1950 and 1960s

Noise to Signal: Retrieving Information from Jazz Recordings (I)

This talk presents the basic tools of audio signal analysis for music information retrieval, and discusses the prospects for their useful application in jazz music collections. This work is part of a project led by the Center for Jazz Studies to build a collaborative online resource for information on jazz recordings known as J-DISC. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a young field that applies tools from machine learning and signal processing to obtain information about musical items.

Seminar: The World of Thelonious Monk

Author: 
Robin Kelley

This course explores 20th century cultural history through the music, ideas, and image of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk. We are particularly interested in how Monk has been "constructed" by critics, fans, writers, visual artists, the music industry, the media, etc., and how Monk himself helped shape his public image. After all, Monk became a major icon for Beat generation poets, surrealist artists, and emerging avant garde jazz musicians, despite the fact that he neither identified nor engaged these creative artists directly.

The New Thing

Author: 
John Szwed

Yale University

Anthropology

Spring 2004

An examination of the new jazz that emerged shortly after the middle of the 20th century. Discussion will include the work of musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Carla Bley, Albert Ayler, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago; the economics and politics of the period; parallel developments in other arts; the rise of new performance spaces, recording companies, and collectives; the accomplishments of the music and the problems it raised for jazz performance and criticism.

Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album

Author: 
Mark Tucker

Monk and Ellington were kindred spirits: both were profoundly influential composers and wonderfully idiosyncratic pianists. Tucker explores and evaluates Monk's recording of nine Ellington compositions from 1958. Detecting some diffidence in Monk's attitude toward the project, he suggests that the recording may have been designed to position Monk as part of an emerging jazz "mainstream," or middle way between extremes, which was a commercial and critical trend so powerful it swept along even an iconoclast like Monk.

URL: 
BMRJ Web site

Musical-Verbal Performance and the Negotiation of Ethnically Segregated Social Space

Author: 
T.M. Scruggs
Current Musicology

In "'Come on in North Side, you're just in time': Musical-Verbal Performance and the Negotiation of Ethnically Segregated Social Space," Scruggs explores the ways that tenor saxophonist Von Freeman used both music and speech to create a sense of community and shared tradition through his performances at Chicago's Enterprise Lounge during the 1970s and 1980s.

Thelonious Monk and the Performance of Poetry

Author: 
Charles Bernstein

Bernstein asks why poets would read their work aloud and what happens when they do. He views the performance of poetry as a "competing realization" of the written work and explores the possibilities for tonal, rhythmic, and phrasing dynamics that performance adds to poetry. That in turn suggests a comparison with jazz performance, and specifically that of Thelonious Monk for his pauses and silences.

Syncopating Rhythms: Jazz and Caribbean Culture

Author: 
Herbie Miller

Miller argues that Caribbean music is central to the emergence and development of jazz. The Caribbean islands were a crucial transfer point to the mainland United States for African rhythms and musical forms from the beginning of the slave trade until the present. Caribbean music was especially important in the development of jazz in New Orleans, America's Caribbean city.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - 1950 and 1960s