88 research outputs found
Lonnie Liston Smith: An Oral History
No full textLonnie Liston Smith is an American pianist and keyboard player from Richmond, Virginia, born in 1940. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Music Education and an honorary doctorate from Morgan State University and has performed with Betty Carter, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis. His original music with the Cosmic Echoes has influenced the genres of smooth jazz, jazz funk, acid jazz, and hip hop. Scott Gray Douglass is a bassist and teacher also from Richmond, born in 1984. He is writing a book based on the oral histories of Richmond’s jazz musician educators. The two spoke by telephone in September of 2021. The following conversation is edited for clarity. Footnotes are provided by the co-author for context
Starting with the ABC and HR of It: A Conversation on the State of Jazz Education with Five Renowned Jazz Educators
No full textThe author sits down with five renowned jazz educators--Jamey Aebersold, David Baker, Dan Haerle, Rufus Reid, and Jerry Coker--for an enlightening conversation about the state of jazz education
Out of the Ordinary: Andrew Hill's "Verona Rag"
No full textIn 1986, the adventurous and accomplished jazz pianist Andrew Hill (1937–2007) presented his composition “Verona Rag,” based loosely within the traditional ragtime idiom. Through close analysis of Hill’s studio recording, the author explains how this composition is “an exemplary illustration of Hill’s ability to extend and transform a bygone style and place his indelible mark upon it.” Background on Hill’s career and influences is provided, and an appendix includes a complete transcription of the piece
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
Journal of Jazz Studies. Volume 7, Number 2 (Archival Information Package)
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. This resource is archived and is not available for public use. The publicly accessible version is available at http://jjs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/jjs/issue/view/2Binary format, Base64 in XML wrapper, native OJS import format -- README file -- [Articles] Psychoacoustic Foundations of Contextual Harmonic Stability in Jazz Piano Voicings / McGowan, J. -- The Miles Davis Nonet Manuscripts Lost and Found: From Manuscript to Publication / Sultanof, J. -- [Book Reviews] Unlocking the Mysteries of the Second Miles Davis Quintet / Bierman, B. -- [Bibliography] Jazz Research Bibliography (2007–2008) / McGowan, J
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
"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
Current-Phase Relation of Ballistic Graphene Josephson Junctions
No full textThe current-phase relation (CPR) of a Josephson junction (JJ) determines how the supercurrent evolves with the superconducting phase difference across the junction. Knowledge of the CPR is essential in order to understand the response of a JJ to various external parameters. Despite the rising interest in ultraclean encapsulated graphene JJs, the CPR of such junctions remains unknown. Here, we use a fully gate-tunable graphene superconducting quantum intereference device (SQUID) to determine the CPR of ballistic graphene JJs. Each of the two JJs in the SQUID is made with graphene encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride. By independently controlling the critical current of the JJs, we can operate the SQUID either in a symmetric or asymmetric configuration. The highly asymmetric SQUID allows us to phase-bias one of the JJs and thereby directly obtain its CPR. The CPR is found to be skewed, deviating significantly from a sinusoidal form. The skewness can be tuned with the gate voltage and oscillates in antiphase with Fabry-Pérot resistance oscillations of the ballistic graphene cavity. We compare our experiments with tight-binding calculations that include realistic graphene-superconductor interfaces and find a good qualitative agreement.</p
Ballistic superconductivity and tunable pi-junctions in InSb quantum wells
No full textPlanar Josephson junctions (JJs) made in semiconductor quantum wells with large spin-orbit coupling are capable of hosting topological superconductivity. Indium antimonide (InSb) two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) are particularly suited for this due to their large Landé g-factor and high carrier mobility, however superconducting hybrids in these 2DEGs remain unexplored. Here we create JJs in high quality InSb 2DEGs and provide evidence of ballistic superconductivity over micron-scale lengths. A Zeeman field produces distinct revivals of the supercurrent in the junction, associated with a 0−π transition. We show that these transitions can be controlled by device design, and tuned in-situ using gates. A comparison between experiments and the theory of ballistic π-Josephson junctions gives excellent quantitative agreement. Our results therefore establish InSb quantum wells as a promising new material platform to study the interplay between superconductivity, spin-orbit interaction and magnetism.</p
Controlling Andreev bound states with the magnetic vector potential
No full textTunneling spectroscopy measurements are often used to probe the energy
spectrum of Andreev bound states (ABSs) in semiconductor-superconductor
hybrids. Recently, this spectroscopy technique has been incorporated into
planar Josephson junctions (JJs) formed in two-dimensional electron gases, a
potential platform to engineer phase-controlled topological superconductivity.
Here, we perform ABS spectroscopy at the two ends of planar JJs and study the
effects of the magnetic vector potential on the ABS spectrum. We show that the
local superconducting phase difference arising from the vector potential is
equal in magnitude and opposite in sign at the two ends, in agreement with a
model that assumes localized ABSs near the tunnel barriers. Complemented with
microscopic simulations, our experiments demonstrate that the local phase
difference can be used to estimate the relative position of localized ABSs
separated by a few hundred nanometers
- …
