The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University

Brilliant Corners: Jazz and Its Cultures April 3-5, 2007

Al Jones, FATS, 1995 (acrylic)

Biographies and Abstracts for our Jazz Speakers

Thursday, April 3rd,
4:00PM
Welcoming Remarks
Shirley Strum Kenny (President, Stony Brook)
E.Ann Kaplan (Director, Humanities Institute at Stony Brook
Krin Gabbard (Conference Director)

4:30PM-6:00PM
What is Jazz? A Conversation with
George Lewis(Columbia University)

John Szwed(Yale University)
John Szwed is Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University and John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Film Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. As an anthropologist and folklorist his work includes field studies in Newfoundland, the Georgia Sea Islands, and Trinidad. As a musician, he played professionally for twelve years. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 2006 was awarded a Grammy. His books include Afro-American Anthropology; After Africa, Folk Songs and Their Makers; Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography; Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra; Jazz 101; So What: The Life of Miles Davis; Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture; Doctor Jazz (a book included with Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax); Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul; and a forthcoming biography of Alan Lomax.

Vijay Iyer (Musician and Composer)

Described in the The Village Voice as “the most commanding pianist and composer to emerge in recent years,” VIJAY IYER was named #1 Rising Star Jazz Artist and #1 Rising Star Composer by the Downbeat International Critics Poll for both 2006 and 2007. His twelve recordings include Reimagining (2005) and Tragicomic (2008) with his quartet; Simulated Progress (2005) and Door (2008) with the collective trio Fieldwork; Raw Materials (2006) in duo with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa; and In What Language? (2004) and Still Life with Commentator (2007), his large-scale works with poet-performer Mike Ladd. Vijay performs constantly around the world with his projects and collaborations, and he has also performed and/or recorded with Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Amiri Baraka, Butch Morris, Ethel, dead prez, Karsh Kale, George Lewis, DJ Spooky, John Zorn, Dennis Russell Davies, and the American Composers Orchestra. He received the 2003 CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts, the 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and project grants from the Rockefeller Foundation MAP Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, Chamber Music America, Creative Capital, American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, Arts International, and The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. He is a faculty member at New York University, New School University, and the School for Improvisational Music, and has published articles in Music Perception, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Current Musicology, Journal of the Society for American Music, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, and Sound Unbound.

Eric Lewis (McGill University)
Eric Lewis is a professor of Philosophy at McGill University specializing in the philosophy of improvised music. He is presently completing two book manuscripts, Other Worlds--Towards a Philosophy of Jazz and Intents and Purposes--Improvisational Practices in the Arts. He is the McGill coordinator for the MCRI Project "Improvisation, Community and Social Practice" and a member of the Murray Street Band.

Chaired by Ritch Calvin (Women's Studies, Stony Brook)

8PM
Performance Wang Center Theatre
The Vijay Iyer Trio

Friday, April 4
9:00-10:45AM
Jazz and Literature
Tracey Walters"The Blues and Jazz Aesthetic in Jackie Kay's Trumpet"Abstract
The Blues and Jazz Aesthetic in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet While much of the scholarship discussing the relationship between jazz and the blues and Black writing focuses on the works of African American authors like Ralph Ellison or Toni Morrison, Black writers across the Atlantic have also incorporated blues and jazz elements into their narratives. This essay examines how Black Scottish writer Jackie Kay turns to the blues and jazz for the construction of her jazz inspired novel Trumpet. Kay’s narrative about the life and death of a transgendered biracial Scottish trumpeter appropriates a number of blues and jazz techniques such as call and response, repetition, revision, and fragmentation. In Trumpet, Jazz is used as both a structural device and thematic metaphor to discuss the complexity of defining race and gender.

Dr. Tracey L. Walters is Associate Professor of Literature at Stony Brook University. She recently published African American Women and the Classicist Tradition: From Wheatley to Morrison (Palgrave Oct 2007). Forthcoming Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (Peter Lang) Spring 2008. She also wrote the entry on Zadie Smith for the Dictionary of Biography and has published numerous article on Black British literature including: “Music and Metafiction: Aesthetic Strategies in Black Writing,” “Controlling Images of Black Womanhood in Zadie Smith Novels,” “‘We’re All English Now Mate’ Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the Question of Black/British Fiction.”

David Yaffe (Syracuse University)"'What is thisMusic?'": Mingus, Melville and the Sounds of Covert Revolution'"
David Yaffe is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University and a music columnist for The Nation. He is the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton, 2006). His writings have appeared in many other publications, including The New York Times, Slate, The Village Voice, New York, and The New Republic. He is currently at work on The Many Roads of Bob Dylan (Yale, forthcoming) and Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (FSG, forthcoming). Next year he will be a Gould Faculty Fellow at Claremont.
Title of David Yaffe's presentation is: "'What Is this Music': Mingus, Melville, and the Sounds of Covert Revlolution"

Michael Jarrett (Penn State University, York) "Building the Hipster: A Bit of Business" Abstract
Michael Jarrett is professor of English at Penn State University, York Campus.
He is the author of Drifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing (SUNY Press) and Sound Tracks: A Musical ABC (Temple University Press).

Building the Hipster: A Bit of Business The screen shot reproduced here, from Yvan Attal’s My Wife Is an Actress, represent a gesture-a trope, really-occasionally employed in films and inevitably employed in jazz literature. We see a collection of recordings, from which a character selects a disc to play. To the record-collector obsessiveto methis trope is enchanted.To invoke a semi-technical term, we are focusing here on a “bit of business”: a physical activity that actors or characters engage in, most often, while dialoguing. Sometimes bits of business are integral to a scene; more often, they are not. Christian Keathley (following Barthes) has observed that bits of business are most effective when they combine two seemingly contradictory qualities: “on the one hand, the action is carefully selected and thus subtly meaningful, relevant to character or theme; on the other hand, the action appears as arbitrary, meaningless.” To record-collecting jazz fans, the bit of business that pictures jazz records getting played always carries the potential triumph of meaning: the possibility of interpretation (i.e., the bit is a metaphor, key to something or other). But it also unfolds as the potential triumph of the meaningless: the possibility of realism (i.e., the bit is a metonym). Theorizing this bit of business (and its allure) provides a way to think, not just about its meaning, but more broadly about its operations in culture, particularly as a machine that manufactures hipness

Farah Jasmine Griffin (Columbia University) "She Lives in Music: Ntozake Shange, Jazz, Poetry and Politics"
Farah Jasmine Griffin is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She earned her A.B. from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from Yale University. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin': The African American Migration Narrative (1995) and If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001), which was the inspiration for a six-part BBC2 documentary, Billie & Me (2003). Professor Griffin is also the co-editor of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (1998) and a collection of letters, Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut 1854-1868 (1999), which was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. She co-edited with Robert O'Meally and Brent Hayes Edwards, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004). Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Callaloo and African American Review. Her new book, Birth of a New Freedom: Miles Davis and John Coltrane, 1955-1961, is forthcoming.

Chaired by Frederick Moehn (Stony Brook University)

10:45-11:15AM
Coffee Break

Jazz and Representation

Helen Harrison (Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center) "Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Inspiration or Imitation?" Abstract

Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Inspiration or Imitation?
This illustrated talk will examine the relationship between Jackson Pollock's "action painting" technique, which reached its apogee in 1947-1950, and the jazz music he loved. His spontaneous creation of free-flowing forms is often likened to jazz improvisation, specifically the be-bop that was prominent at the time, and many people believe he listened to that music while he painted. Was Pollock responding directly to the rhythms and energies of jazz, or was the music's influence on his art more oblique and subtle?

Helen A. Harrison is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, a project of the Stony Brook Foundation, and the visual arts commentator for WLIU 88.3 FM, Long Island's jazz radio station. A former art critic and feature writer for The New York Times Long Island section, she is the author of numerous exhibition catalogues, book chapters, and articles for popular and scholarly publications, including the Smithsonian Institution's American Art and Archives of American Art Journal, Prospects, Winterthur Portfolio, and Stony Brook University's Long Island Historical Journal. Her book, Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (co-authored with Constance Ayers Denne), was published in 2002 by Chronicle Books.

Bernard Gendron (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) "Improvising at the Kitchen: Rapprochements with Jazz in the Bastion of Downtown Classical Music" Abstract
The Kitchen was the major performance site for the experimental “classical” music which flowered in New York’s Downtown during the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the midst of this highly eclectic and permissive scene, there was a growing interest in improvisation, free or otherwise, either as an end in itself, or as a component of other sonic practices, such as live electronics and acoustic experimentation. What accounts for the growth of these improvisatory practices within “classical” music after decades of rank hostility or total disregard? What aesthetic values were at work? To what extent could this lead to a breakdown of the barriers between classical music and jazz, so heavily policed during most of the 20th century? In this paper, Gendron discusses the first tentative explorations of improvisation and hesitant outreaches toward jazz, during the early years of the Kitchen and other Downtown “classical music” sites.

Bernard Gendron is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has taught in the areas of aesthetics, Continental Philosophy, and popular and experimental music. He is the author of Technology and the Human Condition (St. Martin’s, 1976) and Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2002), and articles such as “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs” and “Pop Aesthetics: The Very Idea.” He is presently at work on two book projects: Aesthetics in Turmoil: Experimental Music in New York’s Downtown and Why Jazz Lost to Rock ‘n Soul.

Jans Wagner (Utah Sate College) "Jazz and Cocktails: Reassessing the Black and White Mix in Film Noir" Abstract
Jans Wager is the author of Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir (2006) and Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir (1999). Her current book project deals with censorship and representation in film noir. Wager is an associate professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley University.

Jazz and Cocktails: Reassessing the Black and White Mix in Film Noir
Film noir and bebop flourished simultaneously in the United States in the 1940s, and declined by the end of the 1950’s. Hollywood films noirs afford a historiography of jazz, displaying obliquely the tension between the waning swing and ascendant bebop, a shift which Arthur Knight suggests “marked a change in jazz from mainstream popular music to an explicit art music, which was (at least initially) assertively black and (at least nascently) cultural-nationalist.” Knight, Eric Lott and others note that the turmoil surrounding the bebop revolution reflected the black cultural and political “militancy of the moment,” with “the music attempt[ing] to solve at the level of style what the militancy fought out in the streets.” Hollywood style, dominated by capitalism, is anti-militant, but the nightclubs of film noir provide a setting for, as Knight notes, both the “segregated look of swing,” and the “‘authentic’ black invention” of bebop. In many noirs, the white protagonists work in nightclubs, as singers, dancers or musicians in the segregated (if not exactly swing) tradition. In other noirs, the white male protagonist visits a jazz club where he is the only white person there, where musicians, singers, and patrons are all African American. This paper explores the dichotomy set up by these two types of jazz representation in film noir.

Chaired by Tracey Walters (Stony Brook University)

12:35-2:00PM
Lunch Break
2:00-2:30PM
Jazz and Performance
Robert Crease (Stony Brook University), "Divine Frivoloity: Jazz Dance and Embodiment"

"Divine Frivolity: Jazz Dance and Embodiment"

Robert P. Crease is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy Department, Stony Brook University. He has written numerous articles on jazz dance and dancers, and contributed the entries on jazz and dance to both the Cambridge Companion to Jazz and the Oxford Companion to Jazz.

Gary Grant (Stony Brook University), "Writing “with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme”: Sam Shepard’s Jazz Plays" Abstract
Gary Grant is Associate Professor of Theatre History and Criticism Bucknell University. He has directed three Sam Shepard plays that have toured to the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. In January 2008, Bucknell’s production of True West toured to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his University of Puget Sound production of Shepard’s Angel City toured to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC where he was awarded a national prize for Outstanding Direction. Several of his articles on Shepard’s notebooks and journals have been anthologized, and his dramaturgical sourcebook on True West will be published soon.

In 1965, when Sam Shepard moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, his roommate, Charlie Mingus Jr. (son of the legendary bassist) helped him find a job as a waiter at the Village Gate. Here, Shepard encountered a remarkable jazz scene, wrote about Nina Simone and Duke Ellington and discovered “jazz sketching,” his signature writing style from this period. By the early 70’s, Shepard was studying music theory and jazz structure and working with musicians on collaborative pieces, like Inacoma in which the acting technique “sensitized the performers to sound, rhythm and music’s emotional affect.” In Suicide in Bb, Shepard created Niles, the eccentric jazz genius and artistic outlaw whose music provokes non-ordinary states of consciousness.

David Krasner (Emerson College), "Jazz Acting: Billy Holiday and the Performance of Modernism

David Krasner Associate Professor & Head of Acting, Emerson College will present "Jazz Acting: Billie Holiday and the Performance of Modernism"

Chaired by John Lutterbie (Stony Brook University)

3:30-4:45PM
Keynote Address

Robert G. O'Meally(Columbia University) "Circe's Empty Bed Blues: Romare Bearden Collages The Odyssey"
Robert G. O'Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he founded The Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and The Jazz Singers; principal writer for the The Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition catalogue, Seeing Jazz; editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, and of several other volumes, including three Barnes and Noble classics by Melville, Douglass, and Mark Twain. He co-edited The Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature, History and Memory in African-American Culture, and Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. His articles on literature, music, and visual art have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Callaloo, and The American Scholar. He has won awards for his liner notes and for his work as writer for the PBS documentary based on his book on Billie Holiday. For his co-production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award. His new book is Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey—the catalogue essay for an exhibition of the artist’s collages based on Homer.

Introduced by Krin Gabbard (Stony Brook University)

5:00-6:00PM

Exhibition Opening

Pops to Lady Day: Portraits in Jazz

8:00PM
Performance Staller Center Recital Hall
Ray Anderson and Friends
photo of Ray Anderson by Moutoussamy Ashe
The mark of a great artist has always been to go beyond technical excellence and impart a personal vision - a sense of style and self-expression that is indelibly his own. Among modern jazz musicians, no one rises to that standard more than trombonist Ray Anderson, whose sublime mastery of the tricks of his trade is equalled by the bountiful spirit he pours into his one-of-akind sound. The man who wrote If I Ever Had a Home It Was a Slide Trombone, one of his many original compositions, has inhabited every nook and cranny of his horn. Described by critic Gary Giddins as “one of the most compellingly original trombonists,” he is by turns a supremely lyrical player and bold texturalist, a warmly natural-sounding soloist and footloose innovator. Broadening the trombone's sonic scope with his extended techniques, brilliantly unconventional use of the plunger mute and demonstrative vocal-like tones, he played a major role in reawakening interest in the instrument in the '80s. Named five straight years as best trombonist in the Down Beat Critics Poll and declared “the most exciting slide brass player of his generation” by the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, Anderson has shown remarkable range. He has led or co-led a daunting assortment of tradition-minded and experimental groups, big bands, blues and funk projects and even a trombone quartet. Anderson is gifted teacher and has long been in demand for workshops and master classes around the world. In 2001, he was a Guest Faculty member of the Music Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was hired as the Director of Jazz Studies there in 2003. “I really enjoy teaching,” he says. “As I get older I seek to serve music not only by performing but by helping to inspire the next generation. Another aspect of this aspiration is my increasing interest in composition.” In response to this interest he has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the Oberon Foundation and Chamber Music America. In 2001 he became a John S. Guggenheim Fellow.

Saturday, April 5

10:00AM-11:20PM
Curating Jazz
Loren Schoenberg (The Jazz Museum in Harlem), "Harmony in Harlem" Abstract
Harmony in Harlem
Harlem resonates in every way from the overtones of its jazz legacy. Conceiving, organizing and realizing a coherent policy towards the acquisition of relevant materials has been a challenge and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem has had to invent solutions to meet this situation. One of the most pleasant results of this challenge has been to take us even deeper into the community than we anticipated going.

Loren Schoenberg is the Executive Director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. As a young teenager he met his idol, Benny Goodman. He volunteered at the now-defunct Jazz Museum in New York City and met more and more of his jazz idols. A gig with the Eddie Durham's Jazz quartet put Schoenberg and his saxophone alongside such legendary artists as Al Casey, Jo Jones and Roy Eldridge. While still a student at the Manhattan School of Music, Schoenberg was tapped by Benny Goodman to manage his archives. Schoenberg left The Manhattan School to pursue this project, but continued playing, forming the Loren Schoenberg Big Band, which has recorded seven albums. Schoenberg also became Goodman’s personal and business manager. Upon Goodman’s death in 1986, Yale University engaged Schoenberg to organize their Goodman collection, and he produced a 10-CD series of previously unissued recordings for the Musicmasters label. Schoenberg has directed the American Jazz Orchestra, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and the West German Radio Orchestra. In 1997, he was picked by Bobby Short to be his musical director and saxophonist, a position he held until Short’s death in 2005. Besides his own big band and quartet, Schoenberg has recorded with Benny Goodman, Bobby Short, Jimmy Heath, Marian McPartland, David Murray, James Williams, Benny Carter and many other jazz legends. Concert appearances include work with Ella Fitzgerald, Wynton Marsalis, Red Norvo, Sylvia Syms, Joe Williams, Quincy Jones, Gunther Schuller, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis and James Moody. He has been teaching at The Juilliard School since 2001, and was formerly on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, The New School, SUNY/Purchase and William Paterson College. His writings on jazz have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Lester Young Reader, The Oxford Companion to Jazz, and Masters of the Jazz Saxophone. In the summer of 2002, Schoenberg's book, The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jaza, was published by Perigee Books, with an introduction by Wynton Marsalis. He has been nominated for four Grammy Awards, and won two (1994 and 2004) for Best Album Notes, in addition to playing on Grammy Award nominated recordings.

Fred Moehn (Stony Brook University), "Curating Community at the Jazz Museum in Harlem" Abstract
Fred Moehn earned his B.A. degree from Berklee College of Music in music production and engineering. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in music with a specialization ethnomusicology at New York University. His research interests include music cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean, especially Brazil, Cuba and Ecuador, as well as jazz and other African-American music cultures. In his work he focuses on questions of race, gender, class, and national identity in relation to music technologies and production aesthetics, citizenship, civil society, social movements, and new media and intellectual property. Recent publications include “Music, Citizenship, and Violence in Postdictatorship Brazil” (Latin American Music Review, 2007); "The Disc is not the Avenue: Schismogenetic Mimesis in Samba Recording" (in the edited volume Wired for Sound, 2005). He has performed jazz, pop, and Brazilian music for 20 years. Other interests include outreach and applied ethnomusicology.

Curating Community at the Jazz Museum in Harlem" I began conducting ethnographic field research at the Jazz Museum's "Harlem Speaks" series of oral history presentations in 2005. I found that the Museum’s unassuming offices -- situated in the middle of one of the nation’s most iconic neighborhoods for African-American and Latino culture and yet at the same time strangely off the beaten track -- seemed to provide a space where a variety of individuals felt more at liberty to speak frankly about their life stories than in most academic or media contexts, and where the audience members were an important part of the proceedings. Above all, the climate was one of a shared interest in community maintenance and building. In this paper I propose the notion of "curating community" to describe and analyze how a more appreciation-based notion of "the jazz community" and a more place-based concept of the Harlem community interact in this institutional context.

Michael Cogswell (The Louis Armstrong House and Archives), "Saving Satchmo's Stuff" Abstract
In 1973, when he left the University of Virginia to play saxophone professionally, Michael Cogswell did not imagine his musical career would lead him back to a college campus and into the life of Louis Armstrong. But after eight years of performing in jazz bands and R&B bands, he returned to school, fell in love with historical musicology, libraries, and archives, and eventually earned a Master’s in Jazz History and a Master’s in Library Science. In 1991, Queens College hired Cogswell to preserve and catalog Louis Armstrong’s vast personal collection of home-recorded tapes, scrapbooks, photographs, manuscripts, gold-plated trumpets, and other such material. The Louis Armstrong Archives opened to the public in May 1994. Cogswell then administered the nine-year, two million dollar project to open the Louis Armstrong House, a national historic landmark and a New York City landmark, as a historic house museum. The Louis Armstrong House opened to the public in October 2003 and is now a prominent destination for tourists, school groups, musicians, and community members. Cogswell has made presentations on Louis Armstrong in cities across the United States and Europe and is the author of Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo (Collectors Press, 2003). He lives in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Saving Satchmo’s Stuff: The Louis Armstrong House Museum Michael Cogswell, Director, Louis Armstrong House Museum
Louis Armstrong was an international celebrity who could have lived anywhere. Yet in 1943, he and his wife Lucille, settled in a modest house in Corona, Queens, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. Today their house is a National Historic Landmark and a New York City Landmark, visited by people from all over the world. This multi-media presentation showcases treasures from Louis Armstrong's vast personal collection of home-recorded tapes, scrapbooks, photographs, manuscripts, etc. The audience will enjoy a mini-tour of Armstrong’s home, hear Louis practicing his trumpet at home, hear Louis backstage telling jokes and band stories, see candid snapshots of Louis at home, see Louis’s original artwork, see Louis’s gold-plated trumpets and custom-made mouthpieces, and much, much more. Mr. Cogswell will also address some of the curatorial issues of preserving jazz materials and interpreting a jazz historic site.

Chaired by Ray Anderson (Stony Brook University)

11:20-1PM
Lunch Break

1:00-2:45PM
Jazz and Disaspora
Monica Hairston (Center for Black Music Research), "Hazel Scott's Jazz Cosmopolitanism" Abstract
Hazel Scott's Jazz Cosmopolitanism Monica Hairston is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at New York University. She currently serves as the Interim Executive Director of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago.

Hazel Scott performed classics, bebop-tinged jazz and boogie-woogie at the Greenwich Village nightclub Café Society, often mixing the genres in a then-popular approach called "swinging the classics." She also sang in multiple languages including French, Italian, German and Yiddish and composed pieces inspired by the musical culture of her native Trinidad. This paper explores Scott's jazz cosmopolitanism as the negotiation between local and diasporic traditions and thus expands the narrative of jazz musicking in 1940's New York.

Ingrid Monson (Harvard University), "Is Africa in the Diaspora? A View from Mali"
Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African-American music at Harvard University, and Chair of the Department of Music. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of African and African-American Studies. She is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1997) and an edited a volume entitled The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000). Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, and several edited volumes. She is currently working on a book about Malian balafonist Neba Solo.

Chris Washburne (Columbia University), "Jazz Re/Bordered: Nationalism and Cultural Policy in Danish Jazz" Abstract
Chris Washburne is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Columbia University and the founder and Director of Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program. He has published numerous articles on jazz, Latin jazz, and salsa. His newest book, Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York will be published this Spring by Temple University Press. He co-edited the volume Bad Music and is currently working on a book on Latin jazz which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2009. As a performer he has been called “one of the best trombonists in New York” by The New York Times. He has recorded over 150 albums and performed with numerous jazz and Latin groups including, Tito Puente, Anthony Braxton, Eddie Palmieri, Duke Ellington Orchestra, Celia Cruz, Marc Anthony, and Ruben Blades. He leads his own band SYOTOS, one of the busiest and most in demand Latin jazz group in New York. Their release “Paradise In Trouble” on Jazzheads Records was nominated as the best Latin jazz record of 2004.

Jazz Re/Bordered: Nationalism and Cultural Policy in Danish Jazz abstract: The small nation of Denmark has served as one of the main European centers for jazz production and consumption since the 1930s. Danish audiences, musicians, promoters, and producers have been consistently supportive and welcoming to U.S. jazz musicians, where a number have established second homes or relocated altogether. Danish jazz festivals and clubs have provided U.S. musicians with a reliable and consistent source of support and programming. Independent Danish record labels, such as SteepleChase and Storyville Records, have released numerous recordings by U.S. artists. Conversely, Denmark has produced a number of significant musicians (e.g. Svend Asmussen, Nils-Henning Ørsted Pedersen), and established extensive jazz education programs that have spawned a vibrant and innovative young generation of musicians. Regardless, Danish musicians typically do not enjoy the same type of access and support in the U.S. This lack of reciprocity is informed by protectionist practices and prejudiced notions of authenticity and ownership purported by the U.S. jazz community. As frustrations have mounted, Danish jazz institutions, in collusion with governmental agencies, have recently retaliated by implementing nationalistic and protectionist policies that have greatly limited U.S. involvement. This paper investigates how state-sponsored cultural policies, an upsurge in nationalistic fervor, along with protectionist stances convene and reverberate through the current jazz scene, re/bordering a historically marked African-American music into a self-consciously Eurocentric expression.

Brent Edwards (Columbia University), "The Unheard Voice of Black Paris"

The Unheard Voice of Black Paris
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora (2003) and a co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004). He is currently working on two books: a study of the interplay between jazz and literature, and a cultural history of “loft jazz” in 1970s New York. He is the co-editor of the journal Social Text.

Chaired by E. Ann Kaplan (Stony Brook Univeristy)

3:00-4:15PM
Keynote Address

Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas), "A Queer Question for Jazz Studies: When did Jazz go Straight?"Abstract
A queer question for jazz studies: when did jazz go straight?

A queer question for jazz studies: when did jazz go straight? New Jazz Studies has been attentive to the many ways that jazz, historically, has served as a site of struggle over race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other social categories. This paper moves from the question, "What is the place of queer theory in New Jazz Studies?" to reflect on potential objects of study as diverse as sex-spectacle in 1930’s floor shows, the construction of the jazz tradition in canon-formation and institution-building, and musical genre in the L-Word sound-track. Rather than limit our uses of queer theory to the reclamation of lost queer jazz subjects, alternative scenes, and same-sex suggestive lyrics, this paper advocates that we also develop intersectional analyses of sexuality, race, gender, and class that are queer enough to interrogate moments when jazz subjects, scenes, sounds, and historiography may also operate as regulatory signs of normative heterosexuality.

Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas–American Studies) is the author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940’s (Duke, 2000). Her articles on jazz and gender have appeared in numerous journals, including American Music, Black Music Research Journal, Current Musicology, and Women and Music: a Journal of Gender and Culture, and edited volumes, including Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby (eds), African American Music: A History (Routledge, 2006); Ajay Heble and Daniel Fischlin (eds), The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue (Wesleyan, 2004); Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (eds), Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (University of Illinois, 2002); and Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (eds), Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (Routledge, 2000). With Nichole T. Rustin, she has co-edited a forthcoming multi-authored volume, Big Ears: Listening to Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke University Press), and is currently completing a book entitled Dance Floor Democracy: the Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen. She is a member of the “Improvisation, Gender, and the Body” team for Ajay Heble’s Collaborative Research Initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, entitled, "Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice." She is co-editor of the journal American Studies, with David Katzman. She was the 2004-2005 Louis Armstrong Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University.

4:30PM
Master Class with Joe Lovano at Staller Center Recital Hall
8:00PM
Joe Lovano Concert, Staller Center
Click here for a printable registration form
to download a pdf of the JAZZ Poster and Registration form, click here

to download a pdf of the JAZZ Program, click here

Page Created and Updated by Ann L. Berrios, Administrative Coordinator