Jazz Studies Reading Group

A Society for Musicology in Ireland reading group for postgraduate and early-career researchers, run by Kevin Higgins and me from 2017 to 2019.

We met once a month at DCU’s St Patrick’s Campus to talk through papers, articles and book chapters that shaped jazz studies, with a particular interest in race, gender and identity. People came from all disciplines and at all levels. The group no longer meets, but the reading list may still be useful.

What we read

February 2019: Music cognition and improvisation. Vijay Iyer, “Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies”, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 1 (2014), 74–90. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195370935.013.014

January 2019: Authorship and works. Gabriel Solis, “‘A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality’: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and Thelonious Monk’s Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958”, Ethnomusicology 48, no. 3 (2004): 315–347.

November 2018: Authorship, authority and authenticity. Tony Whyton, “Not a Wonderful World: Louis Armstrong Meets Kenny G”, in Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 57–81.

November 2018: Jazz historiography revisited. Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography”, Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (1991): 525–560.

June 2018: Music cognition. Vijay Iyer, “Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies” (as above).

May 2018: Jazz and gender. Sherrie Tucker, “Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies”, Current Musicology 71–73 (2002): 375–408.

April 2018: Music and globalisation. Ingrid Monson, “Riffs, Repetition, and Theories of Globalization”, Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (1999): 31–65, doi:10.2307/852693. Martin Stokes, “Music and the Global Order”, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 47–72, doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143916.

March 2018: Jazz and Europe. George McKay, “Introduction”, in Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke University Press, 2005), 1–32. Tony Whyton, “Europe and the New Jazz Studies”, in Eurojazzland, ed. Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny and Franz Kerschbaumer (Northeastern University Press, 2012), 366–380.

February 2018: Jazz and race. Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., “Introduction”, Music and the Racial Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–53. Martin Stokes, ed., “Introduction”, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Berg, 1997), 1–27.

January 2018: Bebop. Scott DeVeaux, “Eckstine and Herman: A Contrast in Fortunes”, in The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (University of California Press, 1997).

December 2017: Jazz historiography. Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition” (as above). Gabriel Solis, “Avant-Gardism, the ‘Long 1960s’ and Jazz Historiography”, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131, no. 2 (2006): 331–349, doi:10.1093/jrma/fkl016.