Jazz

The de facto war on the Left The Gala Report The current "war against right-wing extremists" is in fact-and always has been-a war against the Left. Right-wing extremist J. Edgar Hoover, his successors in the F.B.I., CIA, and the national security state have waged a de facto war of terror against civil rights activists, antiwar protesters, whistleblowers, labor unions, Occupy Wall Street protestors,

Abstract: This chapter investigates the issue of the role of the computer,in musical analysis. Starting with a survey of the main approaches in computer analysis, we focus on the particular problem of Jazz chord sequences harmonic analysis. We propose a theory of chord sequence analysis, based on an explicit conceptual hierarchy of analysis objects. We discuss the implementation,of the theory

Ya pudimos leer en la primera parte de este artículo, en Cannabis Magazine nº 127 de diciembre de 2014, los orígenes de jazz y su relación con el cannabis. El cannabis comenzó a ser fumado en los Estados Unidos por los latinos (sobre todo mejicanos) y negros (Snyder, 1970:129). Éstos a su vez conocieron la forma de fumar gracias a la expansión del consumo que se originó de los esclavos negros del Brasil que habían usado la planta en África. El cannabis fue perdiendo paulatinamente su imagen de medicina desacreditándose como un embriagador e igualándolo, por los medios de comunicación del momento, a la heroína. Durante el primer cuarto del siglo XX muchos estadounidenses blancos fueron sustituidos laboralmente por mejicanos y negros que trabajaban por menos dinero. Así comenzó el odio de la clase trabajadora blanca hacia todo aquello que se considerase cultura mejicana (entre ellas la marijuana) o cultura negra (jazz y blues). El cannabis, según los periódicos de la época, le provocaba a los mejicanos y negros violencia y ganas de asesinar y de violar. Los títulos de los discos de jazz de la época en los años 20 y principios de los 30 del siglo XX estaban muy influenciados por el consumo de cannabis y los títulos eran: “Golden Leaf Strut” (se podría traducir como “El pavoneo de la hoja dorada”), “Texas Tea Party” (“La fiesta del té de Texas” de 1933), “Chant of the weed” (“El canto de la cizaña”), “Song of the Vipers” (“El canto de las víboras”), “Smokin’ Reefers”, “Muggles”, “Reefer Man” (“El tío del canuto” de Don Redman y su orquestra, 1932) o “Jack, I´m Mellow” (“Jack, estoy colgada” de Trixie Smith, 1938).

Jimmie Blanton (1918-1942), best known for his tenure with Duke Ellington between 1939 and 1941, is by many considered to be one of the most influential bassists in jazz history. He has been widely studied, resulting in a paradigmatic depiction of his life and music. But a closer look reveals that all studies on Blanton focus on a single year, from November 1939 and November 1940, of his six-year career as a performer. Thus, a paradox is born. While many believe to profoundly understand Blanton’s music through the writings that abound, many of its aspects remain ‘hidden’, and only a partial and unnuanced narrative of this musician surfaces. Using 1941, Blanton’s final year with Ellington, as a case study, I will unravel the reasons, several of which are extra-musical, behind this period’s omission and detail its far-reaching consequences, which continue to pervade literature on the bassist to this day.

“Ellingtonian” Jimmie Blanton (1918-1942) is no doubt one of the most influential bassists in jazz history. His legacy lives on to this very day, with for example John Clayton being inspired by Ray Brown, who in turn was directly influenced by Blanton. But despite this far-reaching influence most bass methods, history books, and teachers only focus on part of his rich legacy: his solo innovations. Creative and educational as these solos may be, this focus leaves his equally imaginative accompaniments (walking bass, two-beat, ballad style, etc.) virtually unexplored. In this lecture I will introduce some “lost lessons” that can be learned from Blanton, even for today’s bassists. In the first part I will highlight several innovations of his comping style, some of which even foreshadowed Scott LaFaro’s revolutionary style of twenty years later. In the second part I will focus on some “non-musical” aspects, such as his right hand posture, and its influence on sound projection and timbre. As such I will reveal some “new” sides of a bassist you thought you knew, and demonstrate today’s practical relevancy of Blanton’s enduring legacy. As a bonus, this session is filled with unique photos and never-before-heard tracks of Blanton and his contemporaries.
!!! EXTRA: This presentation will include the ONLY KNOWN FILM FOOTAGE of Jimmie Blanton performing, shown in public for the very first time. Special thanks to Mark Cantor for his permission to show this clip !!!

This book presents a provocatively new interpretation of one of New Orleans' most enigmatic traditions, the Mardi Gras Indians. By interpreting the tradition in an Atlantic context, Dewulf traces the " black Indians " back to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and its war dance known as sangamento. He shows that good warriors in the Kongo kingdom were per definition also good dancers, masters of a technique of dodging, spinning and leaping that was crucial in local warfare. Enslaved Kongolese brought the rhythm, dancing moves and feathered headwear of sangamentos to the Americas in performances that came to be known as " Kongo dances. " By comparing Kongo dances on the African island of São Tomé with those in Latin America, the Caribbean and Louisiana, Dewulf demonstrates that the dances on New Orleans' Congo Square were part of a much broader Kongolese performance tradition. He links that to Afro-Catholic mutual-aid societies that honored their elected community leaders or " kings " with Kongo dances. While the public rituals of these brotherhoods originally thrived in the context of Catholic procession culture around Epiphany and Corpus Christi, they transitioned to carnival as a result of growing orthodoxy within the Church. Dewulf's groundbreaking research suggests a much greater impact of Kongolese traditions and of popular Catholicism on the development of African-American cultural heritage and identity. His conclusions force us to radically rethink the traditional narrative on the Mardi Gras Indians, the kings of Zulu and the origins of black participation in Mardi Gras celebrations.

http://www.ulpress.org/item_224/From-the-Kingdom-of-Kongo-to-Congo-Square.php

The jazz dancing that is the focus of this chapter emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. What has become collectively known as UK, or sometimes old school, jazz incorporated a range of styles that developed around a network of ‘underground’ clubs. In contrast to much previous jazz dancing that was performed by, or emulated, African Americans, these styles, even whilst recognising American influences, are also self-consciously British and, by virtue of the important part played by the children of immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean, have a sense of connection to African diasporic traditions that are not solely reliant on those transmitted via America. My approach to this research of UK jazz dancing is interdisciplinary, drawing on concepts and methods from history, dance analysis, sociology and cultural studies. Rather than providing a comprehensive introduction to this field, my aim is for this research to be understood as laying a foundation for future investigations of this part of recent British dance history.

Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)

Odd meters were experimented variously in the album Time Out by Dave Brubeck Quartet. The audiences accepted it widely during the launching period especially the tunes “Take Five” composed by Paul Desmond and “Blue Rondo à la Turk” composed by Dave Brubeck. This article discuses how odd meters become more acceptable in jazz which has been nominated by duple and quadruple meters for long. Ranging the musicians from Fats Waller, James Reese Europe, and Stan Kenton to Jonathan Kreisberg, Maria Schneider, and Hiromi Uehara. It shows the history of time signature usage in jazz, development, and the relationship between early and contemporary irregular meter approaches.

2017. El jazz se inventó en 1917. La afirmación es discutible, por no decir desacertada, pero la opinión de las personas que estuvieron allí también cuenta. Es que la canción “Livery Stable Blues” de la Original Dixieland Jass Band se publicó en marzo de 1917 y, por convención, arbitraria como toda convención, obtuvo la medalla de primera grabación comercial de jazz. La banda venía de Nueva Orleans, Louisiana, en el sur de Estados Unidos, pero había obtenido cierto reconocimiento en los clubes de Chicago y Nueva York, en el norte, donde estaban la fama, los contratos y el dinero. Nadie en Nueva Orleans consideraba a ese sonido una primicia; hacía décadas que se lo escuchaba en las calles, las casas y las cantinas. Un siglo más tarde, en Nueva Orleans, el jazz es cultura hegemónica: puede darte oxígeno al igual que puede asfixiarte. El jazz es capaz de edificar un universo concluso y estático en el que cada uno desempeña un papel más o menos previsible. También es capaz de crear los puentes de fuga.

Why would I embark on designing an Electric Upright Bass? Because the advent of CAD-CAM and the affordability of CNC Routers makes it possible for someone with industrial design skills. Luthier (musical instrument making) used to be limited to the realm of master craftsmen. That is no longer the case.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT: www.BerlezBass.com

Musical spaces are often mythologized as the ‘place to be’ and ‘the place to be seen’ or ‘the place you should have been’. District Six in Cape Town was once such a neighbourhood, where human activities and shared musical experiences intertwined so successfully, that it became a notable space, a place where ‘you should have been’. Weighed down by the difficulties of poverty and overcrowding, magnified by the segregation of the society, music (and dance) became the ways in which the society was drawn together and held together; functioning as the main factor that led to “the integration of the society” and the strengthening of the community (Merriam, 1964).

‘Forced removals’, on the other hand is the antithesis of this; a counter-clockwise motion against the creation of a community. Ordinarily understood as the forced re-settlement of peoples from one geographic area to another, and used as a vehicle to settle political disagreement, it touched the lives of many people in South Africa during the apartheid years. It peaked in Cape Town to displace “a greater number of people than in any other city in South Africa” (Cook, 1991: 26), including the destruction of District Six, leaving only a Mosque and a Church to keep the cloddy soil company.

In this paper I wish to show the importance of space and place, with special reference to the musical life of District Six. I hope to demonstrate the cultural importance of this neighbourhood that, ultimately, led to the creation of the musical city. Finally I wish to focus on the forced removal of people from this area; the resulting trauma of which led to the composition of an album entitled Jazz from District Six (1970) under the auspices of Cliffie Moses.

This paper is an analysis of Brad Mehldau's solo on the Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie composition "Anthropology," itself based on George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." The focus is on devices deployed by Mehldau to break free form the traditional harmonic underpinning of "rhythm changes."

Henri Matisse's images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily revealed when consideration is given to two carefully devised interpretative filters that Matisse created. The first, a circus theme embodied in its original title Cirque, and the second, the intricate captions that Matisse accorded to each image. Enhancing the visual quality of his handwritten text with his richly drawn arabesques, he created a new text-image dynamic which gave primacy to the image. The paper reveals a congruency between the text in Jazz, which he declared had no relationship to the image, and the essay he wrote at the same time, "How I made my books", where he articulated a principle he adopted for his other books, the rapport between the image and the literary character of the text.

As the 20th century began, composers sought the new sounds of modernity. Jazz was one of those new sounds. Soon, European composers and jazz musicians began to influence one another in a period of transcontinental mutual influence that helped shape the musical makeup of the 20th century. Written in May 2015 for an undergraduate 20th century Western music history course, this paper focuses on three particularly important composers of the early 20th century - Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky - and examines the ways in which they were influenced by jazz as well as how their works, in turn, influenced jazz musicians.

A research based on groove.

Bachelor thesis for Codarts (Rotterdam, NL) Pop Drums course, about the influence of music producer J Dilla on the way drums are played today, more specifically in modern soul, hip hop and afro american based music.

This, recorded in 1940, is Tatum at his most relaxed. His phenomenal technique belies the effortlessness of his performance, on a par with his "Sweet Lorraine" of the same year.  His ability to stretch 10ths in the left hand, even apart from the virtuosity, make playing it impossible for ordinary mortals,  but the transcription enables his harmonic inventiveness to be appreciated. You can listen to the original with the transcription here: https://youtu.be/Qt5f3x7VwrY

As mais diversas tendências da harmonia moderna são explicadas neste método inédito no mercado nacional, de autoria do pianista e professor Bebeto von Buettner. O livro é direcionado aos instrumentistas, arranjadores e estudantes que desejam se aprofundar no estudo das técnicas de harmonia. Entre outros, o método aborda os temas - blocos abertos, substituição das dominantes e interpolação dos acordes.

My essay is about the Jazz Age, I’m currently studying Artistic Studies and doing a minor in
Modern Language thus the reason I picked this topic is to correlate my artistic educational
background with American Century history. My main goal in this work is to analyze the History
of Jazz age in the 20th century and its future influence in our contemporary world. Ill focus and try
to summarize “The Jazz Age”1 a term conceptualized by novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Storytelling is an age-old tradition that is found in every culture. Stories capture the essence of the morals, attitudes and world views through the characteristics of the characters in the story, the story arc and the moral resolution of the story. Stories are told to pass down information from the older generation to the younger generations. Stories were told and retold as primary ways of retaining cultural information in the days of past before the advent of written language. Stories later became codified through the medium of written language and commercialized through theatre and moving pictures.  This book is accordingly entitled Sonic Storytelling. In this book, we look at how stories are told using musical tones and rhythms, instead of words. I especially anchor sonic storytelling within the context of jazz because it is only in jazz that one finds the express intellectual effort to tell stories through song. Jazz has a story. Jazz tells a story. With every reharmonization, jazzers are changing the context of the story. With every improvisation, jazzers are plotting a new story arc for the main character(s). Let’s create our own sonic stories. Let’s learn how to reharmonize and improvise. There is a method to the jazz madness.

En este libro, al igual que Ximo Tébar en sus grandes producciones,  se han orquestado varios elementos: recortes y  noticias de prensa, reseñas discográficas,  partituras  y abundantes fotografías, conforman un todo que dibuja al personaje y a la persona en esta celebración de su 25 aniversario discográfico.  De la misma manera que un estándar jazzístico, el texto se divide en tres partes. En la amplia primera parte se desenvuelve la investigación discográfica a través de todos los materiales compartidos, que harán las delicias del lector melómano. La segunda parte incluye análisis musicales de las partituras más significativas del músico que clarificaran estos aspectos relevantes al lector más especializado, y por último, es el propio Ximo Tébar quien en primera persona nos aclara todas estas pesquisas en la entrevista más humana y sincera que probablemente haya concedido, en donde a través de las memorias y vivencias del músico podemos vislumbrar una significativa parte del último cuarto de siglo de la reciente historia del jazz valenciano.

En esta primera parte, se realiza un acercamiento a la vida de Charlie Parker desde aspectos desconocidos de su vida. No quise escribir una biografía más, sino una biografía embebida principalmente de eventos como duscutir la teoría de la relatividad con Einstein, gravar con Benny Woodman, la verdadera historia del saxo de plástico, etc.

This article examines music auditions in jazz education and the artistic valuation of music performances by gatekeepers working in two prestigious schools. Using the inherent insecurities of the entry-test situation as a site of ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores the whole chain of valuation needed in order to produce a hierarchical ordinal ranking of the candidates. By drawing attention to the distinction between what is being said and what is being done by the gatekeepers, a structural ambiguity is identified in the selection game: on the one hand, it is dependent on romantic notions of artistic uniqueness (originality, personality, authenticity) and on the other, it relies on the requirements of jurisdiction and equal assessment (numerical grading, standardized repertoire). The artistic doxa of jazz is constituted in opposition to two negative characters, either by framing the candidates as epigones – echoing the standard repertoire too closely – or framing them as heretics, considered as traitors to the local interpretation of the standard.

The solo has been a crucial element of jazz throughout this tradition’s development. Unaccompanied solo works by single-line instruments, however, have a more recent lineage. Saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton’s 1968 "For Alto" was the first full-length album of unaccompanied solos. The 1970s brought a plethora of solo recordings from an ever-increasing number of artists, many in the vanguard stream of the music.This aesthetic development brought with it a number of issues to consider. In the absence of a score or standardized repertoire, as is often the case in this genre, what gives a composition its identity? What are the ontological implications of music that deviates from cyclical harmonic structures and the theme-and-variations format? This article examines aspects of these issues through a close look at both the unique compositional processes of trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon, and his unaccompanied solo trumpet piece, “Webern.” Based on extensive interviews with Dixon, I explore three performances of Dixon’s composition, none of which sonically resemble one another. If the sounding result of a composition is not its central identity, how does one examine or define such a work? The problems in locating an essence or “center” of non-notated music, and how to analyze and represent it, are not specific to Dixon’s work, they are major issues that have limited the amount of scholarship that has focused on this approach to music-making.