In his recently published book Civic Jazz, Gregory Clark (University Professor of English, Brigham Young University) argues that the elements for a successful democracy are the same elements crucia...

This essay examines the incorporation of immigrant musicians in a jazz jam session in Brooklyn, New York. Migration scholars define incorporation as a dialectical process in which hosts and immigrants negotiate established social boundaries between “us” and “not us.” While the social dynamics of jam sessions have intrigued scholars since the 1950s, the interactions between immigrants and American-born musicians in jazz jam sessions have not been studied. Drawing on ethnographic participation as a bass player in a weekly jam session in Brooklyn, I analyze the ways musical competence is used to establish and negotiate social boundaries between immigrants and hosts. Ultimately, I argue that jam sessions privilege incorporation, allowing immigrant musicians to cross, blur and shift social boundaries between themselves and their American-born peers.

Wes Montgomery was one of the few jazz musicians in the mid-1960s to achieve crossover success in the popular marketplace. Like other jazz artists at the time, the guitarist chose to pack his albums with interpretations of current pop hits. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, Montgomery embraced a savvy producer, Creed Taylor, who molded the overall sound of his recordings for maximum impact in the pop marketplace. Their partnership did indeed yield several commercially successful albums during this time period, the most popular of which was the 1967 release A Day In The Life. The primary purpose of this article is to examine this album and parse the reasons for its commercial success. Through detailed musical analysis of A Day In The Life, we can see the creation of the new genre of “jazz-pop,” one that was viable in the popular marketplace at a time when traditional jazz was marginalized. Furthermore, Wes Montgomery’s A Day In The Life represents a seminal example of modern crossover jazz, making detailed understanding of this work crucial to a jazz historiography that has, in recent years, been expanded to include more commercialized forms.

Based on transcriptions taken from footage of Pat Metheny's live performances, this analysis examines a selection of Metheny's guitar solos in order to investigate the relationship that exists between improvisation and instrumental technique, with a particular focus on left-hand (the fretting hand) muscle memory. Through the examination of four solos it is hoped that stylistic features of Metheny's playing will be discovered in terms of demonstrating some of his unique vocabulary, but primarily the analysis aims to go beyond simply presenting licks, and to begin to demonstrate the way in which Metheny navigates his instrument whilst improvising, and to show how the mechanical movements impact on the musical ideas and the construction of the improvisations themselves.

This article outlines the contours of the short-lived musical relationship between bassist Richard Davis and drummer Tony Williams, as captured on a pair of recordings released by Blue Note Records in 1964. The article addresses the dynamics of the recording studio as a site of creative negotiation and commercial compromise, and as a conduit through which momentary musical choices can solidify into widely-held aesthetic standards. Drawing on the work of Greg Urban and William Sewell, this article explores the dynamic improvisational exchange between bandleaders, freelance musicians, recordists, and record industry personnel and the creative processes through which later generations of musicians incorporate specific interactive logics from prized recordings as elements of their own personal and collective musical identities.

The last for-profit radio station with an all-jazz format was located not in a major city or center of jazz activity, but in Carmel, California. KRML-AM 1410 broadcasted jazz almost exclusively for three decades, before changing to an eclectic rock format in October 2012. This article attempts to explain the conditions that enabled this small but affluent community to sustain a presence for jazz on the airwaves for so long. Moreover, it takes a microhistorical approach that examines the ways that KRML's history reflects the broader national trends in jazz programming. As jazz has accrued “cultural nobility,” a fancy for the music has become a social indicator of one's level of cultural sophistication. Canonized as a quintessentially American expressive form and repackaged as a non-intrusive, unthreatening vehicle for tranquil repose and nostalgia, jazz thus complements the aura of refinement and serenity that Carmel residents have sought to create and have fought to maintain for over a century. Its jazz programming informed by such discursive shifts, KRML sought to sway listeners to accept jazz as the ideal accompaniment to the placid, laid-back Carmel lifestyle.

Willis Conover's Friends of Music USA (FOMUSA) Newsletter functioned as a record of overseas jazz reception and as a document that cohered a global network of fans. From 1964–1969, the newsletter gave a voice to Conover's jazz fans throughout the world, as it contained their correspondence in the form of excerpted letters. Consequently, the newsletter today comprises a social document of jazz reception by an international audience in the midst of the avant-garde jazz movement of the late 1960s. My research has shown that, while Conover intended his musical selection process in his broadcasts to remain both personally and musically unbiased, the newsletter, distributed to subscribing Friends chapters, contained decidedly partisan sentiments voiced through listener correspondence. The opinions and assertions contained in the newsletter served to shape the attitudes and the reception of jazz by a vast, international audience of fans and musicians overseas. Lastly, I present the FOMUSA Newsletter as a document inspired by Conover's prior experience as a fan and author of science fiction and fantasy literature by placing it in the context of fanzines, an integral component in the phenomenon of fandom.

This article refers to:“‘Jazz-mad Collegiennes:’ Dave Brubeck, Cultural Convergence, and the College Jazz Renassaince in California”

John Coltrane's relevant biographical events are discussed along with a fractal analysis examining the sequential structure of pitches in his saxophone solos. Eighteen solos were examined, two songs on two different album releases for each year from 1959–1967. Saxophone solos were transcribed from sheet music into a format that represents an absolute pitch numerically. The pitch sequences were examined using power spectral analysis. Results indicate that all 18 Coltrane saxophone solos display sequences of successive pitches that are consistent with anti-persistent fractional Brownian motion having 1/f α power spectra with scaling exponent α between 1.6 and 1.8. Brownian motion is a type of statistical pattern that is symptomatic of self-similar or fractal patterning across time. In addition, average mutual information analyses revealed various dominant regular rhythmic patterns in several of the pieces. Eighth-note patterns were dominant in Coltrane's earlier work while greater irregularity was present in rhythmic patterns of his later work. Thus, Coltrane's improvised solos, including his later avant-garde compositions, are comprised of Brownian fractal patterns, which others using different pitch encoding techniques have previously identified in performances of both classical and jazz music. These fractal patterns quantify the concepts of order and complexity addressed in the Theory of Aesthetic Value.