Books by Mark Lomanno
Forthcoming Spring 2024
An adept improviser can find ways forward amid impasse, agency amid op... more Forthcoming Spring 2024
An adept improviser can find ways forward amid impasse, agency amid oppression, and community amid division. The editors and contributors to The Improviser’s Classroom present an array of critical approaches intended to reimagine pedagogy through the prisms of activism, reciprocity, and communal care.
Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.
The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.
Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors
Monograph in progress. Inspired by the work of Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rosi Braidotti (... more Monograph in progress. Inspired by the work of Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rosi Braidotti (among others), this project examines case studies involving improvising artists around the world (such as Don Cherry, Amir El Saffar, and Rima Khcheich) whose highly diverse and socially engaged intercultural musical collaborations model what George Lipsitz calls “art-based community-making.”
Journal Articles by Mark Lomanno
Ethnomusicology Review, Dec 18, 2014
Ethnomusicology Review, Mar 14, 2014
Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, Nov 2013
This article addresses the historical creation of the Canary Islands as spaces of isolation and s... more This article addresses the historical creation of the Canary Islands as spaces of isolation and spaces that isolate, and suggests how these spaces are re-appropriated and re/worked as critiques of that isolation. Beginning with the mythical St. Brendan's Island, I will outline some episodes through which we can critique the actively produced elisions that confine the Canary Islands and their inhabitants to the periphery, perhaps glimpsing opportunities for emergence from within these boundaries. By outlining some historical gaps in Afro/Canarian historiography and geographic gaps in Afro/Canarian cartography, I will demonstrate how the politics of the cite can gloss over the actualities of the site. Amid these gaps and fissures lie spaces in which inhabitants of the Canary Islands can re/form local and global ideas about the Islands and local cultures. Based on ongoing ethnographic research begun in 2009, this article explores how Afro/Canarian jazz musicians draw on local histories and historiographies of fusion to resist and rewrite their peripheral status, reasserting and re/placing themselves on the map through critical re-appropriation of cartographic, historiographical, and sonic technologies.
Jazz Perspectives, Jan 2013
Inspired by an Ellington quote about the influence of his Orchestra’s 1963 tour on the compositio... more Inspired by an Ellington quote about the influence of his Orchestra’s 1963 tour on the composition of the Far East Suite, this article examines the inherently subjective process of translation between musical systems and between musical performances and discursive representations thereof. The two case studies—Anthony Brown’s 1999 recording of a re-orchestrated Far East Suite with the Asian American Orchestra; and the “Far East Revisited Project,” an ongoing collaboration featuring the Tony Overwater Trio and the Calefax Reed Quintet—illustrate how Ellington’s ideas about transcultural
interaction relate not just to musical collaboration but also to the socio-cultural contexts in which musical performance is situated.
Ellington’s quote includes references to the binary of reflection and refraction, implying a lens metaphor through which I suggest these processes of translation can be discussed. Coupled with the instruments and media used in the case studies, this lens metaphor highlights the importance of technology in mediating both musical
and discursive performance. Attention to these mediations requires a shift in research tactics, rooted in specific case studies in which the complex interrelationship between musical performances and their mediating discourses, cultures and technologies, is spun out using multiple methodological perspectives receptive to collaboration and
re-interpretation.
Inasmuch as Ellington’s Far East Suite was composed over time and its individual movements varied and altered, this article calls for a wider scholarly acknowledgement and sensitivity to the ways in which music, musicians, and cultures develop over time and how continuing performances can map new (sometimes disjunct) associations onto the histories of individuals and their music. As such, the article closes positing this lens metaphor as a technology for jazz scholarship, which promotes and acknowledges the subjectivity of the researcher, the importance of context, and an emergent, improvisational stance that embraces the creative aspects of performing jazz studies research.
Book Chapters by Mark Lomanno
Playing for Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath of Crisis, 2020
chapter in volume edited by Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter (Duke University Press)
intimate entanglements in the ethnography of performance: Race, Gender, Vulnerability, 2023
Chapter in a volume edited by Sidra Lawrence and Michelle Kisliuk for University of Rochester Pre... more Chapter in a volume edited by Sidra Lawrence and Michelle Kisliuk for University of Rochester Press.
Message me for a copy.
Discover Jazz (Pearson), 2011
Reviews by Mark Lomanno
Ethnomusicology, 2023
book review
World of Music, 2020
Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman (eds.), Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation i... more Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman (eds.), Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxvii + 349 pp., figures, tables, music examples, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199355914 (hardcover). Juniper Hill, Becoming Creative: Insights from Musicians in a Diverse World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 264 pp., figures, music examples , acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199365180 (pa-perback). Tina K. Ramnarine (ed.), Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvi + 404 pp., figures , tables, music examples, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199352227 (hardcover). Comparing Commonalities and Articulating Differences in Recent Studies on Musical Creativity: A Review Three recent publications from Oxford University Press investigate many facets of musical creativity, spanning historical eras, musical genres and ensembles types, compositional and performance practices, and geographic regions. Each publication in its own way engages with the challenge of finding commonalities in creative processes that apply across all these distinguishing factors, while also maintaining an openness to variation and differentiation. In Becoming Creative: Insights from Musicians in a Diverse World, Juniper Hill postulates a key set of processes that characterize creative music-making. Synthesized from over 100 ethnographic interviews (the transcriptions of which totaled nearly 3500 pages) and interdisci-plinary applications of "ethnomusicology, education, sociology, psychology, and performance studies," (back cover) Hill examines these processes-generativity, agency, interaction, non-conformity, recycling, and flow-throughout the book in terms of "enablers and inhibitors," factors that contribute positively or negatively to musicians' ability to enact them. (p. 15) Her interlocutors were chosen from among musicians participating in the folk music, classical, and jazz scenes in Helsinki (Finland), Cape Town (South Africa), and Los Angeles (United States). Though Hill finds some commonalities across genre and geography (especially these six processes), she notes that significant differences arise among these case studies due to "varying degrees of ethnocultural diversity, internal differentiation of classical and wealth, state fund
Italian American Review, 2019
Jazz Perspectives (vol. 8, no. 1), Oct 2014
Journal of African History (vol. 54, no. 2), Jul 2013
African Music (vol. 8, no.4), 2010
Theses by Mark Lomanno
University of Texas at Austin, 2012
This dissertation is a performance of and around borders, emphasizing how physical and virtual bo... more This dissertation is a performance of and around borders, emphasizing how physical and virtual boundaries impact members of a community on the global periphery. More specifically, it interrogates the ways in which Canarian jazz musicians encounter and interact with the multiple types of actively produced aislamiento (isolation). As an autonomous community of Spain, the vestiges of colonialism are quite present in everyday Canarian life, despite many inhabitants' self-identification as African. This project traces three main lines of inquiry: the historical construction of the Canary Islands as exoticized periphery; the eradication of the Afro/Canarian subject through the ongoing ideological and physical violence; and the ways in which Canarian populations are re-asserting their identities—as Afro/Canarian, diasporic, and trans-Atlantic—through critical performance against trenchant stereotypes and the dominant paradigms that propagate them. Throughout the dissertation, I examine how surfaces—architectural, cartographic, scholarly and sonic—act to frame (and mask) cultural and musical identity. The ideological seams of these surfaces can function as interstitial spaces from which critical resistance can be performed through improvising musical and discursive acts. Just as Canarian jazz musicians play against and across dominant paradigms to subsist, I will demonstrate how interstitial research methodologies can break open the potentially obscuring surfaces that these paradigms construct. I extend David Sudnow's notion of the "articulational reach" and his phenomenologically informed exploration of piano performance into ethnographic research, emphasizing how my own subjectivity as researcher/pianist impacts and shapes the project. Crucial to Sudnow's "reach" is its inherently improvisatory emergence and the uncertainty of its outcome. In short, the ways in which Canarian musicians must improvise performances in musical and social environments will be examined and resonating with an approach imbued with the same improvising, subjective unfolding—both in terms of research methodology and of writerly perspective. The dissertation could be read as an unfolding, improvised construction that is constantly accruing new meanings: its chapters are not so much driven by an overarching or individual theses so much as by the spinning out of possible responses to the questions surrounding the project's initial premises.
M.A. Thesis (Jazz History and Research), Rutgers University Newark, 2007
"As a musical form that unites two cultures, Afro-Cuban jazz has been historically problematic fo... more "As a musical form that unites two cultures, Afro-Cuban jazz has been historically problematic for jazz historians and critics to address. In a discipline that embraced a dominant historical narrative emphasizing continuity of style and substance, early jazz studies had little or no regard for Cuban contributions to the American jazz aesthetic. Since the advent of New Jazz Studies in the 1980s, new attention has been focused on the underrepresented and forgotten idioms and figures of jazz history. In this spirit, this thesis examines how New Jazz Studies has reacted to Afro-Cuban jazz and whether or not this music has been given ample critical attention.
While addressing critical issues that impede American scholarship on Afro-Cuban jazz, this thesis also suggests several fresh methods for re-examining this music, many of which are already used in the study of other jazz idioms. These methods are applied to two seminal musical interactions from the Cuban/American musico-cultural canon: the late nineteenth century interaction between danza and ragtime, and the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo--known as cubop--which, sixty years later, continues to inspire musicians."
In addition to written and recorded source lists, interviews with the late trumpeter Manny Duran and saxophonist Bobby Porcelli are also included as personal testaments to this history of collaboration.
Uploads
Books by Mark Lomanno
An adept improviser can find ways forward amid impasse, agency amid oppression, and community amid division. The editors and contributors to The Improviser’s Classroom present an array of critical approaches intended to reimagine pedagogy through the prisms of activism, reciprocity, and communal care.
Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.
The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.
Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors
Journal Articles by Mark Lomanno
interaction relate not just to musical collaboration but also to the socio-cultural contexts in which musical performance is situated.
Ellington’s quote includes references to the binary of reflection and refraction, implying a lens metaphor through which I suggest these processes of translation can be discussed. Coupled with the instruments and media used in the case studies, this lens metaphor highlights the importance of technology in mediating both musical
and discursive performance. Attention to these mediations requires a shift in research tactics, rooted in specific case studies in which the complex interrelationship between musical performances and their mediating discourses, cultures and technologies, is spun out using multiple methodological perspectives receptive to collaboration and
re-interpretation.
Inasmuch as Ellington’s Far East Suite was composed over time and its individual movements varied and altered, this article calls for a wider scholarly acknowledgement and sensitivity to the ways in which music, musicians, and cultures develop over time and how continuing performances can map new (sometimes disjunct) associations onto the histories of individuals and their music. As such, the article closes positing this lens metaphor as a technology for jazz scholarship, which promotes and acknowledges the subjectivity of the researcher, the importance of context, and an emergent, improvisational stance that embraces the creative aspects of performing jazz studies research.
Book Chapters by Mark Lomanno
Message me for a copy.
Reviews by Mark Lomanno
Theses by Mark Lomanno
While addressing critical issues that impede American scholarship on Afro-Cuban jazz, this thesis also suggests several fresh methods for re-examining this music, many of which are already used in the study of other jazz idioms. These methods are applied to two seminal musical interactions from the Cuban/American musico-cultural canon: the late nineteenth century interaction between danza and ragtime, and the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo--known as cubop--which, sixty years later, continues to inspire musicians."
In addition to written and recorded source lists, interviews with the late trumpeter Manny Duran and saxophonist Bobby Porcelli are also included as personal testaments to this history of collaboration.
An adept improviser can find ways forward amid impasse, agency amid oppression, and community amid division. The editors and contributors to The Improviser’s Classroom present an array of critical approaches intended to reimagine pedagogy through the prisms of activism, reciprocity, and communal care.
Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.
The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.
Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors
interaction relate not just to musical collaboration but also to the socio-cultural contexts in which musical performance is situated.
Ellington’s quote includes references to the binary of reflection and refraction, implying a lens metaphor through which I suggest these processes of translation can be discussed. Coupled with the instruments and media used in the case studies, this lens metaphor highlights the importance of technology in mediating both musical
and discursive performance. Attention to these mediations requires a shift in research tactics, rooted in specific case studies in which the complex interrelationship between musical performances and their mediating discourses, cultures and technologies, is spun out using multiple methodological perspectives receptive to collaboration and
re-interpretation.
Inasmuch as Ellington’s Far East Suite was composed over time and its individual movements varied and altered, this article calls for a wider scholarly acknowledgement and sensitivity to the ways in which music, musicians, and cultures develop over time and how continuing performances can map new (sometimes disjunct) associations onto the histories of individuals and their music. As such, the article closes positing this lens metaphor as a technology for jazz scholarship, which promotes and acknowledges the subjectivity of the researcher, the importance of context, and an emergent, improvisational stance that embraces the creative aspects of performing jazz studies research.
Message me for a copy.
While addressing critical issues that impede American scholarship on Afro-Cuban jazz, this thesis also suggests several fresh methods for re-examining this music, many of which are already used in the study of other jazz idioms. These methods are applied to two seminal musical interactions from the Cuban/American musico-cultural canon: the late nineteenth century interaction between danza and ragtime, and the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo--known as cubop--which, sixty years later, continues to inspire musicians."
In addition to written and recorded source lists, interviews with the late trumpeter Manny Duran and saxophonist Bobby Porcelli are also included as personal testaments to this history of collaboration.