http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomJazz Research Journal2023-11-24T15:28:00+00:00Sarah Rainesarah.raine@ucd.ieOpen Journal Systems<p>The journal aims to represent a range of disciplinary perspectives on jazz, from ethnography to film studies, sociology to cultural studies, and offers a platform for new thinking on jazz. In this respect, the editors particularly welcome articles that challenge traditional approaches to jazz and encourage writings that engage with jazz as a discursive practice. <a href="https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/about">Read more about the journal.</a></p>http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27432Editorial2024-03-12T12:34:04+00:00Judit CsobodHaftor MedbøeTom Sykes2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27425Challenging subjects; inclusivity and diversity2024-03-08T23:51:01+00:00Judit Csobod
<p>.</p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27376Green in blue2024-03-08T23:51:01+00:00Haftor Medbøe
<p style="font-weight: 400;">The global commodification of jazz (and indeed culture more generally) has contributed to significant and enduring environmental consequences. The various physical formats through which it has been disseminated have each employed by-products of the petrochemical industry in their production and distribution, and the environmental cost of digital streaming platforms has more recently been observed as contributing further to the carbon footprints of music producers and consumers. International and regional travel by touring artists and festival audiences has similarly been recognized as having negative environmental impacts through associated air, sea, and land transport emissions and through increased burden on host-location infrastructures. The environmental implications of culture have come increasingly under scrutiny as society becomes conscious of individual and collective contributions to, and imperative mitigations against, critical anthropogenic climate change. This article seeks to explore the machineries of jazz dissemination, foregrounding the festival as a place of coming together in celebration of music and community, and considers how the road ahead may look as we attempt to green our engagement with culture while safeguarding its intrinsic values and modes of experience. It questions, therefore, whether the art form that spearheaded the ways in which we currently interact with live and recorded music can similarly lead us in addressing urgent and necessary paradigm shifts in the means and methods of cultural production and consumption. </p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27310The changing face of my jazz photographic practice2024-03-08T23:51:01+00:00Brian Homer
<p>This article is a reflection on my jazz photography practice and how it has changed with my involvement in academic research after becoming actively involved in the Jazz Studies cluster at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR), Birmingham City University and starting a close collaboration with jazz scholar Dr Pedro Cravinho. My practice evolved from photographing musicians playing at gigs to visualising the jazz scene and musicians from a different perspective which includes aspects of their off-stage lives. Through our discussions and common interests in the local jazz scene(s), Cravinho and I began developing a research process in which photography is the visual driver but is underpinned by Pedro’s rigorous academic input. Our collaboration is built on my documentary photography practice and Pedro’s ethnomusicological research background.</p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27169Creating the improvised moment2024-03-08T23:51:02+00:00Yotam Ronen
<p>In the summer of 2023, a dancer, a saxophone player, and a bass player got into a room and recorded ‘Rega’—an improvised conversation on the concept of time. Now, several months after its publication, this article aims to reflect on the process of the planning, creation, and final publication of ‘Rega’ utilizing the perspective of care. Care, this article argues, is both a necessary ethical praxis, and one that creates unique improvisational conversations within the improvised moment. Bringing together in-depth descriptive accounts of the performance itself together with contemporary literature on improvisation, this article is intended as an invitation for others to consider care within their own improvisational endeavours, from initial planning to final execution.</p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27048William Sites, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City2024-03-08T23:51:02+00:00Erik R Steinskog
<p>William Sites, <em>Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 313 pp. ISBN 9780226732107 (pbk). $30.00.</p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/27045Jen Wilson, Freedom Music: Wales, Emancipation and Jazz 1850–19502024-03-08T23:51:02+00:00Amber Clifford-Napoleone
<p>Jen Wilson, <em>Freedom Music: Wales, Emancipation and Jazz 1850–1950</em>. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. 336 pp. ISBN 9781786834072 (pbk). £24.99.</p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/26638Gender and jazz research in Spain2024-03-08T23:51:02+00:00Rebeca Munoz-GarciaConstanza Tobio-Soler
<p>During the last two decades, the little jazz research that has been conducted in Spain has focused on examining both <em>flamenco jazz</em>, as the most important contribution of Spanish culture to jazz, and sociocultural meanings of jazz development, mainly from a political and historical perspective. This period has also coincided with a significant development in jazz studies outside of the United States, and a key juncture for gender and feminist studies in Spain that concurred with the emergence of fourth-wave feminism. Spanish gender research in music has traditionally focused on written music, paying scant attention to jazz, although popular music is slowly becoming a significant focus of research. Far from seeing this as a drawback, we propose that the underdevelopment of knowledge production is an opportunity for a feminist-inspired overview, and a re-reading of jazz cultures and jazz research in Spain as we ‘listen’ for the relationships between gender and jazz as interdisciplinary fields of research. The article concludes that Spain presents fertile ground for a comprehensive exploration of its own jazz culture as research here strives to find its own voice. </p>
2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/20128Jazz as film2023-06-07T12:06:46+00:00Cornelia LundHolger Lund
<p>In the history of documenting music, Roger Tilton’s film Jazz Dance (1954) is an outstanding experimental approach to early direct cinema. By using a novel, genuinely audio-visual, non-staged, multi-angled approach to recording, the film opened up new ways to capture the vibes of the filmed event and thus turn jazz into film. This article seeks to remedy the lack of academic engagement with Jazz Dance by outlining its status as a seminal example for early direct cinema as well as documenting jazz and jazz dance. To that end, the means and techniques chosen by Tilton and his collaborators to convey the impression and vibe of jazz as well as the aesthetic approach to the combination of jazz dance and music in the film will be analysed. Furthermore, Jazz Dance will be discussed and positioned within in the larger field of documentary films that bring together jazz music and dance.</p>
2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/21511Racial and historical considerations of Benny Goodman’s 1956 state-sponsored tour of Southeast Asia2023-06-07T12:06:13+00:00Denin Slage-Koch
<p>The state-sponsored jazz diplomacy tours of the 1950s and 1960s have generally been well-documented, but Benny Goodman’s 1956 tour of Southeast Asia remains relatively under-researched. Considering the United States’ heavy military and surveillance interests in the region at the time, Goodman’s tour merits further consideration as a key element of diplomacy during the early stages of the conflict in Vietnam. In particular, Goodman’s tour, while effective, highlights American racial hypocrisy at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1950s. Despite this, Goodman’s efforts contributed significantly to US-Thai relations, which ultimately became one of the most important alliances of the Vietnam War.</p>
2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/24716‘A superb library at bargain cost’2023-06-07T12:05:12+00:00Alan John Ainsworth
<p>Offering access to low-cost authoritative literature, the Jazz Book Club was a successful and influential venture, publishing 66 subscription titles and 11 occasional volumes between 1956 and 1967. The Club was created to meet the demand for information by the rapidly growing post-war jazz audience in Britain. Extending the intellectual discourse of the 1930s, an educated, socially diverse generation coming to jazz in the 1940s and 1950s was serious about the music and earnest in their pursuit of information. Although the new fans were often fiercely partisan in their preferences, the Club believed its book choices would appeal broadly across the emerging jazz community. Surprisingly, the Jazz Book Club has been little researched. Using previously unexamined archival records and Jazz Book Club publications, contemporary journals and personal recollections alongside recent scholarship, this article provides the first full account of a small but important moment in British jazz history. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s epistemology of generations, I argue that the Jazz Book Club was created to meet the demands of a young post-war generation for whom jazz assumed an unexampled measure of cultural saliency. The Jazz Book Club’s moment passed as a later generation turned away from jazz after the early 1960s.</p>
2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/25947Eight meditations on musical signification2023-06-07T12:05:04+00:00Lee Griffiths
<p>In this article I offer eight short meditations (or perhaps provocations) on the theme of musical signification. They each cover a different theme—composition, rehearsal, sung and spoken words, writing about music, improvisation, cultural politics, technology, and listening to music—with the aim of evoking a rich and multidimensional sense of musical meaning. Their form and style are influenced by my reading of the diffractive philosophy of Karen Barad and are meant to invite a creative reading of the eight sections through one another.</p>
2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/26119Stanley Crouch, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker2023-06-07T12:04:57+00:00Andrew Scott
<p>Stanley Crouch, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 384 pp. ISBN 978-0-06-200559-5 (hbk). $37.86.</p>
2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/26196Editorial2023-06-07T12:04:35+00:00Sarah Raine2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/26182The Future of Conferences2023-06-07T12:04:39+00:00Judit Csobod
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this first piece of our new series, our contributors address issues around an important element of our academic infrastructure, namely conferences. We are all too familiar with the frustrations that emerge from outdated conference formats, the real-time manifestations of hierarchies, the lack of time and space for discussion in the official programs, the pricey and environmentally excessive travel and accommodation arrangements, and the overwhelmingly long days and exasperating parallel sessions. Although the pandemic presented us with a chance to rethink many of our business-as-usual practices, the disappointment of returning to post-COVID conferences that do not reflect any of these discussions and visions for the post-lockdown future is palpable. Returning to our manifesto mission, contemplating approaches for creating places for inclusivity, accessibility, kindness and safe spaces for debate, we have asked four colleagues to share their experiences at academic and non-academic conferences as a means to reinvigorate these discussions and (potentially) renew our interest in making positive and sustainable changes in how to network and we share our research.</span></p>
2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/20551The two Simones at Montreux2022-12-20T23:39:58+00:00Rashida K Braggs
<p>This article weaves Nina Simone’s 1976 concert and Lisa Simone’s 2016 concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival with the author’s life experiences. Despite multiple shifts between historical period and person, attention to the dangers of racism and the hope for liberation persist throughout the festival experience.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22819Without making a song and dance about it…2022-12-20T23:39:43+00:00Katherine Williams
<p style="font-weight: 400;">This story can be read in three ways. The Story is a fictional day in the life of a female jazz guitarist. The Endnotes tell another story, a referenced timeline of discrimination and sexism against female and minority musicians. You could read The Story by itself. You could read The Endnotes by themselves—taken together, they form a prose story of some of the barriers faced by musicians outside the cishet male narrative. Thirdly, you could refer to each endnote as it appears in the story. This method will be a disjointed reading experience, but perhaps best represents the doublethink necessary from people outside the dominant demography in today’s society.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22863The reincarnation of an Egyptian queen2022-12-20T23:39:14+00:00Richard Elliott
<p>This article proposes Nina Simone as an Afrofuturist artist who explores themes of utopia and dystopia in connection to posthuman discourses. Having established three main ways in which this is a speculative approach, it then explores gaps in existing theories of posthumanism and Afrofuturism. It also considers work that addresses the omission of female musicians in Afrofuturist theory and proposes alternative theories in the form of speculative fiction and Black utopias. The article discusses Simone’s frequent allusions to Egyptian myth, her self-identification as a ‘robot’ and her interest in other planets, planes and spheres. It argues that, beyond the unexplored parallels with ‘classic’ Afrofuturism, there is a sense of dystopianism, apocalypse and reterritorialization throughout Simone’s mature work. To explore these connections, three case studies are used: the 1969 album Nina Simone and Piano!, the song ‘22nd Century’, and Simone’s performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22892Free jazz2022-12-20T23:39:10+00:00Maurice Windleburn
<p>This concept poem ekphrastically manifests Ornette Coleman’s landmark album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Separated into two columns, the piece features the work of two quartets of poets, reflecting Coleman’s own separation of his double quartet ensemble into left and right recording channels. The poets Bob Kaufman, Jayne Cortez, Cecil Taylor and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are the quartet in the left column; Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, M. NourbeSe Philip and Boris Vian are the quartet in the right. The work of these poets has been scrambled and interwoven in the first and third-from-last stanzas, mimicking the two polymelodic interludes found in Coleman’s album. The remaining stanzas either combine lines from a quartet of poets or are entirely from the work of a single poet, who ‘solos’ against the quartet in the adjacent column (again, mimicking the general structure of Coleman’s album).</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22895Wayward lives and beautiful experiments2022-12-20T23:38:46+00:00Christopher J Smith
<p>Saidiya Hartman’s 2021 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments literally re-imagines the experience of young black women in 1910s New York, employing a method Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, in which—rather in the form of retconned speculative fiction—she teases out gaps in the archival record. Employing Hartman’s own call-and-response technique of rhetorical questions which spotlight the uncertain answers to questions about minoritized human experience, I ask: ‘How did the “light-skinned chorines” in multi-racial 1930s nightclub and theater culture create spaces of “beautiful experiment” within their day-to-day? How did the “noisy” dance of jazz reinscribe—or subtly subvert—the white racist gaze? What did the chorines think about all this?’ This creative non-fiction essay imagines responses.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22911Gabe Jones2022-12-20T23:38:21+00:00Jesús Jiménez-Varea
<p>Introduced in the 1963 Marvel comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Gabe Jones is ‘one of the first “normal” black people in comics. […] I mean not a racist caricature’, in the words of African-American writer Reginald Hudlin. The Harlem-born Jones was written as a professional jazz trumpeter who had learned to play from none other than Louis Armstrong. At some point during the Second World War, the Howling Commandos help repel a Nazi invasion of Wakanda, the African nation ruled by Marvel superhero Black Panther, with whom Jones strikes up a personal friendship. This piece takes the form of a 1000-word entry on Jones for a fictional Encyclopedia of Jazz Marvels. It speculates the effect that contact with an Afrofuturist utopia like Wakanda might have had on the subsequent evolution of an African-American jazz musician, leading to the birth of an imagined genre—Vibop—in the early 1950s. By parodying the formal qualities of journalistic writing on music and comics, the piece speculates on the boundaries of fiction in jazz life-writing.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22954Calling Planet Earth!!! Is anybody listening…?2022-12-20T23:38:14+00:00Clare Lesser
<p>Travelling the space-ways, two figures. One from Saturn, one from Sirius: brought together in a speculative conversation that crosses space and time. A message to Earth: ‘Get your house in order!’ Sun Ra (1914–1993) wrote extensively throughout his life. Of his over 350 prose-poems, nearly half are directly concerned with exploring concepts of meta-reality, astro-Black identity, and lost time via the coming and consequences of ‘the cosmic age’. For Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), the ‘astro’ played out through the interpenetration of the micro and the macro in text and music. Interplanetary vibrations mingle with earthly micro-particles, the celestial and the fantastic combine in music’s transformative ability to bring profound change. Using a combination of Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) deconstructive technique of the animadversion, and the interview ‘cut-up’, as employed by Christian Marclay (b. 1955), this provocation will take the form of a ‘sampled cosmic conversation’ of Ra and Stockhausen’s own words.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/23072Both Directions at Once2022-12-20T23:37:53+00:00Bryan Banker
<p style="font-weight: 400;">In Both Directions at Once, an album lost for almost 40 years, John Coltrane presents a constellation of musical tradition, themes, composition and improvisation, in dialectical opposition. This article imagines Coltrane as a sonic philosopher of oppositions and the album—named after Coltrane’s quote in which he attempts ‘starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time… both directions at once’—as his philosophical treatise. Borrowing from biographers, musicologists and jazz critics, this contribution argues that in the album, the music engages with itself rather than seeking resolution or finality. In other words, Coltrane’s dialectical aesthetic drives the aesthetic. Both Directions at Once is sound focused on sonically opposing forces. It is an attempt by a deep thinker to present contradictions and oppositions between musical polarities that may create new potentialities. What listeners hear is Coltrane, the philosopher, striving toward a multidirectional aesthetic that furnishes music unshackled from the conditions of possibility.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/23613Hip Bop2022-12-20T23:37:29+00:00Liam Maloney
<p>This article explores Afrofuturist countermemory and alternative history, and the potential of these concepts to be applied to the legacy of Miles Davis’s final fusion concept. Through artistic practice and investigations into the role of such practice in musicological research, Kodwo Eshun’s ‘sonic fictions’ are leveraged as a lens to reclaim Davis’s experiments in jazz-hip hop fusion. Afrofuturism and its relation to speculative modalities is discussed, particularly in terms of its capacity for cultural recovery and historical disruption with a focus on recorded music via sonic fictions and their attendant considerations. The practice-led research brings the ‘conceptual collaboration’ paradigm of Amerigo Gazaway to bear on Davis’s work; four guiding principles in Gazaway’s concept are identified and discussed. The culmination of this research, an original album titled Hip Bop, imagines an alternative future for Miles Davis post-1992 that continues and expands the jazz-hip hop fusion of his final album. This new album is then discussed with reference to sonic fiction, and its relationship to authenticity and techno-political expression is questioned.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/24224Amy: Beyond the Stage2022-12-20T23:37:21+00:00Leanne Weston
<p>Amy: Beyond the Stage, Design Museum, London, 26 November 2021–10 April 2022</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/24286Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation2022-12-20T23:37:12+00:00Sharon Kong-Perring
<p>Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 18 October 2020–25 July 2021</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/24677Editorial2022-12-20T23:37:07+00:00Liam MaloneyNicolas Pillai2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/25398Manifesto2023-05-18T13:00:23+00:00Jazz Research Journal Editorial Board
<p>The editorial board of Jazz Research Journal collectively authored this statement over a number of months in 2021 and 2022. We consider it a necessary and long overdue intervention into the field of jazz studies. The statement describes the jazz studies we want to see.</p>
2023-01-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22906Albert Ayler’s Ghost2022-12-20T23:38:31+00:00Nicolas Pillai
<p>This short play dramatizes the myth-making around a lost episode of the BBC’s Jazz Goes to College series—‘The Albert Ayler Quintet’ recorded by an Outside Broadcast unit at the London School of Economics on 15 November 1966. I use the event to explore questions of cultural ownership, institutional racism and academic hierarchy. The content of the play is based upon the archival, ethnographic and television production elements of my 2017–2019 Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Jazz on BBC-TV 1960–1969’ (AH/P007376/1). The play is an experiment in scholarly form, a challenge to the exclusionary structures of academia (including language) and an acknowledgment of the subjective and autobiographical impulses that inform historical narrative.</p>
2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/20677On the sunny side of the street2022-02-16T09:12:53+00:00Sonya A. Grier
<p>This article tells a personal story of research suppressed for over 20 years and reawakened in the context of music festival attendance. The story integrates participant observations and experiences at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Worldwide Festival in Sète, France with academic literature on racial inclusion. The article highlights the importance of multiple perspectives and disciplines to understand how social connections and contextual realities shape people’s experiences related to jazz and inclusion.</p>
2021-12-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.