Problematic metaphors about New Orleans jazz occur rampantly in jazz history.Comparing the music to a melting pot, mosaic, and even gumbo attempts to capture its multicultural influences.Caroline Vzina challenges these romanticized ideas by demonstrating the profound impact of Creole culture on jazz's formation.In Jazz La Creole: French Creole Music & The Birth of Jazz, Vzina dispels the myth that only Creole habaneras and quadrilles shaped jazz's development.Rather this culture's contributions span over a century beginning with the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana.Drawing extensively on primary sources, this book is divided into two sections, "The Precursors of Jazz," which include folk, religious, and dance music, and "Early Jazz."With these, Vzina provides a necessary, if imperfect, revision to the narrative surrounding the music of a complex ethnic group in New Orleans.First, Vzina explores the meaning of the word "creole," taking the reader through its Portuguese and Spanish origins during the seventeenth century to its use in Louisiana to describe both white and Black people born in the New World during the nineteenth century.Vzina uses creolization, despite the theory's complicated history, to describe jazz's creation, "for it better represents the intricate multilayered, and dynamic aspect of the process during which various elements of diverse cultures get intertwined as people adapt to new or changing environments in which creolized products or practices can themselves be part of a new process of creolization" (9). 1 Vzina elaborates on creolization's complex history and its prior uses in a section in the appendix, but commits to the theory anyway because of its ability to represent cultural interactions.In her work, creolization is combined with Mark Slobin's work on micromusics and those musics' involvement with subcultures.The chapter closes with insight from firsthand accounts of white and Black creoles to explain their experience 1 Anthropologist Richard Price has warned scholars about the implications of using such theories because of its entanglement with crolisation and globalization.

Institute of Jazz Studies Archivist Elizabeth Surles reports on the acquisition, conservation, and processing of the Count Basie family papers and artifacts. She details select notable items in the collection and emphasizes portions of the collection of particular interest to jazz researchers.

Kenny G is the bestselling instrumentalist and bestselling saxophonist of all time. He is, in short, the most commercially successful artist in the history of jazz—a position that he holds despite the vehement objections of many within the jazz community. In this introductory essay, I provide an overview of the common criticisms levelled against Kenny G; I then deconstruct them and some of their underlying implications. As I argue, the popular backlash against him has much to teach us about the prevailing values of contemporary jazz discourse.

Saxophonists have a complicated relationship with Kenny G. His presence as the public face of the instrument is often contested by members of the saxophone community for a variety of reasons ranging from doubts about his authenticity and integrity to a perception of his lack of taste and skill, which has resulted in a form of aesthetic abjection of him and his music. Through a brief exploration of historical contexts, narratives from community members, and a survey of some of his career choices, this essay aims to illustrate that the saxophonists’ rejection of Kenny G serves to diminish the public’s understanding of the instrument’s significance.

Recorded in 1965 at the Village Gate, but rarely seen until recently, the National Educational Television program Jazz: The Experimenters features music from Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor. This article explores and contextualizes both the extraordinary performances and critical commentary contained in this program, as provided by Ralph Ellison and Martin Williams. Since being uploaded to YouTube for the Mingus centennial on April 22, 2022, Jazz: The Experimenters has been viewed over 140,000 times, a remarkable number for an old arty black and white TV show, and quite possibly far more than the number of people who watched when first broadcast. It isn’t surprising that the program has struck a chord with contemporary audiences, for the sounds are still fresh and the debates remain unresolved.

A Taxonomy and CorpusStudy" reflects a number of Steve's scholarly interests.The authors encourage readers to consider how the layered analyses at the end of Strunk's seminal "Harmony of Early Bop" article (JJS 6.1) agree, depart from, or inform the processes discussed in their contribution.Furthermore, Salley and Shanahan's broad stylistic survey of standard jazz tunes resonates notably with Strunk's work-particularly his "Linear Intervallic Patterns in Jazz Repertory" (ARJS 8) and his entry on "Harmony" in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.Joon Park takes a closer look at Steve's innovative application of the neo-Riemannian Tonnetz to jazz.Steve reinterprets neo-Riemannian transformations as geometric reflections-as opposed to more conventional group theory opera-

This article explores how iconography can be a useful analytical tool, and in the process help to demystify the lives and music of so-called jazz icons. I will start by illustrating how a narrative around jazz bassist and Ellingtonian Jimmie Blanton (1918-1942) grew that posits him as an artistic hero in the pantheon of jazz history. Next I will highlight some problems that arise with such canonization and examine two case studies focused on Blanton, one based on statements historian Gunther Schuller made in regard to the bassist’s right hand posture, and a second one focusing on his tone in relation to his physical position within the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In both cases visual sources are used to gain a better understanding of Blanton’s performance technique, which in turn aids to nuance his iconic framing.

In 1944, Duke Ellington told a writer from The New Yorker that his composition “Harlem Air Shaft,” recorded four years earlier, was inspired by the myriad sounds heard in the air shaft of a Harlem apartment building (“You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love…”). Many scholars have contended that Ellington invented this “storyline” after the composition was written. This article addresses the authenticity of “Harlem Air Shaft” as programmatic music. The author finds ample evidence—from unpublished manuscripts, unissued radio broadcasts, analysis of arranging devices and compositional design, and other Ellington testimony—that Ellington did indeed have the sounds and smells of a Harlem air shaft in mind as he wrote the composition.