Journal of Jazz Studies (JJS)
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Unforgivable Whiteness[a review of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture, by Krin Gabbard]
No full textRandy Sandke, a working professional trumpeter and composer for the last thirty years, contributes a review-essay on Krin Gabbard’s book Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture (Faber and Faber, 2008)
"Harlem Air Shaft": A True Programmatic Composition?
No full textIn 1944, Duke Ellington told a writer from The New Yorker that his composition “Harlem Air Shaft,” recorded four years earlier, was inspired by the myriad sounds heard in the air shaft of a Harlem apartment building (“You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love…”). Many scholars have contended that Ellington invented this “storyline” after the composition was written. This article addresses the authenticity of “Harlem Air Shaft” as programmatic music. The author finds ample evidence—from unpublished manuscripts, unissued radio broadcasts, analysis of arranging devices and compositional design, and other Ellington testimony—that Ellington did indeed have the sounds and smells of a Harlem air shaft in mind as he wrote the composition
Psychoacoustic Foundations of Contextual Harmonic Stability in Jazz Piano Voicings
No full textWhile many written sources on tonal jazz harmony are implicitly aware of the fundamental differences between "stable" and "unstable" chords, little significant work has examined an improvising jazz pianist's harmonic options in terms of stability, or "consonance." For this article the author focuses on the vertical dimensions of this issue, providing a "harmonic dialects" model that accounts for variants in chordal membership of stable sonorities, and an outline of psychoacoustic phenomena that affect how various piano voicings are interpreted as stable or unstable in different contexts
The Miles Davis Nonet Manuscripts Lost and Found: From Manuscript to Publication
No full textIn 2002 the author published Birth of the Cool, a folio of the Miles Davis nonet repertoire of 1948 to 1950, based on the original manuscripts. This article gives a brief history of the nonet and its music; describes how the manuscripts turned up and how the folio came to be published; presents listings of the most salient editorial changes made to the parts in preparing the folio, as well as corrections that should be made to the folio; and shares new information about this repertoire that has come to light since the folio's publication. Finally, the article presents the author's philosophical and practical approach to preparing accurate versions of jazz and popular ensemble music
Unlocking the Mysteries of the Second Miles Davis Quintet
No full textA review of The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–68, by Keith Waters (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Jazz Research Bibliography (2007–2008)
No full textThis bibliography compiles articles of interest in jazz music scholarship that were published in 2007 or 2008 and appeared in journals not specifically dedicated to jazz study