..., gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz—all drew upon the common body of ritual and musical elements which developed along with nineteenth-century congregational singing. Though reinterpreted in terms of their secular settings, signifying parallels and allusions to black worship permeate secular genres...

...This chapter confronts the notion of a jazz “essence,” showing how musicians' adoption or rejection of this concept can work as a strategy toward shifting musical identities and professional opportunities, and suggesting that jazz must be understood through its relationship to other vernacular...

...This chapter examines a variety of virtual communities on the World Wide Web where the boundaries of jazz and of the jazz community are negotiated. The creation of jazz articles on Wikipedia demonstrates key processes in the generation of knowledge concerning how genre boundaries...

..., downtown musicians—including Anthony Coleman, John Zorn, Don Byron, Shelley Hirsch, and Marty Ehrlich—drew freely on modern jazz, free jazz, rock, punk, and twentieth-century experimentalism from the European concert tradition. This chapter proposes that the scene—which was largely supported...

... factories—musicians' accounts tended to be largely devoid of nostalgia for a bygone era. Instead, descriptions of loft jazz venues generally focused on the creative possibilities enabled by the presence of large, raw spaces. By emphasizing the liberatory potential of blank space, rather than the nostalgic...

.... This chapter gives three examples: When It Rains (1995), a jazz fable about a neighborhood griot who tries to keep a mother and daughter from being evicted; The Final Insult (1997), an experimental mixture of documentary and fiction concerning homelessness in Los Angeles...

... manner of exploitation of rhythmic devices is to be taken as a distinguishing feature of American music, it is inevitable to assume that it must have a great deal to do with jazz, pop, and rock. There are elements other than those provided by folk music that define the American character, elements along...

...Throughout the decades following the swing era, big bands appeared regularly in ballrooms, concert halls, and jazz clubs. Recording and broadcast studios mediated the sounds. During the 1990s, big band activity in New York mushroomed as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band...

...This chapter examines the rise of repertory jazz orchestras in the context of the changing cultural significance of jazz, growth in performing arts centers, shifting patterns of funding by philanthropic and governmental agencies, and expanding corporate sponsorship. It also examines different...

...This chapter follows many of the same players into a very different situation, the now-defunct Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, directed by Jon Faddis. Comparing the leadership in this band with the more cooperatively run VJO, as well as taking a glimpse back at the leadership styles established by Thad...

...By looking at the careers, lives, and music of Chico O'Farrill and Ray Santos, this chapter enters a jazz world that thrives on hybridity. Latin jazz bands test musicians' mastery of the harmonic and melodic complexities of jazz, as well as the rhythmic matrices of Latin music. While musical...

...This chapter discusses the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. It includes an analysis of Wynton Marsalis's Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio, Blood on the Fields, and the relationship of this work to his efforts to build an orchestra in the Ellington mold. The chapter addresses why he...

...Section 2 conveys our impressions of the 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the first iteration of this event after Katrina and the occasion of a first visit to the city in the wake of the flood. I ponder how what we observed at and around jazz festival, and what became apparent...

... class. Browne's Jazz Band class included writing, arranging, and performing, as well as occasional visits by musicians from Central Avenue. Bontemps Arna Central Avenue DuBois W E B Ku Klux Klan Los Angeles African Americans in Los Angeles Police Department LAPD Miranda Roberto Racism...

...Fred Astaire filmed his first dance solo in a Hollywood musical to the sound of a live jazz jam session. The occasion, a momentous one in hindsight, was by Hollywood standards a genuine jazz encounter. The date was September 7, 1933; the film, Flying Down to Rio; the song, “Music...

.... A dizzying panorama of the Crescent City: for a moment it felt as if they were about to soar over all that lay beyond and around the skyscrapers, the 70,000 secret nooks where squatters dwell. The WWOZ radio station provided theme jazz music for this twelve-hour day and night. It was America with the lid...

... from the start of “Old Folks”—and the ways one might gather some of the meanings revealed and shaped by the creak that are studied here. The chapter also discusses how people listen to, perform, and evaluate jazz. “the creak ” and unintended sounds Davis Miles Kelly Wynton “Old Folks” Davis “Second...

...This chapter discusses the carnivalesque, which is one of jazz's “lower” manifestations, and is largely derived from literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin believed that the carnivalesque can help people understand or make sense of the improper outbursts in the supposedly...

...This chapter discusses jazz education and the shift from urban nightclubs to schools as the primary homes of hundreds of jazz composers and musicians. However, this shift continues to be marginalized, ignored, or belittled throughout the wide range of jazz discourse. The chapter also examines...

...This chapter discusses the increasingly complicated and fluid associations of jazz's “American” identity. It studies some of the ways that jazz musicians displayed or represented “Americanness”—through professional strategy, musical style, and subjective identity—at the start of the twenty-first...