had to say, you know, ‘that’s cool.’” Put simply, Davis’s versions were “cool”—were somehow authentic—while Brubeck’s versions were not, despite being considered by most critics and audiences to be part of the cool jazz genre. In distinguishing between these uses of the term “cool,” Gitler rooted Davis’s authenticity and jazz authority in his blackness, implying that Brubeck’s whiteness kept him from achieving the same status.

"Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion" by Jason C. Bivins

Book Review

Approaching the Jazz Past: MOPDTK’s Blue and Jason Moran’s “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959”

This article analyzes two approaches to the jazz past undertaken recently under the aegis of “jazz reenactment”: Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s 2014 release of Blue (a note-for-note re-performance of the Miles Davis Sextet’s 1959 album, Kind of Blue) and Jason Moran’s multi-media re-visiting of Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall Concert, “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959.” I contend that rather than an ironic critique of the canonization of jazz, Blue is a direct product of the same tradition of understanding the past that informs such canonization. This tradition is based in an epistemology that privileges objectivity, logic, boundaries, and an obsession with naming while suspecting the subjective and what cannot be named. Jason Moran’s “In My Mind,” however, offers a different understanding of the past, one rooted in ambiguity and connection rather than delineation and separation. I argue that this latter understanding offers a necessary critique of conceptions of the past and of self and other found in the dominant Western worldview.

Flamenco Jazz: An Analytical Study

pending

Circular Thinking: A Roundtable on "Blue in Green" and "Nefertiti"

A roundtable featuring Keith Waters, Henry Martin, Steve Larson, and Steven Strunk. The talk frames general principles of circular tunes and explores two of them from the 1960s: "Blue in Green" and "Nefertiti."