Martha Velez has had a long career as a musical adventurer. She grew up riding NYC subways to the Bronx High School of Music, and later to New York's High School of Performing Arts. Tour buses and airplanes eventually replaced Velez's subways, as music took her further afield: from touring the country in the early 1960s with the Gaslight Singers; then to England to record her debut album, Fiends and Angels (1969), with musicians that included Eric Clapton and Christine McVie. After releasing a pair of singer-songwriter albums, Hypnotized (1972) and Matinee Weepers (1973), in 1975 she was off to Jamaica, where Bob Marley and Lee “Scratch” Perry produced her reggae album Escape from Babylon.

Velez’s voice has taken her on a journey through an amazingly diverse range of genres: from opera, to the musical theatre stage; from folk, to blues rock, to reggae, and back to musicals again. Velez and I talked about her experiences in the studio, about being a young woman in the music business in the 1960s and 1970s, and about singing. As a singer myself, and as a scholar who studies singers, I find that conversations with performers like Velez can reveal how singers adapt their instruments to different styles and contexts, and use singing as an act of musical authorship.

Your early training was in opera and musical theatre. How did you end up making the shift from those genres to blues and rock?

I went to Long Island University where I joined up with a group of guys who were putting together a folk group called the Gaslight Singers. The Gaslights led me into touring right out of college. We toured for two or three years, and we recorded two albums for Mercury Records with producer Milt Okun, who produced records for Peter, Paul and Mary and The Chad Mitchell Trio, so we were in very good company. 

After touring with the Gaslights, I entered into musical theatre. I auditioned for a show called Mata Hari. It was my first ever audition for a Broadway show—and I got the part While we were in previews, the woman playing the lead came knocking on my door, asking if I could go on stage that night, and I just said ok! I played the lead for the duration of the run. It was a pretty amazing thing. From there, I went on to another show called I'm Solomon, and then I replaced Diane Keaton as the lead in Hair. 

Being in Hair led me to think that I could possibly go from classical music to folk music to blues and rock. When I was in Hair, I went in to record some demos for a songwriter. I could see these two execs walking around the control room and when I came out of the vocal booth, they said to me, “we'd like to sign you as a recording artist.” The execs were Seymour Stein and Richard Gotterher, the owners and founders of Sire Records, responsible for Madonna, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, The Ramones, etc. The next thing I knew, they sent me to London to work with Mike Vernon, who had produced for Cream, the Yardbirds, John Mayall, and all of those British greats.

Your London sessions led to Fiends and Angels, a blues rock record. Blues rock was a fairly new singing style for you at that point – what was it like to jump in?

I knew a lot of the music because blues is fundamentally folk music—it was very related to what I'd sung before, and shared this sense that something about it was visceral and primal. Chordally, you have three or four chords that you're playing with and the vocals can really fly through those patterns. And that's also what I loved about reggae:  reggae to me is a solid base for a lot of jazz feel, a lot of free-form exploration of what you can do with your voice.

Could you talk a bit about what it was like to work in the studio? You were surrounded by these fantastic musicians – it must have been an exciting experience, but also potentially intimidating.

Working on that first album was very intimidating – but I'm tall and that always helps. In those days I was wearing these tall boots that made me stand at least six two, so that helped me feel less intimidated. I'd walk in and there would be all these people: Christine McVie was there, and Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix band. They were at the top of their game in that era, and I had not really done this music to that extent – I hadn't worked it, hadn't been on the road with it, I hadn't done anything but really have a fire for it. The experience of singing in Hair helped. There was a lot of rock music in Hair, and even though it was kind of Broadway-ish, it was very rooted in an enormous amount of visceral and emotional projection. That's what I think accomplished in Fiends and Angels: that kind of emotional projection.

We were working in the Decca Studios, and at that time it was set up for orchestras: bleacher style, where the instrumentalists would sit with the conductor standing on the floor level. It was perfect for me in a way because I was used to performing on a stage, and standing on the top section this was like standing on a stage. We'd just arrange things as if we just started playing and just didn't stop: nobody sat down and wrote out specifics for the basic track arrangements. That wasn't as important to me as really finding the groove with these artists.

So, a few years after Fiends and Angels, you went to Jamaica to make a reggae album with Bob Marley.  How did that come about? And what was it like to work with Marley?

By the time I worked with Bob Marley, I'd recorded 3 albums, and two of them were singer-songwriter albums.  I'd done a couple of reggae tunes on one, Matinee Weepers, and I'd written this reggae song called “Money Man,” that Richard Gottehrer liked. I had no thoughts of working with Bob Marley himself, but Sire told me they'd sent him a couple of cuts from my album and he'd loved my voice and was interested. By then my sense of what I wanted to do with music and wanted to say within music had evolved in a different way. Working with him, I was really trying to say something and yet not be too pretentious about it, because my life was very different from his life. We finally did get into a groove but I ended up doing a lot of my vocals up in New York. It was simply because some of the equipment in Jamaica used an electrical current that wasn't compatible with US currents, so we were getting all this strange sounding distortion.

After that album, Escape from Babylon, I really wanted to do more reggae, but even though that album did well and found its niche, the record company wasn't interested.

I'm struck by the stylistic diversity of your music: you've done rock, reggae, musical theatre, opera, and blues. I'm interested in how you navigated these genre shifts with your voice.

Somewhere along the line I learned to trust what my vocal instrument could do. There's this transition where you're trying to sing opera, and you're trying to sing folk music, and you're adapting to what the genre requires.  But somewhere along the way I thought: this is where my voice can go more readily and easily. It's my fingerprint, and my imprint is there in the way my voice can hit that note, even if I don't hit it in the way somebody might expect. It's about really trusting that your high range will be there and that you can move through it without fearing. It's never perfect, that's for sure, but I can only say this: it's never perfect but it is hopefully true.

What it comes down to for me is this: if you know you can hit that note, and you're emotionally invested in the song, then you're going to hit whatever version of that note exists for you and is true. That note may not be right for anybody else but it will be right for me. I've been formally trained; I've had to disregard a lot of that but at the same time I've embraced a lot of what was taught to me. It’s in my DNA.

I feel, that as a singer, the exciting part is to try all these genres. I'm always pleased to see people who have been singing, challenging themselves to do another genre, and hopefully, doing it well or as well as they can, and not cheating the genre or themselves. In that sense I still am shamelessly courageous: it's what artists do. If we're not pushing the envelope all the time then we're not doing what we were meant to do.

Your career spans a period that has seen considerable shifts to the amount agency that women have in the music industry. As someone who started making records as a young woman in the 1960s, do you think gender shaped your music and career?

I think it has. When I started out, I didn't know many girls out there doing rock music or trying to push the envelope with the voice. Most of the women I was aware of were singers with bands: Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Chrissie Hynde, Blondie. Now, having been a singer with a band, with the Gaslight Singers, I kind of knew that was a fantastic comfort zone. The guys wanted it as much as you wanted it and you got to be the featured girl. But when you approach it all on your own, as a solo artist, it's a different game and people have a different perception of you. One of the things that I consciously did, was to avoid intimate relationships with the people that I worked with. I felt it was important to maintain professional respect because I didn't want to be that girl who was in the studio because of that. I wanted to be the girl that was there because my musical approach was respected and, hopefully, equal to the boys. These players and producers, all of whom had incredible egos and were wonderful colleagues, they weren't going to be performing on your record unless you had something to bring, I can tell you I was always very self conscious, insecure, and intimidated by that fact. Stepping up was a challenge and a difficult one, but I was there to do it, so I had to do it.

I have nothing but incredible respect for all these women who are successful—these young singers who are challenged by the music industry and who are bringing in millions of dollars for various people. They have to keep it together, they have to be pretty, their voices have to be strong, they have to perform, and they have to do all of this while being a female person up against all of those glass ceilings.

So you've been working in theatre again—this time as a playwright. What projects do you currently have underway?

About a year ago I decided to write this piece called American Heartbeat based on a play that I had written in 1992, about a construction worker, Vietnam Vet with PTSD who ends up on the street corner because of the recession of 1992, alongside the Mexican illegal immigrants he used to hire. I decided to rewrite it because, unfortunately, not that much has changed socio-politically. It's a play with music: I pulled songs from my albums, and I've written a couple of new songs to move the narrative forward. It's a very exciting project we're doing it here in Florida in May. We’re looking at a New York presentation in July, and are in consideration for a Pulitzer Prize—a long shot, but sweet.

As if your career hasn't been wide-ranging enough, beyond your work as a musician, you earned an MA in Clinical Psychology and a PhD in Depth Psychology and Cultural Mythology. Do you find that your musical work informs your work in that field, or vice versa?

I gravitated to these disciplines because of my work in theater and in the arts. I'm interested in psychological interiors: what's behind the story, and what's deeper. Music and art are fundamentally about the art of being a human being, and the different approaches we can take living our lives. Hopefully, the artful approach is something that makes the individual more beautiful and the world more beautiful, exponentially.  That idea was really my push towards being in a community of people who explored a more abstract way of thinking, a cohort that were more conscious of the liminal spaces of life, working in between consciousness and the unconsciousness. For me, it broadened the thinking that was possible and I feel very blessed. I'm incredibly grateful for what I've been able to experience in my life and the people that I've been able to experience.

This interview was conducted on December 9^th, 2014 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Greetings All! My name is Rose Boomsma and I am excited to be taking on the role of Editor-in-Chief for Ethnomusicology Review. Having been involved in various ways with the journal for the past two years has taught me the importance of having a dedicated team of editors, eager to serve and create. This year we have quite a few new staff members who will be taking charge of different aspects of the Sounding Board and our Journal Volume. I will introduce both them and our continuing staff below.

As we continue developing our growing Sounding Board, we also look forward to publishing our 20^th Journal Volume! The submission deadline for the journal is March 10^th and we accept posts for the Sounding Board on a rolling basis. Submission guidelines can be found to the right of this page.

 Mike D'Errico is our Technical Editor. He is a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Musicology and the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. His research interests and performance activities include hip-hop and electronic dance music, video games and generative media, and sound studies. Current projects include ethnographies on hip-hop and electronic dance music communities in Los Angeles (Low End Theory, Team Supreme, Brainfeeder), sound design for the RomeLab virtual world project, and ongoing research on convergence media and interactive audio in contemporary digital audio production. He is also currently the web editor and social media manager for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, as well as Echo: a music-centered journal.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Schuyler Whelden is Managing Editor for the Sounding Board and a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Musicology. His research focuses on issues of genre and race in Brazilian popular music. Current projects include investigating the influence of European modernist intellectuals on racialized conceptions of genre in the 1920s and 30s and analysis of 1970s musical recordings as a lens into the repressive military dictatorship of the time.

John Widman is Managing Editor for the Journal Volume and a second year graduate student in UCLA’s Ethnomusicology Department where he specializes in researching the music of China’s Zhuang minority. In addition to Chinese music, John has interests in global expressions of various genres of rap and hardcore. He is further involved in researching sound studies and music listening preferences in extreme environments derived from his experiences as a wildland firefighter.

Associate Editors

Ben Cosgrove manages the Ecomusicology section of the Sounding Board. He is a multi-instrumentalist and touring composer/performer whose work focuses on the human experience of landscape. He grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and he graduated from Harvard College in 2010. More about him can be found at www.bencosgrove.com.

Dean Reynolds is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, where he is currently writing his dissertation on jazz musicians and listeners and their uses of recording technologies and new media. Dean has taught undergraduate music courses at City College, the New School, Princeton, and elsewhere, and he is a double bassist. He manages the Space is the Place section of the Sounding Board.

Rosaleen Rhee is a PhD student in the Musicology and the Urban Humanities Institute at UCLA. Her research involves analyzing how an AIDS victim is represented in one Korean popular music video. In addition to multimedia interpretation, Rosaleen is also interested in urbanism, critical race theory, and the sustainability of performing arts venues and civic institutions. She manages the new Crossing Borders section of the Sounding Board.

Mehrenegar Rostami is the current Reviews Editor. A native of Tehran, she is at present a PhD student at UCLA with an in terest in the music of Silk Road cultures. After completing her B.A. in the Field of Music at Azad University of Tehran, where she studied the Persian traditional music repertoire, she continued her studies in Musicology and Dance at University of Salzburg. She received her M.A. in ethnomusicology from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her further research interests include intercultural musical encounters, improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, capitalism & globalization, politics, and philosophy.

Otto Stuparitz is a Chicago native and received his BA in music history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he researched aesthetics and distribution networks within the local recording studio scene. His current graduate work at UCLA focuses on ways in which technology, law, and distribution networks affect traditional and popular musics of Indonesia. He manages the Bring the Noise section of the Sounding Board.

Kristina Nielsen completed her B.M. in piano performance at Western Washington University and studied for an additional year at the Native American Language and Cultures program at Copenhagen University. She is currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Columbian instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Columbian music. She founded and now manages the HistoricalPerspectives section of the Sounding Board.

Thank you to all the past editors, especially Alex Rodriguez, the outgoing Editor-in Chief. We hope to continue to bring you interesting posts on current issues in the field of ethnomusicology and look forward to producing a unique 20^th journal volume this coming fall.

Surfing about Music.By Timothy J. Cooley. Berkeley:University of California Press, 2014. [240 p. ISBN 9780520276642. Paperback: $29.95; Hardcover: $65; E-Book Version: $29.95.]

Reviewed by Michael J. Roberts / San Diego State University

“Is there any meaningful connection between place, music, surfing and surfers? Can we talk about surfers as a community with a music?” This question (which appears on page 112) seems to be the main issue that guides Timothy J. Cooley’s new and very interesting book, Surfing about Music (2014). The answer seems to be yes and no.  No, if we take that question to refer to something inherently musical about surfing, but yes if we take seriously one of the surfers Cooley interviews for his book, who says, “Surfing without music would be nothing” (117). But then again, if we’re thinking in more technical terms, there is no “surf” music per se, because the music is an appropriation of blues music. And, Cooley demonstrates that the instrumental music that we sometimes call “surf music,” (the Ventures for example) existed prior to its connection with surfing. Although, I find Cooley’s analysis of how the use of reverb in the guitar arrangements of surf music is supposed to give the listener a feeling of being underwater is a very compelling case for a strong connection between music and surfing. Regardless, as Cooley argues, surfers need music, and his book is an exploration of why that is the case.

To be more precise, Cooley begins his book by taking care to ask the correct kinds of questions. Asking whether the connection between so-called “surf music” (like the Beach Boys or Dick Dale for example) and the activity of surfing is real or mythical, is the wrong question. Rather, Cooley suggests that we should instead accept those connections as meaningful “cultural constructions” and then look at how groups of individuals give meaning to both activities by constructing those connections. Constructing those connections also creates the conditions for surfers to develop themselves into what Cooley calls an “affinity group” as an alternative concept to an “ethnic group.” An interesting and very important conceptual move that Cooley makes is to criticize his “discipline’s [ethnomusicology] obsession with the increasingly problematic division of individuals into politically defined ethnic categories” (8). What makes an affinity group distinct from an ethnic group is that the former is based upon voluntary participation of individuals who are connected by desire, whereas in ethnic groups, individuals are bound to the group out of obligation based upon family ties, “religion, place of origin, shared history,” etc. This is a crucial point to make, and it seems Cooley is making an important contribution to the field by using the concept of “affinity” group to ground his empirical investigations.

This line of reasoning is informed, in part, by semiotics, where the starting point of the analysis is Saussure’s claim that the connection between signifier and signified is not inherent, but rather, arbitrary. Indeed, the signified varies between cultures and places as well as across time. This leads me to mention one of my favorite parts of the book; namely, the ways in which Cooley makes good use of the semiology of Charles Sanders Pierce in an analysis of how to make sense of the relationship between musicking and surfing. The best chapter in my view is chapter 3, which is about music in surf movies. Here, Cooley discusses how music in surfing movies should be understood as a “dicent index sign,” where the images of surfing on film influence the music, which in turn comes to “stand in for” the surfing. But again, there’s no necessary or inherent relationship here. According to Cooley, “the power of music lies not in its ability to mimic other sounds or replicate the exact effect of a different experience, but in suggestion and in the associations we make in our minds and bodies. Pairing visual stimuli with music allows for some wonderful things to blossom in one’s mind and body” (71).  Indeed!

But the book is much more than a semiotic analysis of the relationship between music and surfing. Cooley also makes use of ethnography and tells a history of what he calls “new surfing” or surfing post-contact between Hawaiians and Westerners. This is another reason why this book is a valuable contribution to the field as well as making for a good read. Using a mode of analysis that combines history, ethnography and semiotics is not an easy feat, but Cooley does a good job of it. The book has seven chapters (not including the introduction), with the first two being a history of “new” surfing, tracing how surfing was used to promote the tourism industry in Hawaii in the early 20^th century, which in turn led to the exportation of surfing to California and beyond. People interested in music, but who don’t know the history of surfing will find these chapters very stimulating. The book then moves to an analysis of the rise of “surf music,” like the Beach Boys, where the author has an interesting analysis of how many famous surfers hated the Beach Boys, although some, like Bruce Brown, have since changed their mind. The next section of the book is on music in surfing movies (the best part of the book) and then Cooley moves into an ethnography, where he writes about his research on festivals that feature surf music. The final sections are a comparison between professional surfers and “soul” surfers who write and perform music. This is also an interesting section as Cooley offers his take on the age-old question of whether or not surfing is a sport, as like football or baseball, or if surfing should be considered a different kind of activity. The last chapter is about why surfers need music, and here Cooley argues that in spite of differences among and between surfer affinity groups, “there is the participatory potential in musicking that provides expressive and community-building possibilities that surfers find significant. With both music and surfing, many of my research subjects emphasized participation and experience (as opposed to achievement)” (173).

The only issue I have with the book is not a short-coming of the work. On the contrary, it’s an indication of why Surfing about Music is a good and significant book in the field. There are some very thought-provoking sections in the text where Cooley discusses surfing as a transgression of norms, and as a counter-hegemonic practice, especially when it comes to the issue of the work-ethic and everyday life. I wanted to read even more about this aspect and how it makes its way into the music. Perhaps I’m imposing my own point of view here, but what makes surfing such an attractive and desirable phenomenon has to do with fantasy, which in my view is about the desire to escape the drudgery of everyday life and experience the thrill and the freedom of surfing. This, it seems to me, is why the images of surfing (including those in the music) are so exciting and interesting from an academic point of view. This is why I enjoyed chapter 3 of Cooley’s book the most.

Overall, this book will have a significant impact on the field, and Cooley’s command over the prose makes for an enjoyable read.

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to trans-disciplinary music scholarship. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions and feedback from scholars working on music from all disciplines.

The following is a tiny offering of the kind of rich, rewarding work that interdisciplinary thinking can bring to musicology. In following my interests in print culture and music, I am continually humbled by the knowledge of material culture studies, iconography, and intellectual history needed to analyze a single page of sound culture. The study of print and books requires the forging of connections between disciplines to learn about craftsmanship, visual culture, and the sensorial experience of reading. No new digital technologies to learn: just the old-fashioned technology of conversation and attention to all the senses that a deep engagement with a book deserves. More and more, I am finding that music making cannot be separated from its print manifestations.

In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, I’ll begin with a poem inspired by music and print. 

How should I praise thee, Lord! how should my rymes

Gladly engrave thy love in steel, 
If what my soul doth feel sometimes, 
My soul might ever feel!

[…]

Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best:

Stretch or contract me, thy poore debter:

This is but tuning of my breast,

To make the musick better.

“The Temper,” George Herbert (1633)

The importance of print cut deep into the production of material culture. We find its mark even in poetry about music. For instance, George Herbert’s poem “The Temper,” is about the musical tuning and temperament of heartstrings (to “make the musick better”). But the poem also imagines the heart as an annealed (tempered) metal plate that can be printed continuously. Though this poem has no actual music, it draws clear connections between music, words, print, and books.

The first thing I notice when studying a book of song is that it is a material object, composed of many discrete parts, organized and compiled at different stages by several people. In other words, the book is an interdisciplinary project. A single page can reveal hours of careful planning and coordination of labor and skill. This is especially true of early modern print books of music, which often open with lavish frontispieces that visually announce the content of the book. More than just the music’s wrapping paper, frontispieces tell us a great deal about the concepts that governed the organization of the book. Take for instance the line engraving that opens Henry Playford’s Second Book of Sacred Hymns and Dialogues, Harmonia Sacra (London: 1693).

Though pretty, it is tempting to pass over this line engraving as an ornamented restatement of the title page. Stock angels playing music in a collection of sacred music: how obvious!

But this is a period in which emblems and visual art could express ideas better than words.  More than just a “hook” to persuade me to press on, the engraving shows everything the book stood for, and, in this case, invites me to contemplate what sacred music is. If I can read the engraving, then I can understand how to approach making the music. 

Line engraving was a serious investment of time and effort that was entirely separate from typecasting, which required another printing press. Simon Gribelin, a favorite engraver of Prince William III of Orange, Queen Mary, and Queen Anne, engraved this frontispiece. Line engraving is a specialized type of intaglio printmaking. Under a magnifying glass and with a variety of tools, the engraver cuts the print’s design into a metal plate (usually copper); these lines are then filled with ink. A piece of paper is laid on top of the metal plate and pressed down by a metal roller or a felt press to absorb the ink and emboss the paper—exactly the inverse of a relief print. Paper quality is an important factor to ensure proper absorbency and to preserve the detail of the engraving. Even with ideal paper, it can take a week for oil-based ink to dry from a line-engraved print. Done in many steps of proofing, reproofing, mirroring, correcting, ink-laying and wiping of each print, line-engraving was a laborious, detailed project deserving of its categorization as fine art.  It behooves me then to examine it with care, since it appears before any music.

Upon closer inspection, the engraving tells me two important things about the book: the first is that it merges sacred worship with secular themes. The second is that it places the book in a broad history of Neo-Platonic ideas about music. 

Merging Sacred Song with Erotica

Above an empty landscape, three cherubs (or archangels) play their instruments on clouds. Higher still, two putti, or secular angels, brandish a banner bearing the anthology’s title. Overseeing all this is the tetragrammaton: the unspoken name of God. The placement of secular putti next to sacred cherubs is significant. These putti are like other putti that populate secular visual art of the period festooning deities with garlands of flowers or banners of fabric. The connection to profane love becomes obvious placed near secular representations of putti waving banners, such as the frontispiece to the Englishing of Ovid’s love letters, the Heroides (London: 1680), or the mid-seventeenth century “Triumph of Galatea” from the circle of Jacques Stella. 

Against these and other images of embodied and frustrated love, Gribelin’s putti suggest secular themes of sensuality and desire. This opens an avenue to discuss sexuality as an integral component of early modern devotion. Indeed, as the songs show in their representations of madness, their fetishism of bodily fluids, and even, at times, indulgence in incestuous desire, the pious songbook also promises sexual and exploitative intrigue. But why stop there?

Neo-Platonic Ideas About Music

While the frontispiece can be read allegorically, it can also reveal an entire mentality of Neo-Platonic idealism about music. Specifically, it resembles Robert Fludd’s pyramids from his History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm (1617, 1623).

With the dazzling pyramid at the top of the image symbolizing the evaporation of material matter and the heavy pyramid weighed down with earthly elements, Gribelin similarly composes his engraving with the heavy material world at the bottom (landscape), followed by celestial music, and finally the realm of wordless immateriality. At the center of Neo-Platonism, Fludd’s treatises were full of emblems that superseded his prosaic philosophy. Important, too, is that his pyramid is directly related to his cosmic monochords, an obsession of his much discussed in the historiography of hermetic philosophy. 

As shown in these prints, music elevated you to spiritual transcendence. It is striking, then, that the musical angels on the frontispiece play three kinds of string instruments to bridge the gap between heaven and earth.  

In sum, the frontispiece tells us a great deal about what I’m getting into with this songbook: a book of music for worship, it is also a piece of entertainment as well as a complex philosophical statement. This is all before we even get to the music, yet it is entirely relevant to the study of the songbook. 

We can still do something with the worn knowledge of other disciplines. If we forget, in our fever for new computational methods, that the music is situated in a material object, if we skip over the frontispiece and the history of its production looking only at the notated music in isolation, we miss the care and creative energy that generated the book itself. Moreover, we risk closing ourselves off to sounds emanating from poetry, images, and the books that contain them. And though I’ve been somewhat detailed about the frontispiece, there are pages of song just beyond it. That is to say, I haven’t even scratched the surface. 

Dave DeMotta is a New York-based pianist, scholar, and adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and M.M. and B.M. degrees in jazz performance from William Paterson University. I spoke with Dr. DeMotta on the topic of his recent dissertation, “The Contributions of Earl ‘Bud’ Powell to the Modern Jazz Style.”

Dean Reynolds: What led you to a dissertation on the music of Bud Powell?

Dave DeMotta: A goal for me has been to find a way for my study of jazz piano and my academic research to complement or enhance one another. I searched for a topic that would help me to advance my concept and raise my level as a musician but also would allow me to make some contributions to the scholarship and pedagogy of jazz. I considered writing about other pianists, including Wynton Kelly, Red Garland, and Ahmad Jamal. I also thought about writing about the repertoire, such as the compositions of Benny Golson or Horace Silver. I settled on Powell because I found his music to be so profoundly rich in detail, and I felt that there was so much yet to learn from it. I also began to hear more and more connections between things that Powell did in the late 1940s and early 1950s and things that other innovators did 10 or 20 years later. I became convinced that analyzing Bud Powell’s music could lay some groundwork for future studies of jazz piano, my own and hopefully those of other scholars as well.

DR: Could you give us a brief gloss on your analysis of Powell’s music? What do you argue are his signal contributions to modern jazz style?

DD: My analysis mainly deals with the relationship between pitch and rhythm. I argue that in his melodic improvisations and left-hand comping, Powell engages harmony and harmonic rhythm to express the core aesthetics of modern jazz rhythm. Another significant contribution of Powell’s that was a recurring theme in the dissertation involves the ways that he was able to create dissonances against the harmonic rhythm in his right-hand lines and between his hands. His improvised melodic lines were lyrical and inventive, but also they often articulated a kind of voice leading that’s idiomatic to modern jazz.

DR: You had extensive conversations with many professional musicians, asking them general questions about Powell’s music and discussing specific performances. Why were these collaborations so important to your own theorizing about Powell’s music?

DD: I had a good network of knowledgeable players of every instrument with whom I could discuss this music. I reached out to them and told them what I was trying to do with this project, but I tried just to let them say what they wanted to say about Powell’s music. I was very happy when they came to certain points that I had also come to through my own analysis.

They know that Bud Powell was a great improviser and melodically fresh and the harmony was a special kind of harmony. This is important, but I think they were especially concerned with the way that the general time feel of jazz changed in the bebop period and how Bud Powell was one of the first people to find a way to give the piano a real voice in that new context. So they actually talked quite a bit in terms of rhythm, and I wanted to write about rhythm in the way that musicians think about rhythm and talk about rhythm. If I hadn’t been in touch with musicians, there would be less rhythm in the dissertation.

DR: How did your experiences as a working jazz musician and teacher inform your analysis?

DD: I play a few gigs per week as a freelancer and do many private jam sessions. By practicing and playing regularly, I’ve internalized a good deal of repertoire and vocabulary associated with bebop, which allowed me to recognize things in recordings more quickly. I also started to hear the rhythms of bebop differently after I transcribed and played something like “The Fruit” or “Parisian Thoroughfare” or “Hallucinations.” Or Powell’s solo on “Wail.” I worked that “Wail” solo up so I could play it as fast as he does right along with the recording. He’s playing beat four so strongly in his left hand, and I started to hear beat four differently, you know, hooking up with the drums on beat four, ending phrases on beat four, starting phrases on beat four.

You might find that there are times when there’s something else going on that’s more important than rhythm—the voice leading in “I’ll Keep Loving You,” for example. And his lines are also so lyrical; in some cases they could be like the melody of a beautiful ballad. When I play a Bud Powell solo that’s very, very fast slowly, I hear how melodic it really is. But if the motivation is to understand and teach students how the music works at its core, it’s very useful to think of rhythm as the most important parameter. I think that rhythm is really important to his distinctive sound.

DR: Tied to your discussion of rhythm is some very sophisticated analysis of voice leading in Powell’s music. Can you elaborate a bit more on this, and on your approach to building a theory of his music in general?

DD: Generally, I would rather start with music and then try to see which theories best illuminate what’s going—or combine theories or make up a theory—than start with a theory that has sort of been designed for something else. With that being said, there’s no way that I would have been able to develop the voice leading analysis in the dissertation without two doctoral seminars in Schenkerian analysis. I had been working on my own voice leading and I had ways of thinking about voice leading beforehand, but I took Schenkerian analysis and I started to really see these things. My theorizing started to come together, even if I had to change the Schenkerian theory to match the cyclic, rhythmic nature of bebop.

DR: In your first chapter, you highlight different interpretations of a very specific chord in “Un Poco Loco” made by three of your informants. Why do you foreground these?

DD: There’s an avant-garde side to Powell that we don’t hear about as much, and the A section of that tune is one of those moments. The other reason was that these three really experienced, senior-level, professional pianists who teach at conservatories all had a slightly different way of explaining that chord, and they all made sense. And I didn’t ask them about this; they all independently brought up that moment.

DR: You transcribed all or a large portion of over 25 different recordings. Could you talk about your transcription methodology? What are some of the particular challenges that you faced when transcribing?

DD: I have been transcribing jazz solos at the piano for years. Digital technology has made this much easier than it was with tapes and CDs. I used the program Transcribe! to slow recordings down and isolate tough chords and passages, yet for all that there are undoubtedly still some errors. Some of the transcriptions were very difficult for me, especially harmonically dissonant things like “Glass Enclosure,” but I made multiple revised drafts and passed them out to other pianists to play through, including many of the participants in the dissertation. Tardo Hammer was an especially great resource because he knows Bud’s music so well and has transcribed much of it himself.

DR: Early in the dissertation, you raise questions about Powell’s compositions. We know Powell as a master of bebop improvisation, but often think of other beboppers, especially Monk but also Dizzy, as the preeminent composers of that era.

DD: There are probably a few reasons for that. A colleague of mine once remarked that a Powell tune like “Oblivion,” for example, just doesn’t lay on the alto as well as bebop classics like “Woody ’n’ You” do. And something like “The Glass Enclosure” is so far away from the standard performance practice. Some of them are just tricky, like the “The Fruit.” They’re just hard to play. On the other hand, “Brilliant Corners” is hard to play, too.

But after doing this work I started to hear Powell’s compositions everywhere, you know, in Sonny Clark or Tommy Flanagan or Hank Jones. These people are all individuals and they have their own ways of playing, but I heard pieces of these compositions in the improvising of many musicians.

DR: That’s really interesting. When telling jazz history, there’s often a tendency to privilege compositions that have become standards or are recognized as visionary or ahead of their time; much less often do we value compositions largely to the extent that they inform the concepts of other musicians.

DD: Mark Soskin told me that they’re like études for him. It’s really interesting, because Mark does not sound like Bud Powell, but I can imagine him using them as études, as resources.

I also hear Bud in horn players that came later. Sonny Rollins is really interesting; you can hear on those early albums that he sounds just like himself, but at the same time, certain ways that he uses modal mixture and does other things remind me of Bud. I was called for a gig once and one of the tunes was the Tadd Dameron tune “On a Misty Night,” a medium tempo tune in E-flat on Mating Call. While preparing, I noticed that Coltrane’s double-time playing using the “sheets of sound” really reminds me of Bud playing “Strictly Confidential” in the same key. I wish I could go back in time and ask him if he listened closely to that record.

DR: I loved David Berkman’s comment to you about Bud’s legacy: “He’s not the gospel, he’s a revolutionary!” Can you explain what you think he meant by that?

DD: I’m so glad that you brought this up! I think David was speaking to me as an older pianist, you know, mentoring me. Powell’s music is very compelling and complex. It’s satisfying on so many levels and has a kind of coherence that’s really attractive as a teacher and student, but I think David was criticizing the potential for jazz students to become so fixated on one or another period of the history, especially the bebop period, that they become sort of closed-minded to later developments and to some of the best musicians on the scene right now. For me, of course I love Bud Powell, but I also listen a great deal to many players who came along before and after him.

DR: Did you show your dissertation to any of your informants?

DD: I sent it to all of them. I went to see Tardo at Smalls a couple of weeks ago, and he saw me on his break and said, “I read it! The first thing I did was look up my name.” And then he sat down and played “Un Poco Loco,” and he played the crap out of it.

This interview was condensed and edited for length and clarity.

James Arkatov was born in 1920 in Odessa, Russia and raised in San Francisco, where his father, Alexander Arkatov, owned a photography salon.  In 1938, he was invited by Fritz Feiner to join the Pittsburgh Symphony.  Later, he joined the San Francisco Symphony with Pierre Monteux, and went on to be principal cellist of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra under Fabien Sevitzky.  Arkatov returned to California in 1946 as a studio musician and was later appointed principal cellist of the NBC Symphony Orchestra.  In 1956, he married Salome Ramras Arkatov. 

Photo: Pablo Casals with James Arkatov, 1956

In 1968, he founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) and was its first principal cellist.  According to LACO: "The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1968 as an artistic outlet for the recording industry’s most gifted musicians. The Orchestra’s artistic founder, cellist James Arkatov, envisioned an ensemble that would allow these conservatory-trained players to balance studio work and teaching with pure artistic collaboration at the highest level."

Arkatov began photographing musicians when he was with the Pittsburgh Symphony.  In 1990, he published his first book, Masters of Music: Great Artists at Work.  In 1998, he published his second book, Artists: The Creative Personality.

UCLA Library Special Collections holds the James Arkatov Photograph Collection.  The collection consists of nearly 3000 photographs of musicians and fine artists taken by Arkatov.  The photographs are in the process of being digitized and almost 800 of these images are now available online via the UCLA Digital Library.  You can also search the collection finding aid on the Online Archive of California (OAC). 

Eartha Kitt, 1995 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Ravi Shankar, 1997 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Herb Albert, 1996 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Carlos Montoya, 1985 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Claudia Acuña, 2002 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Gerald Wilson, 1996 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Isaac Stern, 1958 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Isaac Stern, 1986 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Kenny Burrell, 1997 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Does anyone else recognize that t-shirt?  It's from the Society of Ethnomusicology (SEM) 40th Annual Conference in 1995, held in Los Angeles and hosted by UCLA.  Steve Loza was local arrangments chair and A.J. Racy designed that t-shirt. 

Patrice Rushen, 1996 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Sherman Ferguson, 1996 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Tony Bennett, 1998 - James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

The collection also includes "unidentified" performers, in this case, "Unidentifed Female Musician," so if you can help Library Special Collections identify musicians, please do so. 

And because Arkatov was a musician, I had to include some of his work.

In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning by Frank Sinatra (Arkatov on cello) ℗ 1998 Capitol Records, LLC.

Copyright restrictions for the James Arkatov Photograph Collection:  Property rights to the physical object belong to the UCLA Library, Performing Arts Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

by Sabine Feisst and Denise Von Glahn

In fall 2012 Indiana University Press launched the book series Music, Nature, Place. The series is a forum for multidisciplinary scholarship that focuses upon the intersections of music, nature, and place. It includes monographs and edited volumes that employ a wide array of methodologies and addresses a broad range of topics, concerns, and traditions. It traverses boundaries between classical, popular, and folk musics and between musicology and other disciplines. Music, Nature, Place welcomes studies that treat urban and rural issues and conditions, and crossovers between science and the humanities. It explores different modes of thought that are enabled by music. Books in the series vary in scope, and the volumes will contain a bibliography, music examples, photographs, graphics, companion websites and links that enhance the treatment and reach of the work. Indiana University Press has recruited the two of us as editors, and we are supported by an Editorial Advisory Board, including Aaron Allen, Kevin Dawe, Tracey Laird, Jennifer Post, and Jeff Todd Titon who will use their wide-ranging expertise and experience to help in the evaluation of proposals. 

Since the launch of the book series, the first volume has appeared: Denise Von Glahn’s Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World, which showcases three generations of American women composers, from Amy Beach to Emily Doolittle, exploring nature through music. Further volumes include an English adaptation and expansion of musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson’s authoritative study of Icelandic composer Jón Leifs whose works are thoroughly inspired by Icelandic folksong, landscapes and other natural phenomena (Reykjavík 2009). Anthropologist Mark Pedelty is preparing a monograph on the role of activist musicians and musical movements in sustaining place. Focusing on musical activists based around the Salish Sea of the USA and Canada, Pedelty is examining environmentalist musicians on both sides of the border, including Dana Lyons, of Bellingham, Washington and the Raging Grannies of Victoria, British Columbia. His perspective from outside the confines of more traditional music scholarship testifies to the spirit of interdisciplinarity that is the essence of this series. We have received almost twenty proposals for monographs and edited volumes and projects in various stages of completion. They focus on music in Brazil, Canada, Cascadia, Iceland, Mongolia, and North America. They address climate change, environmentalism, ecofeminism, bioacoustics, and animal studies. They also include studies on experimental musical traditions, performance ecology and musicians including Sharon Abreu, Henry Brant, Chalifour, Claude Debussy, Michael Hurwicz, Jón Leifs, and Dana Lyons. 

We are pleased to see such a vivid response to Music, Nature, Place. This is undoubtedly evidence of the rapidly growing interest in ecomusicology. As the field continues to develop through individual efforts, scholarly conferences, interdisciplinary symposia, workshops, round tables, documentary films, multimedia performances, community initiatives, and university courses, it is our goal that the series will respond and reflect the central position music plays in grounding us within our place, wherever that may be. The editors invite interested scholars to contact them with their ideas for projects.

This article originally appeared in Vol. 2 No. 2 of the Ecomusicology Newsletter (October 2013)

Eve Sedgwick ushered in new era of understanding in gay and lesbian studies in 1990 with the publication Epistemology of the Closet, but a major shortcoming of the book is that its treatment of gender and sexuality stems from a distinctly Western perspective. The field of ethnomusicology helped to pluralize our understanding of culture and break down geo-musical barriers, but until recently, has remained relatively reticent about (homo)sexuality and (trans)gender. Addressing this disparity has been the focus of my dissertation research, a process that has led to me wonder how one might engage these topics with undergraduates. Thanks to the support of the UCLA Collegium of University Teaching Fellows (CUTF) program, I will be able to investigate that very question.

During spring quarter, I’ll be embarking on this intellectual journey with a group of bright undergraduate students. Using ethnomusicological material as a point of entry, together we will investigate some of the multivalent constructions of gender and sexuality, raising questions such as: How are gender and sexuality mobilized in culture? How does music reaffirm, construct and/or contest different cultural conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race? What are some of the moral and political implications of queer artistic representation and free speech? What are some of the concerns LGBTQ ethnomusicologists raise about conducting research in the field? Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, this class will be an exploration of the diverse ways in which artists and scholars from around the world perform gender and sexuality.

“Ethnomusicology of the Closet” is designed not only to stimulate discourse on issues of gender and sexuality within the field of ethnomusicology, but also to promote opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between UCLA students and faculty. I have the course cross-listed in the departments of Ethnomusicology and Gender Studies, and secured the participation of musicians and scholars from several departments through a series of lecture-demonstrations. The lineup includes presentations from local artists such as Khmer dancer Prumsodun Ok, Bharatanatyam dancer and transgender activist Maya Jafer, musician Kevin Stea, members of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, and UCLA’s very own Sex Squad. We will also discuss issues of ethnographic representation with artists and scholars whose work engages issues of gender and performance, including UCLA alum Rafa Esparza, and current graduate students working in the queer field. We will even hear from experts in public diplomacy, including the Former Consul General at the US Consulate General in Japan, about the implications of being LGBTQ in the field.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary bent of the class, our readings and discussions will include perspectives from the fields of gender studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, performance studies, and film studies. The ethnography of music, gender and sexuality is a developing area of study. Investigating some of the latest trends in scholarship, we will look at recently released ethnomusicological writings by Anna Morcom (2013), Jessica N. Pabón and Shanté Paradigm Smalls (2014), and take a sneak peak at field notes and recordings in the forthcoming publication Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology. We will read foundational texts by Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Douglas Crimp; ethnographic works by Lila Abu-Lughod, Gayatri Reddy, and Huseyin Tapinc; and review musical and artistic works ranging from Mumbai’s The Dancing Queens and Shanghai’s Jin Xing, to Britney Spears.This work will culminate in students developing an ethnographic research project of their own. This will allow the students to to identify key theories of ethnographic engagement, analyze them in critical discussion and writing, and successfully employ them on their own in the field.

In short, we have no shortage of opportunities for learning. Since this course is community effort, I also wish to invite students and faculty from the UCLA community and elsewhere to participate in lively online discussion, engage in the course materials and events made for the public. As a new and hopefully burgeoning inter-discipline, I’m eager to include not only the UCLA community, but the vast community of scholars interested in these issues in the US and abroad as I develop this course. Those interested can submit inquiries and/or comments to the course materials using the “Ask” and “Submit” tabs on the course webpage.

If you are interested in applying to teach in (or just learn more about) the CUTF program, visit the program website for details. Applications for CUTF’s 2015-16 program are due on March 13.

“Ethnomusicology of the Closet”is based on the dissertation and film project of the same name by Jeff Roy, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Ethnomusicology. Jeff’s Ph.D. research incorporates methodologies in documentary filmmaking and queer theory in an investigation of the ways music and dance produce notions of pechān (knowledge of self, or ‘identity’) in India’s hijra (male-to-female transgender) communities. 

From time to time, Sounding Board will bring interviews with former editors and staffers of Ethnomusicology Review (née Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology). We're calling this series "Rookie Cards" and our first installment comes from Michael Frishkopf, PhD, Professor of Music, Director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology, and folkwaysAlive! Research Fellow at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research focuses on the music and sounds of Islam, the Arab world, and West Africa, as well as music and global human development through participatory action research. He has published an edited collection, Music and Media in the Arab World, produced the album Kinka: Traditional Songs from Avenorpedo, and co-produced Giving Voice to Hope: Music of Liberian Refugees. His current projects include music, sound, and architecture in the Muslim world, and deploying musical dance dramas for public health in northern Ghana. He co-edited Volume 6 (1991) of the Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology.

What prompted you to get involved with the Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology? Did you have any prior experience with academic writing and editing?

I first learned about PRE in 1987 or so from Marina Roseman, one of my professors at Tufts University, where I completed an MA in Ethnomusicology before moving to UCLA in 1989. I was impressed that UCLA had established a prestigious graduate student journal, of evident high reputation across the discipline, from coast to coast. When I arrived in Los Angeles I was already primed to participate, and I was very pleased to have the opportunity to do so with issue #6, published in 1991.

What did you hope to accomplish with this issue? Were there any contemporary debates within the field that you particularly hoped to address?

The issue wasn’t deliberately thematic—we simply took over the reins, with the intent to publish the best research we could find, though implicitly I’m sure we were guided by that era’s ethnomusicological zeitgeist. However I think we succeeded to publish several unique, groundbreaking, and durable contributions, corresponding to contemporary issues or even anticipating them, including Wanda Bryant’s insightful study of musical change in Turkish music, a highly contemporary analysis of protest music at Tiananmen Square by eyewitness Valerie Samson, and probably the very first study of music-dance communications on the Internet, in its pre-World Wide Web days, by Sam Parnes, anticipating a huge wave of internet research and scholarly communication in the virtual era that was shortly to follow.

I do recall feeling that Sam’s survey was crucially important; even if it represented a mere moment in time, that moment was momentous. In my introduction to Sam’s article I think I sensed the gathering confluence of technology, society, and music in enabling virtual music communities, even if I couldn’t appreciate the full extent of its socio-musical consequences (remember that at this time most people outside of science and technology didn’t use email at all!). I wrote:

“Over the last twenty years or so, wide-area electronic computer communications networks have become increasingly accessible, primarily within universities and high-technology industry around the world. Such networks, consisting of computers interconnected by telecommunications lines and switching equipment, are designed to facilitate rapid exchange of data and the sharing of computer services. They have consequently wrought certain transformations in social communication. Perhaps the most prominent social effect of the new technology is electronic mail, a facility which delivers electronic messages from a user on one computer (or “host”) to the electronic “mailbox” of any other user at any other host in the network.

Electronic mail is distinctive for its speed (though not all networks offer immediate message delivery), for its compatibility with other computer software (electronic messages can be generated, sorted, searched, filed, duplicated, edited, and redistributed using the computer), and for its multi-addressing capability. This last feature is a critical advantage: a message can be delivered to any number of users at once, “broadcast,” as it were, to a select (or self-selecting) group(…)Thus, perhaps for the first time in history, rapid informal discussion may take place within an abstract social group defined only by mutual interests, and unconstrained by spatial proximity(… )As network access continues to expand, such a mode of communication may be expected to have increasingly revolutionary consequences, both for scholarly research and for society at large.

One can do more than hope for positive consequences. Scholars concerned to ensure that electronic mail becomes a constructive tool for research can do much to shape its future through critical examination and participation (particularly in the humanities, where the computer-network flow of information is still relatively a trickle). Those who participate also stand to benefit from the practical advantages of electronic scholarly discourse. Finally, the scholarly study of electronic mail as a communicative medium will become increasingly important to all who take the study of human communications seriously. Ethnomusicologists will likely find themselves in all three camps.”

The World Wide Web came online just a year later, in 1992, and the rest is history!

How were pieces for the journal issue solicited? Did you get as many submissions as you had hoped for?

As I recall, we distributed a call through email and posters. We received many more fine submissions than we could fit in an issue, some of them from friends and colleagues. So the anonymous peer review process proved crucial to curating with diplomatic grace.

Since you edited this issue and completed your PhD in Ethnomusicology, you have contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals and books, edited the book Music and Media in the Arab World, and served on the board at the journal Ethnomusicology among other endeavors in the print world. Did your work at the Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology prepare you for these undertakings? How? What else did you take away from the experience?

I look back on this extra-curricular experience as formative, teaching me so much about the academic process—writing, reviewing, curating, editing, copyediting, formatting, page designing, publishing—providing both technical and social skills relevant to our discipline, and enriching my graduate student life by offering new modes of interacting with peers and professors outside the classroom, especially my co-editors.  All ethnomusicology students should enjoy such an opportunity during the course of their studies – it is excellent career training for our multiple roles as researcher, editor, teacher, and supervisor.

Are there any unexpected insights you've gained about the field since editing this journal volume? How has your perspective changed?

Of course so much has changed since then, for me personally, and in the field at large. All writing soon comes to appear as if written by someone else, and the same goes—to a lesser extent — for editorial and curatorial tasks. Certainly I might have performed them differently, were I to take this role on again, knowing what I know now. But the issue reflected its time, our time, as was necessarily the case. It’s hard to gauge “progress” in the humanities and social sciences—when progress happens or at what rate, or even whether such thing is possible at all. I think to a great extent perspectives simply shift, though undoubtedly along with a slow accumulation of knowledge, ethical acumen, and critical insight. But every document can be critically read by the future, in order to contribute to a shifting scholarly context. Perhaps the biggest change ushered in by the 90s was a profusion of theory from outside our discipline.  But in the end, I feel that it is ethnographic richness—the “data”—whose value is potentially most durable, even as theoretical perspectives continue to change and diversify. My perspective on publication itself has changed too. These days, anything can be put out on the web, instantaneously, and often is. That’s good.  I’m a huge advocate of wikis, blogs, YouTube, SoundCloud, and the like. But the traditional processes of scholarly publication—judicious selecting, reviewing, editing, disseminating, and preserving—help to realize the ethnographic potential of our research most fully.

Any other anecdotes you want to share about editing the journal volume or your experiences during that time are more than welcome.

We were computerized, of course, but as I recall that in those days a large hard drive could hold only around 80 megabytes, and floppy disks only held less than a megabyte. The largest article (Valerie’s, I think) was about 180 KB. I can’t recall how we handled figures, but high-res scans were out of the question—as I recall we had to print and physically paste up the pages. Technology has rendered many such tasks easier, though critical thinking and writing remain as challenging as they’ve always been!

Sam Posner (PKA Sammy Bananas) is a producer and DJ living in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to his celebrated bootlegs, remixes, and original dance music for Fool's Gold Records, he founded and organizes DJs for Climate Action, an initiative dedicated to helping traveling musicians offset their carbon emissions and raise awareness about climate change.

To me, the Grammy awards have never been as interesting as the Grammy show. As a working musician and producer, I've always watched the broadcast as a way to take the temperature of mainstream culture and popular music in America. Over the past fifteen years, the Recording Industry has crumbled and the show's producers have turned and tacked in an effort to best represent the shifting landscape. The Grammys have always favored established acts and “classy” artists, but this year's show entirely abandoned the idea of a democratic approach, and focused instead on crafting a distinct narrative.

The narrative of the 57th Awards was two-pronged, telling intertwining stories that "Live Music Still Matters" and "Music Has Transformative Power."  AC/DC kicked off the whopping 23 live performances, many teaming seasoned veterans with relative newcomers in a tried and true Grammy practice. With record sales dwindling, concert tickets are the linchpin in many artist's careers—and some labels too, by way of increasingly common “360 contracts”—a growth area in the industry that can’t (yet) be replicated digitally. “Go see a show,” the Grammys tells it’s viewers, “because we know you’re streaming the album.”

At many points the live acts seemed hand selected to remind us of the powerful force music plays in our lives. Beyonce was tapped to perform a moving spiritual, Katy Perry did the somber tale of her marriage's dissolution, Usher paid tribute Stevie Wonder and then surprised the audience with Stevie guesting on harmonica. These moments are designed to remind us that music binds us together, makes us feel, and get fired up more than any other art form. The show played to the Grammys’ old-school strengths: heartfelt ballads and white British soul singers rather than dance music and Hip-Hop.  

In keeping with this lack of balance, the rap and electronic music awards were excluded from the broadcast entirely. With Gaga and Perry delivering introspective performances, the still-exploding dance music scene was represented solely by a Madonna extravaganza that looked and sounded 20 years old, save for the track's more modern sounding EDM "drop."  It’s a shocking departure from last year, when Daft Punk, the forefathers of contemporary electronic music, cleaned up... until you remember that they won for a throwback 70s soft-rock, proto-disco album.

For the first time in 25 years, rap's top award was not aired live. Perhaps the show’s producers dropped it following Macklemore's controversial win over Kendrick Lamar last year—a moment worsened when, only minutes after the show, the awkward winner tweeted a personal text to Kendrick writing “It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you.” It ended up being a prudent move, as Eminem took home the rap album prize this year… At least he snubbed Iggy Azalea. There’s a whole other editorial—if not a book—to be written on the Grammys and Race.

With Pharrell so "Happy" and Kanye going full emo/country in his 2 appearances, the only actual rapping at the Grammys was in the finale: Common's socially-charged, Selma-inspired invocation of the ongoing "Black Lives Matter" movement. The political nature of his performance was fully in keeping with the carefully sculpted narrative: “We only want rap that’s uplifting and transformative.” It was moving and powerful (except in the way it tacitly implies that all the other music in this genre is purely violent and misogynistic.)

Viewed through a lens that takes into account the full spectrum of popular music, the show is suspicious and problematic.  But narrowing to the Recording Academy’s wheelhouse, the Grammy producers seem the savviest they've been in years. To be clear: I enjoyed the broadcast! However, what they showed us only represents about 25% of what is actually relevant and popular in music right now. Dance and rap dominate the charts, airwaves, and internets even if their primary beneficiaries are festival promoters, Vegas, and YouTube, not record labels and the established Recording Industry.

This brings me to the most important point of all, and a trend that this broadcast’s narrative implies by omission. The Grammys can't represent Mainstream Musical Culture even if they tried because it is fast fracturing into distinct, barely overlapping feeds. Billboard may have been able to approximate the influence of some of these newer lanes by incorporating avenues like YouTube and Spotify streams into its metrics, but much more goes under the radar. Musical virality and memes create items of cultural relevance and influence, but “art” that is hardly around long enough to ever be awarded.

I'm a bit nostalgic for the days when the Grammys could be a wider panorama, but the Internet's overall democratization of music seems well worth this loss. The relevance of an industry-wide popularity contest holds less sway when large swaths of rap, electronic and indie music thrive entirely outside of the traditional industry.

The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop. By Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. Berkley: University of California Press, 2013. [ix, 254 p. ISBN 978-0-520-24391-0. Hardcover: $34.95]. 

Wail: The Life of Bud Powell. By Peter Pullman. Peter Pullman, LLC, 2012. [vii, 483 p. ISBN 978-0985141813. Paperback: $28]. 

Reviewed by Steve Beck / Rutgers University

Nearly fifty years after his untimely death at age forty-one, pianist-composer Bud Powell remains a foundational presence in jazz. Recently, Birdland celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of Powell’s birth with an all-star quintet. Two current publications explore Powell’s legacy as a musician and cultural figurehead. Collectively, these works also offer a fascinating example of contrasting approaches to jazz scholarship. 

Peter Pullman’s exhaustively researched if overlong Wail: The Life of Bud Powell began its life as an e-book. Known for his Grammy nominated work on the liner notes to Verve’s 1994 The Complete Bud Powell on Verve five CD box set, Pullman’s work seems the ideal guide to the pianist’s life and music. With Wail, he constructs a portrait of Powell that is simultaneously pathetic and sympathetic: the pianist experiences multiple hospitalizations, suffers under the dictatorial grip of Altevia “Buttercup” Edwards and the manipulation of Birdland proprietor (and one-time Powell custodian) Oscar Goodstein, and endures endless custody battles, seeking throughout his triumphs and tribulations to placate his addiction to alcohol.

Indeed, this portrait is known to most jazz musicians and historians as part of “the Powell legend.” To Pullman’s credit, he attempts with the greatest discernment to distinguish between that legend and fact. He provides interesting details about Powell’s pre-professional years, including his early tutelage under local pianist William F. Rawlins. He also interviews the right people, whether fellow musicians Jackie McLean and Walter Bishop, Jr. or patrons who witnessed Powell in a club playing at his peak or nadir. By extension, the author wisely relies on available historical records. Rather than simply reiterating the pianist’s condition as reported in the popular jazz press, Pullman goes directly to the source; crucially, he specifically uses numerous hospital reports when discussing Powell’s mental illness. The doctors and other medical professionals who examined Powell were often wholly unaware of his reputation as a pianist. As evidence of his medical condition as well as the perception of the medical world toward a black musician during the 1950s, these documents are particularly significant, and Pullman should be commended for exposing them to a wider public.

Given the breadth of detail and research in such a comprehensive work, it is unfortunate how thoroughly Pullman’s book disappoints. His pretentious though elucidated shortening of “African-American” and “European-American” to “afram” and “euram” (abbreviations peppered throughout the book) can perhaps be forgiven. By contrast, the extent to which the book reads as sophomoric is startling considering Pullman’s credentials. The following passage is sadly representative:

Powell was capable in this, his greatest period, of making adjustments, as a successful performer must do, depending on his environment. Those adjustments casual spectators, only seeing the seething pianist, bristling with ideas (and apocryphal blood spurting from his hand), doubted that Powell had in him. (127)

The origin of Wail as an e-book is pertinent to this criticism. On the web, Pullman’s book may read smoothly; however, the awkwardness of such writing on the printed page distracts from the extent of his research.

In addition, criticism of Pullman’s work need not be confined merely to style. In the process of dispelling the mythology of Powell, he reiterates myths about other musicians. Particularly distressing is his characterization of Oscar Peterson as a pianist with “formidable technical ability but no individual style” as well as his seemingly incessant reliance on a supposed (though unsubstantiated) rivalry between Powell and George Shearing. The latter type of mythologizing makes musicians cringe, especially those who recognize the wealth of Shearing’s contributions to jazz. Moreover, the focus of Pullman’s writing is often curious. Whereas he devotes significant space to Powell’s famous relationship with Francis Paudras, the author makes virtually no mention of the affect that Riche Powell’s tragic death had on his brother. He even chooses to relegate the passing of Powell’s mother to a footnote.

Additionally regrettable is Pullman’s method of citation. He does not provide a bibliography, and the end notes he does include are often sparse in their application. When Pullman does not provide citations, his scholarship becomes questionable. In a specific example found later in the work, he even invites the perception of character assassination. Discussing the supposed recollections of one Jens-Jørgen Thorsen upon hearing Powell in Copenhagen in 1962, Pullman relates that the European remembered “even Powell’s drinking was dignified, his consequent comportment making him ‘less black’” (317). Unconscionably, Pullman does not provide a source for this quote, and the reader is left to ponder whether Thorsen’s apparent reflection was intentionally racist.

Pullman’s work is not the product of a musical mind; unlike many non-musician authors of jazz texts, he admirably acknowledges as much. It is straight biography, and is not intended as an academic tome or musical analysis. By contrast, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.’s The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop reads like the scholarly text its title connotes. In this challenging and invigorating work, the professor of music and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania seeks to incorporate studies of historiography and cultural theory into his analysis of Powell. Ramsey’s enterprise involves the examination of Powell as a subject of discourse rather than straight biography, purporting to inform the reader about Powell through elucidating the mechanics of these discourses. He also includes detailed musical analysis of Powell’s playing, and the resulting study is exceedingly readable despite the potential for academic solemnity.

Ramsey’s work considers numerous discourses, among them the dynamics of race and gender, the critical emergence of jazz as “art music,” and the critical concept of the jazz audience against the backdrop of that emergence. For the author, an examination of Powell’s cultural milieu as well as scrutiny of scholarship pertaining to that world is as important to understanding the pianist’s life and work as data driven biography. Throughout the book, Ramsey makes trenchant insights regarding the ways in which these discourses influence our perception of Powell. Discussing “black genius,” Ramsey notes that

the very notion of Bud Powell’s genius designation unites several sometimes contradictory forces, including the act of projecting current ideas about genius onto the past, contemporaneous notions of African Americans’ abilities that circulated during bebop’s popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, and western culture’s historical beliefs about blacks’ intellectual and physical capacities. (88)

This work thus falls squarely within the category of New Jazz Studies, and it is to Ramsey’s credit that he is able to weave together such a mass of ideas while presenting an informative text.

Clearly, Ramsey’s book is about more than Bud Powell. Still, his exegesis calls into question whether or not it is also about something less. As a study of historiography and African-American studies, the work is perceptive, even brilliant. However, Powell as the focus of that study almost immediately recedes into the background. Ramsey never unambiguously addresses the question: why Bud Powell? His insights could equally apply to countless jazz musicians; indeed, he devotes important space to discussions of Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins within the context of these discourses. As a subject, Powell consequently transforms from a captivating figure to an arbitrary one, and the musical analysis found toward the end of the book correspondingly feels equally tacked on. Ramsey’s work is like a contrafact that completely eschews the original tune, becoming something of comparable complexity which nevertheless completely obscures its origins. In reading his book, we might be able to recognize some of the changes, but we can no longer hear the original melody. We certainly cannot remember the lyrics.

Despite these criticisms, both Pullman’s biography and Ramsey’s tome undoubtedly stand as required reading for anyone even remotely interested in Powell’s life and work. Their mere presence in a field sorely lacking in Powell scholarship warrants interest. Still, the reader should be cautioned to read each work as anything but holy writ. It is debatable whether or not Powell deserves better, but he certainly deserves more.

“Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends atEcho: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions and feedback from scholars working on music from all disciplines.”

I dedicated my Masters Thesis and Exhibit to “educators and advocates of music and museums” because I felt indebted to the museum and music educators who helped realize this project. My mentors at EMP museum and the University of Washington taught me what music education can look like, both inside and outside of the school, with or without musical instruments. And while I had many music teachers in my life (from private piano instructors, orchestra conductors, and band leaders in a Korean public middle school, to a nun in an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Kansas, a warm faculty in a New England prep school music department, and someone I consider my second mom, Arlene Cole, who was my piano teacher at Brown University), my connections with them were centered around music performance.

Performance venues, particularly concert halls, attract performers, lovers, and pundits. But the kinds of performances and spectacles that orchestras offer don’t seem to be competing so well with other options in the arts and cultural entertainment category: films, amusement parks, plain old National Parks (which I love), and aquariums, zoos, and museums. Suffice to say that some symphonies have been facing financial liquidation, while other bold and more mischievous ones began to commandeer fresh attitudes and new performance spaces. So, my idea was to invigorate concerts taking the cue from museums.

It turns out this idea was not entirely original, as I learned from a 2007 NY Times article by Lawrence Kramer titled “Concert Hall? How about Music Museum?”. In it, he proposes that the classical music world embrace the success of 21^st century museums. According to Kramer, museums make the visitors’ experience active and personal, while concert halls fail to do so. Museums offer a place of reflection and renewal, while the classical concert model asks for the listener’s submission. Based on these observations, Kramer suggests that symphony halls learn from enterprising art museums, which have had much success in presenting new and old art in convivial, liberal, and stimulating ways. The modern concert-museum is or should be a space of liberty and self-invention. My opinions diverge a bit from Kramer’s in regard to the types of museums he suggests that concert halls take after. Let’s face it: museums can be boring too. Some can expand our perspectives of the world, and others can be mediocre or uninviting. And while I admire the fine arts and contemporary museums that Kramer mentions in the article, I found that many children’s museums, science museums, and county art museums are better at communicating with and responding to their visitors.

My argument was simple: If both museum professionals and music educators argue that increased access and social relevance can be achieved by applying a culturally responsive and community-based framework, why shouldn’t concert halls, or symphonic institutions, also try to experiment with new programs and methods with which to engage with their audience?

Seattle Symphony was searching for a way to appeal to the local black community. I gave a pitch to their director of education about introducing an exhibit that highlights and celebrates the achievements of under-acknowledged African-American classical musicians. Once the Seattle Symphony got involved, I began the process of soliciting resources and interviewees for the exhibit. After numerous emails, personal meetings, and eight-months’ worth of collaborative and creative work, I was able to harness a small fund from the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, as well as participation and accreditation from local nonprofit organizations, video producers, concert hall administrators, and the Center for Black Music Research. In the end, we managed to create a modest pop-up exhibit titled, Treemonisha.

I first came across the word “Treemonisha” while doing a quick search for famous African-American classical musicians. I gathered a moderate list of impressive but often overlooked musicians including: composer, bugler, and globe-trotter Francis “Frank” Johnson, who brought the promenade concert format to 19^th century United States of America; pianist, organist, and composer Florence Beatrice Price, who witnessed the Chicago symphony orchestra premiere her Symphony in E in 1933; and Scott Joplin, who is extolled for his prolific output in ragtime music, but less recognized for his contributions to opera. Joplin died without witnessing a full staging of his opera, Treemonisha. Treemonisha became the title of my exhibit.

Treemonisha had panels featuring historic musicians, as well as iPads playing short themed interviews of local students, music teachers, and performers. The exhibit was installed in conjunction with two concert events—one at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, and the other at University of Washington’s Meany Hall for the Performing Arts.

*  *  *

When I was defending my Masters Thesis, my advisor asked what I had learned from this experience. While searching for an appropriate answer to this question, I took the longest pause I have ever made in a formal conversation.

What I learned was that ideas, conversations, and the physical presence of educators and advocates matter because without the threads and bonds that have been formulating even before I got to Seattle, I would not have been able to find the networks of support that were essential to the creation of the exhibit. I cannot, nor do I wish to, claim that Treemonisha (the exhibit) changed the lives of black Seattlelites and Pacific Northwesterners pursing a career in classical music. The best I can say is that we created a nodule in the larger narrative of fighting injustice through education. I did not find answers to why social, economic, and cultural barriers persist for certain racial and ethnic groups, but I did come away with humble realizations and, frankly, more questions.

I also learned that there is a glaringly wide crack between the borders of ethnomusicology and musicology when it comes to the study of African American, or for that matter, Latin American and Asian American classical musicians. The ethnicities point to ethnomusicology but the word “classical” points to musicology. How this will pan out in the future depends on how students and emerging scholars approach and champion their research. Many of my colleagues seem to be in similar situations, so I will let their work speak for themselves and return to museology for now.

museology musicology, musicology museology

In museology, the imperative is: always evaluate. We evaluate the heck out of our visitors in the hopes of making their museum experience better next time. And in order to evaluate, we try to formulate questions about their habits, needs, and interests. This may be why I liked studying museum education. Educators and advocates working in mission-driven organizations untiringly strive to realize their vision. I want to dialogue with them to conceive of and articulate productive questions. I want to ask them how to maintain and enact hope.

In closing, I channel what Angela Davis said in her momentous return to UCLA last year. In response to a question about how to activate hope, she alluded to Kant’s concept of the categorical imperative and replied that (and I paraphrase here) we have to keep asking questions to better express and comprehend society’s injustices. We have to be prepared for the conjunctures in life that can and do bring about change. We have to act as if it were possible to change the world. And to this, museum professionals will add: one visitor at a time.

Jazz improvisation is, or at least can be, a deeply resonant articulation of—and metaphor for—democratic human expression. This is axiomatic in the discourse. It is a theme that comes up again and again, virtually from jazz’s first public stirrings. For Gilbert Seldes, writing in Dial in 1923, democratic freedom was the key to syncopation and improvised expression: “Freedom with rhythm is audible—should I say playable?—everywhere” (1923:248). In his 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues, clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow contrasted European symphonies—“one-hundred-men-with-a-fuehrer, a musical battalion hypnotized by a dictator’s baton”—with the liberated expression of American jazz musicians: “Symphony means slavery in any jazzman’s dictionary. Jazz and freedom are synonyms” (quoted in Levine 1990:238). For Albert Murray, speaking in 1983, “Improvisation […] is something that not only conditions people to cope with disjuncture and change but also provides them with a basic survival technique that is commensurate with and suitable to the rootlessness and the discontinuity so characteristic of human existence in the contemporary world” (1998:113). Perhaps most trenchantly, for Muhal Richard Abrams, co-founder of the iconic Chicago-based collective Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), “Improvisation is a human right” (Abrams et al. 2011).

For all of these commentators, musicians and critics alike, jazz improvisation offers an opportunity to break free from something—from stultifying American middlebrowism, from a bourgeois predilection for effete European aesthetics, from the dangerous encroachment of undemocratic, principally foreign, political ideologies like fascism or communism, from the perceived mindless appetitiveness of consumer capitalism, and of course, from domestic white supremacist patriarchy. Evidently, this is a complicated and rather contradictory list. Different stakeholders have radically different perspectives on what constitutes constraint or oppression, and on the processes, structures, or institutions that are the source of that oppressive state. The key point, however, is the shared understanding that jazz improvisation is widely understood to be potentially radical, and potentially emancipatory.

With all of that in mind, and before you read any further, take thirty seconds or so to watch this:[1]

Pepsi is one of a number of multinational corporations that have played on this jazz–freedom discourse in their advertising and marketing in order to integrate it into the broader identity of the brand. Pepsi Jazz was a diet cola beverage developed in 2006. Jazz was available in three different exotic dessert flavors—Caramel Cream, Strawberries and Cream, and Black Cherry French Vanilla. With its low calorie content and oppressive sweetness, it was intended to offer a “sinless indulgence” (as Gail Stein, one of the members of the advertising team, told me), perhaps in the middle of the workday. Like virtually all diet soft drinks, it was targeted chiefly at women aged 25-54. As Stein explained,

We […] knew […] from the psychographic profile that we wanted to reach women that are kind of busy throughout the day and are looking for a pick-me-up at some point during the day that’s sinless. So, here was a diet soda that tasted like a dessert, and we said, […] “we think that the target audience are these really busy, multi-tasking women that would love to know that there’s this little treat that they can have at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” (2010)

The Pepsi Jazz ad—titled “Sounds of the City”—depicts a woman who is in complete control of her environment, at least in terms of its soundscape. From the moment she cracks the cap, she enters a solipsistic kind of “jazz world” where she dictates the soundtrack, and in so doing, lays a claim to the urban landscape. Moreover, she improvises. Each vignette in the ad can be seen to represent a spontaneous, improvisatory choice: in an instant, she decides whom to bring into her “jazz world”—the cabbie, the weary mother, the frantic businessman, etc.—and what they will sound like when they get there. By making these improvisatory choices—by performing an “improvisation of walking privilege,” as Michel de Certeau would have it (1984:98)—she is asserting her agency, and is making the urban space her own, if only fleetingly.

Crucially, she is also claiming ownership of the moment in time in which she makes her decision. Gail Stein called these “jazz moments,” and suggested that they were utterly critical to the narrative of the advertisement and to the identity of the brand—indeed, to the identity of a great many brands, especially those that are marketed towards the “25-54 working woman” demographic:

[W]e love doing stuff like that. We’ve done that for many other brands. This one was a “jazz moment”, another is a “special moment”. Another brand that I worked on, Nivea, which is a skin lotion, we had “happy moments”, because when you put on the skin lotion it made you feel happy. We in advertising love to do stuff like that…. Everybody has, as they go through the day, ups and downs. And if we [as advertisers] can give a consumer a special moment, we love doing that. And we like to do this often specifically when we’re talking to women. We like to say, “Hey, take a moment”. Because, you know, women are so busy, because they’re moms, and they’re going to work, and they’re cooks and they’re cleaners and so, we know that, like when we do focus groups with women, often what comes out is, “Geez, if I only had a few more moments to myself”. So we often like to take that concept of the moment and spice it up a little bit. So if it’s a happy moment or a jazz moment or a something else moment, that’s something where we really feel like we can talk directly to…especially a female consumer and have them understand the message very quickly. (2010)

Through her improvisatory, de Certeauian jazz tactics—her solipsistic, moment-to-moment reframing of the urban soundscape within her “jazz world”—the heroine in the Pepsi Jazz ad transforms predictable, quotidian experiences into transcendent “jazz moments.” With this in mind, we can see that the “jazz moment” is predicated on the idea of agency—on the control of one’s individual experience of time. The jazz moment is one that you have claimed back for yourself—by way of Pepsi Jazz’s transformative elixir—from the capitalist-regulated work day, or from the trials of parenthood, or from any of the other host of grown-up challenges and responsibilities that demand and devour almost every minute of every day.

The interwoven themes of time and agency have become commonplace in advertising, and jazz improvisation has served numerous advertisers and brands as a potent metaphor to access those themes. Pepsi Jazz drinkers were invited to “Improvise with Jazz” in the original, abortive slogan for the diet soft drink; Yves St. Laurent’s fragrance "Live Jazz" and Dolce & Gabbana’s "The One" offer consumers access to an undiscovered landscape of erotic possibility; drivers of the Volkswagen Jetta or Honda Jazz can turn the open road into a personal playground, limited only by the extent of the driver’s imagination; in the case of TD Bank—Canada’s second largest bank (eighth largest in North America), and title or lead sponsor of all of Canada’s major jazz festivals since 2003—clientele can take advantage of extended branch hours to bank flexibly, spontaneously, and extemporaneously (even if the counterpart of those extended hours of consumption is extended hours of labor for bank employees). In every case, advertisers and marketers have used the jazz articulation to underscore this kind of improvisatory flexibility and spontaneity as a crucial characteristic of their respective brand identities. In this way, we learn not only that we are improvisers in our role as consumers—we have “freedom of choice” in our consumer decisions—but also that improvisation is an element of the core “use value” of the commodities that we acquire, especially during our leisure time.

Of course, the concept of leisure time itself is a condition of consumer capitalism. Capitalism is necessarily predicated on a balance between work and leisure: commodities and services that are produced and/or sold during working hours can only be consumed during leisure hours. Leisure time is therefore a critical element of the social, economic, and epistemological sustainability of capitalism and capitalist ideology. This crystallizes in the idea of Pepsi’s “jazz moment,” but it is also crucial to understanding virtually every jazz-based advertising or marketing campaign. In nearly every case, consumers are asked to accept that despite being predicated on capitalism, consumptive leisure still retains the possibility of individual agency and collective community building. If you want to indulge in a jazz moment, you need a Pepsi Jazz; if you want to feel the thrill and freedom of the open road, you need a Honda Jazz or a Volkswagen. These advertisements tell us that while consumption occurs within a sociocultural topography and temporality that is determined by hegemony, we as consumers are free to choose where and when we will consume, what we will consume, and how we will “make do” with what we acquire. As a mode of artistic expression that has commonly been discursively positioned as if it were outside of—or at least, antagonistic to—capitalism, jazz improvisation not only serves as a potent metaphor for the consumer experience; it also serves the needs of advertisers who wish to demonstrate the expressive and emancipatory potential of consumption. The theme of improvisation helps us believe that our consumer choices are free, and by extension, that some kernel of our human subjectivity remains untouched by the social, cultural, and economic structures of a capitalist world. You just need to drink a Pepsi to get there.

Indeed, Muhal Richard Abrams argues that improvisation does retain this radical, emancipatory potential. This was a theme he addressed in his keynote remarks at the 2010 Guelph Jazz Festival in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, from which the brief quote I mentioned at the outset was taken.[2] It is worth considering his words—“improvisation is a human right”—in fuller context:

Now, the commercial aspect of things, they are a fact. Human beings have various types among themselves. So there’s all kinds of things. There’s blues, there’s rap, there’s this. It all has to exist because all those kinds of people exist. Whether art or any production of art has to make money, that becomes questionable. What is it for? What’s the purpose of it? Why is it being put out? And […] that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’re talking about. What is it that is happening to us as human beings? The idea of asserting yourself, and being an individual within yourself, that’s a human right. Not just for musicians. Improvisation is a human right. [….] Improvisation starts with just the average person. Improvisation is a necessity. It comes about as a result of a necessity by human beings. (Abrams et al. 2011)

For Abrams, improvisation can transcend capitalism: improvisation is precisely how human beings can potentially self-actualize; it is what we aspire to do to fulfill our expressive potential by refusing to be subjugated by the orthodoxies and pathways of capitalist society. Evidently, Abrams is not speaking only of musical improvisation. For him, improvisation is a cultural—potentially even a biological—imperative that cuts across artistic practice and the myriad practices of everyday life.

What we learn from jazz advertising, however, is that there is nothing necessarily or inherently emancipatory about improvisation, nor is jazz music the intrinsically anti-capitalist phenomenon that we so often believe it to be, or perhaps merely wish for it to be. That is by no means to reject the contention that Abrams and so many others have made that jazz and improvisation can be radical practices of human freedom; rather, it is to underscore the contingent nature of that radical potential. What we learn from a careful consideration of jazz, improvisation, and advertising is that jazz and improvisation can equally serve the interests of capital, buttressing the sociocultural, ideological status quo by offering a shimmering glimpse of a way out that is actually just a way back in. For those among us who are committed to disrupting the status quo and who aspire to realize Abrams’s optimistic vision, it is essential that we recognize how fragile that vision is, and how easy it is to confuse the spectacle of expressive freedom with the genuine article. After all, in many ways it is far easier, safer, and more comfortable to feel like we’re breaking the rules than it is to actually break them.

Portions of this post are taken from Chapters 4 and 6 of my book, Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning (Routledge, 2015). ISBN: 978-1-138-01876-1. You can read more about the book at jazzsells.com.

Notes

Don Ellis (1934-1978) was a jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader.  Ellis won a Grammy in 1972 for Best Instrumental Arrangement for the Theme From The French Connection.  He is probably best known for his extensive musical experimentation.  Ellis’ rhythmic innovations came as a direct result of his studies in non-Western musical cultures, which included graduate work at UCLA’s (then) Institute of Ethnomusicology.

The Ethnomusicolgy Archive holds the complete Don Ellis collection, including musical manuscripts, audio and video recordings, photos, select costumes, and both his "superbone" and quarter-tone trumpet.

Because of the Oscar™-winning movie Whiplash, there has been a fair amount of press about both the movie and the music "Whiplash."  (I have included some links, below.)  Hank Levy composed and arranged the piece for the Don Ellis Band.  It is, of course, part of the Archive's Don Ellis collection. 

Whiplash score excerpt

Hank Levy signature

Don's part, page 1

Don's part, page 2

Don's part, note

A published version of Whiplash

From a published version of Whiplash

In addition to the Ellis musical manuscripts, the collection also includes hundreds of videorecordings.  Five are currently on the Ethnomusicology Archive channel on California Light and Sound (from the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP) and more are forthcoming.

Don Ellis at Ellis Island (club) on the Sunset Strip (1967)

Don Ellis at the San Francisco Museum of Art (June 1968)

Don Ellis Band, Chapman College (May 1974)

Whiplash in the press...

Brody, Richard. 2014. "Getting Jazz Right in the Movies." The New Yorker, October 13.

Chinendec, Nate. 2014. "An All-Year Season of Discontent in Jazz." The New York Times, December 30.

Clark, Nick. 2015. "Whiplash movie hit by backlash from disgruntled jazz fans." The Independent [London], January 23.

O'Connell, Sean J. 2015. "Drummer Peter Erskine on Jazz Flick 'Whiplash.'" KCET Artbound, February 24.

Ross, Brian. 2015. "Whiplash Wins, Jazz Loses." The Huffington Post, February 23.

Photos © Ellis Music Enterprises, All Right Reserved. (For permission to use any Ellis images, contact the Archivists.)

Photos © Objective Music Co., All Right Reserved. (For permission to use any Ellis images, contact the Archivists.)

Photos © Regents of the University of California, All Right Reserved. (For permission to use any Ellis images, contact the Archivists.)

On a particularly bright and sunny morning, my field assistant Sylvain and I left Ouagadougou on the moto to go to a small town in the brousse, where we were supposed to find a fiddle player. I was in Burkina Faso to research the prevalence of fiddles and their role in daily life here. Although much has been written about the myriad varieties of African music and musical instruments - from the Banda Linda horn ensembles to Mande kora music, from harps in Central Africa to the mbira of the Shona in Zimbabwe-, relatively little attention has been paid to fiddles in Africa.[1] I had come to Burkina Faso to discover whether this was a true representation of the role of this instrument in Burkinabé society.

So far I had heard that the traditional Moosé (Mossi) fiddle, the ruudga, was mainly played by blind people to make a living – in rather various locations and circumstances: from local beer bars to the royal court where they perform for the chef du village. On the one hand living in the margins of society, but on the other held in high esteem through their performances for Burkinabé royalty – their ambiguous position fascinated me.

The trip started pleasantly enough, the driving wind providing some welcome coolness. We were speeding along the highway out of town, sharing the road with countless motos, bicycles, ramshackle cars and crowded minibuses with all kinds of loads strapped to the roof - large plastic buckets, bags of millet, furniture, woven baskets, mattresses, and live goats tied upside down, their bellies exposed to the sun. As we took a turn to the left we suddenly found ourselves on a red dirt road, seemingly leading to nowhere. The landscape was desolate here, the endless horizon interrupted by sparse baobab trees – and at one point a gas station, which consisted of a thatched roof with bottles of various sizes containing petrol underneath. It must have been doing business, but it made for an amusing sight since the only traffic we had encountered so far was a donkey cart stacked with firewood.

After a couple hours of driving along the dusty road we arrived in a small village, where we were supposed to find the ruudga player. Sylvain explained to me that we had to stop and ask for permission of the chef du village to enter and to speak with the musician. We made our way up to the royal palace, consisting of a large compound with small houses made of wattle and daub dotted around it. There was a large thatched roof attached to an open brick building, providing shelter against the ruthless sun. Two men were sitting on the floor underneath it, playing the popular bao game.

One of the men had descended from what seemed to be the only chair on the premises onto a sitting mat, and my guess that this was the chef du village was confirmed by Sylvain: apparently a mat, although on the floor, signifies the higher status of the person sitting on it. After introducing ourselves Sylvain inquired about the ruudga player, and it turned out that the musician had indeed been in the village earlier, but that he had now moved to another village, about an hour’s drive away from here. We bade the chef goodbye -though we would have to pass by him again when we came back, a formal ritual- and went on our way.

As we approached another small village on the way, we came across some sort of celebration, with many people who had been drinking gathering around us, shouting and dancing. I didn’t quite understand what was going on, and Sylvain didn’t succeed in explaining it to me either, probably because my brain was working more slowly in this heat. It was however a welcome interruption to the monotony of driving on a dusty road.

After another hour or so we arrived in the small village of Bantogodo, where the ruudga player was said to be. We introduced ourselves and asked for the musician. We were told that he had been here only half an hour ago, but that he had left again. A young man offered to go and look for him, and in the meantime we were offered a seat on a tree trunk underneath a shelter made of branches and palm leaves, which we gratefully accepted. The air felt like warm water filling my lungs, making it difficult to breathe deeply. It seemed very quiet here, I saw a couple of children playing in the shade of another small shelter, and some chickens kicking up the dust.

And then, finally, the ruudga player was brought to us, guided carefully as he was blind. He was wearing wide khaki pants, orange flip-flops, a T-shirt that must have been white once, and sunglasses, perhaps to protect his eyes from the sun or to hide the appearance of his eyes. The young man helped the musician sit down, and I introduced myself in French while Sylvain translated (most people in Burkina Faso speak French, however in smaller towns and villages people prefer to speak their regional language, Moosé in this case). The musician introduced himself as Joacin Souli, aged 52, and told me he started to play the ruudga 35 years ago because of his blindness. That the ruudga is the instrument of choice for visually impaired people made sense to me, as it is relatively easy to construct, play, and carry around from one location to another, and it is possible to sing and play at the same time. Joacin told me he is self-educated and as he improvises everything, he is able to adapt the songs he performs to the context. I learned that he plays at festivals, celebrations such as weddings, and markets to earn some money, and performs regularly for the chef du village. The themes of fiddle songs typically vary from topical and social comments at markets and in beer houses, love and life events at celebrations and praise songs at the royal court (see also DjeDje 2008). During a performance the audience may show their appreciation by putting money in the soundhole of the ruudga. By performing at these different occasions, Joacin is not only able to make a living and to be financially independent, but he is also well known in this area because he plays at the palace. While he technically belongs to the lower class of his society, at the same time he is highly valued because of his performances at the court.[2]

The ambiguity of the social position of a ruudga player is reflected in the instrument as well. During my fieldwork I observed that on the one hand musicians attribute special powers to their fiddle and believe that miracles can happen through its music. The performances that the musician has done with his instrument on different occasions are absorbed into the instrument, thereby turning the object itself into an embodiment of experiences. This causes musicians to develop a great attachment to their instrument and a disinclination to dispose of it. I experienced this when expressing interest in acquiring the fiddle of one of my other informants for our museum. The musician did not want to sell his instrument at any cost, but instead agreed to construct a new fiddle exactly like his own. It was the perfect solution: he retained the special powers of his instrument, while our museum received a morphologically identical fiddle by the same maker[3] (special powers would be lost in a museum anyway). On the other hand, many people are convinced that playing the ruudga can in fact cause blindness. The frequent characteristic of visual impairment of its players is attributed to the instrument, ascribing a degree of agency to it: the ruudga is not simply seen as a passive artifact that produces sounds, but as an agent that exerts powers over its players (see also Bates 2012).

Joacin then showed me his ruudga, which he had constructed himself. The resonator consisted of half a calabash, covered with goat skin which was nailed to the gourd with large metal tacks, and secured around the edges with irregular sewing. There was one soundhole in the membrane, and a single string made of nylon, running over a bridge consisting of a triangular shaped twig. He had used metal to construct his bow -as opposed to the more common wooden bows- thereby minimizing the risk of breaking.

As our conversation progressed, more and more people started to gather around us, barefoot children in shorts, women with colourful pagnes wrapped around their waists, men in Western style shirts. The village had seemed so small when we arrived and now I wondered where they all came from. Were they coming to see and hear Joacin? Or was it the rarity of a foreigner in the village that drew them to our spot? In any case the presence of a crowd increased the feeling of attending a ‘real’ performance as Joacin agreed to perform several pieces for us and allowed me to videotape them. Below is a fragment of one of his songs:

While fiddles in Africa may be underrepresented in the Western discourse on African music, the story of Joacin illustrates that the ruudga plays a rather important role in Burkinabé society. Not only is it an instrument which can be used on manifold occasions, it also enables people who would otherwise be relegated to the economic fringe of society to make a living and to increase their social status by performing in front of the royal class.

Carolien Hulshof holds an MA in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam. She currently works as a researcher at the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, Belgium, where she leads the research project The Formalized Fiddle, funded by POD Science Policy. For this project, digital data on fiddles from all over the world are gathered and analyzed on similarities, differences, evolutions and migrations. In the framework of the project she has travelled to Burkina Faso, Tanzania and Congo-Brazzaville, to research the prevalence and role of the fiddle in Africa. For more information, see http://www.mim.be/the-formalized-fiddle. Promotor: Dr. Saskia Willaert

References

Bates, Eliot. 2012. “The social life of musical instruments.” Ethnomusicology 56/3: 363-395.

Charry, Eric. 2000. Mande Music.Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

DjeDje,  Jacqueline Cogdell. 2008. Fiddling in West Africa. Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Makubuya, James. 2000. “‘Endingidi’ (tube fiddle) of Uganda. Its adaptation and significance among the Baganda.” Galpin Society Journal LIII: 140-155.

Schöpf, Jürgen. 2008. The Serankure and Music in Tlôkweng, Botswana. Berlin: VWB Verlag.

Glossary

Brousse                             Bush, savannah-like landscape

Chef du village                  Respected head of a village

Moto                                 Small motorbike

Pagne                               Long rectangular piece of fabric, often decorated with brightly coloured

   patterns

As humans, we are intimately connected to the world around us. Similarly music intimately connects us individually. It makes perfect sense that there would be a field studying the connection between the two. Without knowing it, I began my journey to ecomusicology as a child. Growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan is an inherently musical experience: as the long-time home of the Gibson Guitar factory, it's hard to avoid the heritage and influence that this mid-sized Great Lakes city thrusts upon the world. Those impacts are manifest in attic treasures found at garage and estate sales, a premiere blues festival and the persistence of live music in local culture. Around the time I began learning the violin in my school and youth symphonies, my summers started including daycamps at the local nature center. It was through these camps that I became familiar with the natural landscape where I lived. I developed an awareness of things such as animal tracks and leaf shapes, and I began to view the world through the lens of art and creativity. One of the most lasting and unknowingly profound experiences I had was a nature art camp which included a section on drawing negative space. Musically, this is the timeless idea of “It's what you don't play.” This concept was solidified in my mind by sketching a tree through the spaces created as its leaves and branches weave into the surrounding canopy, maps of the forest as outlines of meadows and tracing my path along a boardwalk through the cracks between boards and the spiderwebs beyond rather than the grain within. The 1,100 acres of hills, forests and rivers that is the Kalamazoo Nature Center would continue to feature in my development as a musician for years to come. In high school, a friend, who was a raptor volunteer at the Nature Center, encouraged me to take up electric bass. When the band I played in decided it was time to take photos for our press kit, we selected the Nature Center as the setting and spent a day posing with our instruments.

Despite all this, the connection between my musical expressions and nature hadn't really solidified yet. It was forming on the periphery of my consciousness and would take years and some special circumstances for me to become fully aware of it. The first inklings of its presence took the form of trips to the shores of Lake Michigan with band mates to sit on the dunes and play our guitars. Later, a writing partner and I would pack as much of our gear as we could into my Mazda Coupe and travel to a cottage on the shores of Lake Huron with a fourtrack cassette recorder. We sat outside next to a fire, writing and recording music as the Perseids showered through the night sky. I had become enamored with recorded music while involved with my high school radio station, so I made my way to Denver, Colorado, in the pursuit of educating myself about sound engineering. There, I developed an enhanced appreciation for nature coupled with a newly developed sense of adventure. I found joy and solace on the sides of cliffs, alpine lakes, and desert canyons. I continued the pursuit of educating myself on sound in Nashville. I can trace the genesis of my present musical practice incorporating music with nature to an event that took place during a music festival south of the city. I was walking through the woods to my campsite while Toots and the Maytals were soundchecking. For 15-20 minutes I stood, letting the forest wash me in the reverberation of a classic reggae rhythm section. I decided, “I want to do this on purpose!” I wanted to use natural acoustics in the recordings I made. To my freshly trained ear the sound of those drums echoing through the woods was magic, and I set about figuring out how to accomplish the task of recording a band in the woods. Of course, this requires electricity, but I came upon solar power as the optimal way to meet this need. It is virtually silent. It also has the benefit of being environmentally and economically sustainable.

With this understanding, I spent time recording music in Australia, learning more about sound and educating myself about solar energy. I lived in a small town on the easternmost point of the continent, Byron Bay. Most mornings involved the ocean. It was a five-minute bike ride to the nearest beach, and the conditions were consistently good for surfing somewhere on the peninsula. As I sat in the ocean, waiting for waves to come I would use the time to reflect on my day. It became a daily meditation in the waves, a sunrise review of day-to-day life.

I was exposed to Balkan music through two Bosnian bandmates. From there my musical explorations headed east. The similarities between American, Balkan, and Arabian folk music stood out dramatically to me, and many morning sessions were spent with the thought of Middle Eastern music for a bluegrass band. I was teaching myself slide guitar when I began investigating Indian music, and I recognized the impact of all that time thinking while in the ocean. I decided to make it a point to include nature in my music from then on. It was clear to me that being outside was just a better way of making music. I felt less stress, and I had more creative energy. I reflected on my experience in Tennessee and thought: “If all the world is a stage, why can't it be a studio too?”

In 2009, I began recording music in natural settings with a laptop powered by solar panels and a marine battery. As a conscious act of sustainability, I try to use as little electricity as possible and to incorporate environmentally friendly practices into my activities as much as I can, such as using mass transit and maintaining the idea of Leave No Trace. I perform under the title The Sunrise Review as a reference to my time with the waves in Australia. Through a project-based approach to my musical practice I develop narratives which relate to environmental conservation, and I aim to support ecological stewardship activities with music. My first recording project began in earnest as a 2010 Artist in Residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon Coast where I undertook recording the Middle Eastern bluegrass I had conceived in the Pacific Ocean.

In 2012, I set about my next project, American Heritage, writing and recording music in UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Through this project I have had a highlight of my career by participating in an amazing event in Yosemite National Park, the Yosemite FaceLift. Every year hundreds of people dedicate a week to picking up trash and assisting with major remediation projects throughout the Park. I spend the time wandering the Park serenading trail crews, rock climbers, hikers, and attendees to the evening events. It's a great honor to contribute in such a unique way to an effort which, over ten years, has removed over 1,000,000 pounds of trash from a place pivotal in the history of conservation and public lands. In November of 2013, I began a project titled Aquaphilia focused on water as an inspiration. I followed water as it made its way from a spring in West Virginia to the Potomac River and on to Washington D.C. Along the way I transported my recording equipment, guitar and tablas by bicycle through the watershed, recording improvisational performances exploring the intersection of Indian and American slide guitar. I intend to expand locations for this project to include the Great Lakes and the Colorado River, and to advocate for a Birthplace of Rivers National Monument in the Appalachian Mountains in 2014.

If you would like to learn more about what I do and how I do it feel free to contact me at graham {at} solarpoweredmusic.com or browse my website at www.solarpoweredmusic.com, which contains sound recordings, videos and more from my projects. I am always welcoming of any opportunities for collaboration, partnerships or performance opportunities. 

This essay originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of the Ecomusicology Newsletter.

Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability. By George McKay. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. [242 pp. ISBN 978-0472052097. Paperback: $33.75; Hardcover: $80.00]. 

Reviewed by Jessica A. Holmes/ McGill University

The first monograph-length study of disability in popular music, George McKay’s book is a welcome and timely contribution to the burgeoning body of scholarship on music and disability. He explores disability’s many expressions and representations within American and British pop and rock from roughly the 1950s to the 1970s (with several worthwhile diversions outside this geo-historical frame). Through a series of case studies, McKay considers musicians whose performance and reception has been indelibly shaped by disability and necessarily mediated through other positions of identity and marginality. At times he draws the reader’s attention to unexpected places, recasting familiar figures through the lens of disability (e.g. Neil Young), and also presenting characters that have nearly faded into obscurity because of their disabilities (e.g. Johnnie Ray). While he thoroughly investigates the many ways pop/rock can empower disabled musicians, he simultaneously contemplates the industry’s disabling capacities. He engages numerous disciplinary angles including, but not limited to, cultural and media studies, disability studies, Deaf studies, and music research, what he aptly refers to as a “crossing” and “cripping” of disciplines. His musical readings strike an excellent balance between the formal and extra-musical dimensions of his chosen texts such that the book is accessible to a general humanities audience. Similarly, the book is available to those unfamiliar with disability studies since the author effectively primes the reader on important theoretical concepts in the field. McKay’s lifelong journey with disability beautifully informs the writing of his book; it is through his love of pop music and his crip rock icons that he first came to understand and ultimately embrace his own disability.

Taking polio as its conceptual link, the first chapter surveys such artists as Connie Boswell, Horace Parlan, CeDell Davis, Carl Perkins, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Ian Dury. McKay asserts that memories of childhood institutionalization, isolation, and the physical trauma and degenerative paralysis that polio begets left an enduring imprint on these musicians who all came of age during the youth countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Many fashioned and adapted their playing techniques to accommodate their individual bodies, which in turn came to define their unique sound (e.g. Mitchell’s idiosyncratic guitar tunings; jazz pianist Carl Perkins’ lateral, left-handed playing technique), and in certain cases, their musical output is tinged with a melancholic sentimentality both in voice and lyric (see McKay’s reading of Young’s “Helpless”). English rocker Ian Dury figures prominently in the book and serves as this chapter’s polio-survivor musician poster-boy. McKay argues that without a crip precursor, Dury’s dual performance of sexual deviance and disability was exceptional in its defiance but likewise reinstated the seemingly perverse incongruity between disability and sex. Dury’s legacy, explains McKay, was to pave the way for later artists like Johnny Rotten and other members of the punk generation where self-enfreakment became a vital part of the genre’s aesthetic.

In the second chapter McKay engages with the work of Laurie Stras and Andrew Oster to further “crip” the Barthesian grain, maintaining that the singing voice can bear traces of the disabled body. Retaining the falsetto technique’s typical associations with heightened emotion, sexual desire, infantilization, emasculation, and feminization, McKay suggests that the false voice, when deployed by disabled male singers, can additionally signal authentic bodily pain and failure. Neil Young’s fragile, shaky body (a result of polio and epilepsy) finds its ultimate expression in his signature whiny, falsetto vocals, and Hank Williams’ yodelling, with its abrupt registral leaps, directly reflects the embodied experience of his spina bifida. These analyses fall short of fully convincing the reader, however, since they rely primarily on simplified, direct analogues between body and expression. McKay likewise theorizes the mal canto singing style as a counterpoint to the bel canto style: “the disabled body sounds the corporeal and cognitive experience and knowledge of its own disability through its strained, damaged, or disfluent voice” (86). Here he successfully distinguishes between real and performed vocal disfluencies: stuttering can exist in song either as a naturally occurring expression of a speech disfluency, or as a self-conscious performative device used to bolster a lyric’s meaning (e.g. The Who’s “My Generation”).

The spectacle of the disabled body takes center stage in the third chapter where McKay explores instances of “adventitious” disability, that is, disability encountered later in life as opposed to disability present from childhood. In particular, McKay interests himself in the unique challenges in transitioning, often suddenly, from able-bodied to disabled amidst the prying eye of the public and in a phallocentric, hyper-masculine music culture. After a car accident that left him semi-paralyzed and in a wheelchair, the African-American soul singer Teddy Pendergrass maintained his sexual appeal by seeking continuity across his pre and post-accident repertoire and performances (with his deep vocals and “late night love routines”), achieving new erotic possibilities for the disabled, black male performer, observes McKay. In the second half of the chapter, the author investigates the performance of mental illness and cognitive impairment in pop music, returning once again to Young and introducing the late Ian Curtis, lead singer of the British post-punk band Joy Division, whose frenetic on-stage performances both intimated the experience of and triggered Curtis’ epileptic seizures.  

The fourth chapter features an especially compelling discussion on a nearly forgotten musical great: deaf singer-songwriter and jazz pianist Johnnie Ray (aka. “the scrawny white queer with the gizmo stuck in his ear”). McKay demonstrates that Ray’s “stylized speech disfluency” (i.e. sobbing, stuttering, speech slurring, emphatic consonants, delayed/drawn out entries, etc.) and manic physical gestures (i.e. banging on the piano while standing, falling to the floor, etc.), both integral to the singer’s signature heightened emotional display, was an authentic performance of his deafness where staying in tune and in time as well as remaining physically balanced was a significant challenge for Ray, even with the use of his hearing aid. McKay also persuasively argues that the emotional vulnerability of the singer’s performances further exacerbated the insidious speculation about the depravity of his bisexuality and likewise feminized his disability. Ray’s deafness had an immediate impact on his singing voice, especially in the years following a surgical mishap that nearly eliminated his hearing altogether.

McKay concludes the fourth chapter with a discussion of the “self-negating,” deafening practices ingrained in our contemporary listening culture. The ear-splitting volume (over 135 dBs) mandated by the hyper-masculinist and ageist imperative driving certain heavy-metal, rock, and electronic dance music genres, as well as the repeated use of personal ear-buds and headphones at excessive volumes are but two examples of the industry’s many “occupational hazards” that can cause tinnitus, auditory discrimination challenges, and hearing loss for both musician and consumer. Expanding on the theme of pop music’s disabling potential, in the final chapter McKay problematizes popular music as a “destructive economy” in its promotion of certain harmful, but no less “authentic” lifestyles such as substance abuse, “madness,” and suicide among the industry’s youngest members. He writes, “to do well in this career is frequently to be or to get a bit or a lot fucked up,” referring in particular to the lead singers (152). His sobering account of this pervasive, “romantic eschatology” extends to pop music’s audiences as well where there exists an ongoing controversy regarding an ostensible culture of emulative self-harm ingrained in certain bands’ cult fandom (e.g. the purported rise in teen suicides among Nirvana fans in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death). As a counterpoint to his assessment of the industry’s destructive forces, McKay turns to pop music’s emancipatory potential, highlighting its historic place in disability activism (e.g. polio Birthday balls; the March of Dimes) and also critiquing such activism’s corrupt, capitalistic, and exploitative tendencies. 

             McKay’s book covers an expansive selection of artists from across several decades and makes significant strides forward in our understanding of disability’s multi-faceted role in pop music. Particularly notable is his ongoing consideration of the industry’s masculinist impulse and the implications this has had for male expressions of disability, race, class, and sexuality together. Often this is to the exclusion of pop music’s women, however, especially in the chapters on the voice, the body, and deafness. McKay attributes this absence to what he understands as a historical gender bias: there existed little opportunity for transgressive female expression in the pop industry where freak self-display was generally only permissible for men. Yet there were numerous female musicians that boldly defied the normative limits of feminine voice and/or body (e.g. Patti Smith; Annie Lennox) and many whose performances arguably invite a sustained disability reading (e.g. Karen Carpenter and anorexia; Janis Joplin, vocal damage, and substance abuse). I appreciated that in an otherwise decidedly male-oriented treatment of music and mental health, the final chapter includes critical discussion of both the late Amy Winehouse’s anthemic hit-single “Rehab” (2006), and pop-icon Brittney Spears’ 2007 song “Piece of Me” as genuine autobiographic reflections of feminine celebrity breakdown and resistance. Ultimately, McKay’s book is a compelling and vital complement to recent work on music and disability that has centered on Western art music. In revealing further avenues for critical exploration, the book will undoubtedly influence future developments in the scholarship on music and disability. 

Official Press Release

Registration now open for Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities

April 30 – May 2, 2015
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
www.inertiaconference.com

Co-hosted by Echo: A Music-Centered Journal, The Digital Humanities Working Group at UCLA, and Ethnomusicology Review, Inertia gathers scholars from a wide range of disciplines to discuss topics related to sound, media, and the Digital Humanities. The conference features panels on augmented reality, soundscapes, record production, voice, pedagogy, and more, with keynote addresses by Jonathan Sterne (McGill University) and Kiri Miller (Brown University). The full program is available on the conference website.

The conference is free to attend; those who register by Monday, April 27 will receive personalized delegate badges. Visit our Eventbrite page for registration information and directions.

We look forward to seeing you there!

The Inertia Conference Committee

In 2000, Emperor Norton Records released El Baile Alemán, a tribute album of some of Kraftwerk’s greatest hits re-imagined as salsas, rumbas, cumbias, merengues, and cha-cha-chas, performed by Señor Coconut, the suave Latin American bandleader featured prominently on the album cover. Señor Coconut is actually Uwe Schmidt, a German composer, producer, and one of the most inventive and prolific personalities in the electronic dance music community in the past two decades. He has produced music under nearly seventy aliases, creating works that represent each character’s musical style and personality; yet, he has never released any music under his own name.

Señor Coconut was created in 1996 after Schmidt, who was put off by the insular European electronic music scene, relocated to Chile to explore his interest in Latin American rhythms. He has made four albums under this moniker, applying electronic techniques to stereotypical markers of popular Latin American dance music. On the surface, El Baile Alemán, (German dances) might appear to be just a gimmicky lampoon of Kraftwerk’s Teutonic veneer and dehumanized, machine-driven aesthetic. However, Schmidt’s border-crossing and genre-bending music might instead be considered a postmodern experiment whereby a musical identity is deliberately constructed as artifice resulting from a pastiche of musical references. Looking at El Baile Alemán as a multi-layered site of postnational musical production, I consider how Schmidt’s adoption of multiple personae and musical references call into question issues of genre naming, authenticity, identity, colliding stereotypes and authorship.

The “Kraftwerk-Effekt”

Schmidt’s multivalent musical forays can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the longstanding experimental inclinations in German popular music from the past 30 years. The omnipresence of American popular culture in postwar Germany and attempts to revive pre-war avant-garde modernism led a new generation of young musicians to attempt to recapture a sense of German identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, eclectic groups like Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, Neu!, and Tangerine Dream attracted an enthusiastic underground following playing what critics labeled as “krautrock.” These groups attempted to distance themselves from the blues-based origins of Anglo-American rock, opting instead to draw from German avant-garde and other experimental sources in order to emphasize a new sense of progress in their music.

Kraftwerk was arguably the most influential and certainly most successful of the early krautrock groups. Known alternately as avant-garde musicians and originators of electronic pop, they achieved international commercial success with their distinctive combination of repetitive rhythms, catchy melodies, and minimalist electronic instrumentation. Promoting an unapologetically artificial aesthetic, they projected a robotic collective persona in their live performances. Many of their songs juxtapose the convenience of technological amenities with a strong sense of loss and alienation created by those very innovations. Moreover, their emphasis on speed and mobility proved to be the key to their sustained global influence, and the relative accessibility of their aesthetics set the stage for the proliferation of electronic pop forms ranging from Detroit techno and house, to drum and bass, and electro-pop.

The connection between Kraftwerk and the sample-based music of Detroit techno is a significant instance of cross-appropriation and transnational musical exchange. As George Lipsitz has noted, many of Kraftwerk’s songs are in some ways an amalgamation of the electronic and sound collages of experimentalist European composers and the Motown and soul tradition from Detroit and other American cities. (Lipsitz 2006:246). Thus, in spite of Kraftwerk’s early rejection of American popular music, their brand of electronic experimental pop was a transnational and hybrid music from the start. In turn, the eventual appropriation of Kraftwerk by Detroit techno artists, can be seen an act of reterritorialization,[1] connecting Detroit to Düsseldorf in a multi-layered moment of transnational cultural exchange. This is a prescient example of what Alex Seago has called the “Kraftwerk-Effekt,” which describes the ways that advances in communication technologies and the increasingly complex global flows of people, capital, and images in the era of late capitalism have shaped the aesthetics, production, and distribution of electronic dance music around the world. This music, in all of its localized or hybridized forms, has come to epitomize an urban and cosmopolitan cultural stance with fans around the world (Seago 2004: 85).

Rhizomatic identities in an age of digital reproduction

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomes, we might view performing identities as dispersed networks with multiple entry points through which musicians can create new soundscapes. Many electronic dance musicians commonly perform under various aliases or in anonymity, hiding behind pseudonyms and enigmatic public personas. The absence of obvious authorship has enabled them to subtly undermine the mainstream music industry’s attempt at genre and brand labeling. Schmidt came up with an attention-grabbing persona in order to stand out in a crowded field, but adopting a new name wasn’t simply about scoring a new recording opportunity. He views music as a means through which he can define a multiplicity of localities and identities by exploring new sounds and inhabiting the universes of each of his musical identities.

Sonja Hofer (2006) argues that recent musical and communication technologies have significantly altered the sense of subjective identity for musicians. It is quite easy for musicians to shift between and manipulate multiple musical styles and performance identities through the use of multi-track recording, sequencers, and samplers. Schmidt’s constant contextual shifts in terms of musical materials and his own multiple identities as a musician points to processes of deterritorialization.

Cumbia beats along the Autobahn

Autobahn, released in 1974, was Kraftwerk’s first bona fide hit. While the lyrics in Kraftwerk’s songs are usually very minimal, they do play an important role in the rhythmic structure of these songs. In “Autobahn,” the repetition of the phrase “Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn” underscores the repetitive, yet forward-moving feel of the rhythm, simulating the experience of driving along the Autobahn. The listener can sonically recreate the experience of travelling on the high-speed fast lane with sampled interpolations of cars and sirens whizzing by, as well as the driver flipping through the car radio trying to alleviate the monotony of a long road trip. 

Although El Baile Aleman is credited to Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto, it’s actually entirely the work of Schmidt on synthesizers, samplers and three vocalists.[2] Using Akai equipment, he created a database of sounds, loops and grooves made from recordings with a live band before constructing the songs by cutting and pasting the samples together. The Coconut version of “Autobahn” is based on a shorter remixed version of the piece, and while it retains the formal structure of the song, Schmidt changes the grooves and instrumentation to transform Kraftwerk’s cold aesthetic for a hotter “Latin” sound. Both pieces begin with a sample of a driver starting a car. However, while the car speeds off on the Autobahn in the original, it sputters to a stop in the Coconut version. Here, Coconut and his band get out of the car, begin intoning “Autowahn” instead of “Autobahn”—Wahn in German, meaning a fantasy or delirium—before launching into a cumbia-inspired dance party, presumably at the side of the Autobahn.

The relative simplicity of cumbia proved to be an ideal template for experimentation and export.  It was popular with audiences throughout the Americas, particularly in Peru, Argentina, and Mexico, where cumbia in its various localized forms, became an embodiment of popular nationalism. As such, cumbia is a vivid illustration of how transnational flows create local meanings. The cumbia pattern, which is in duple meter and features a quarter note followed by two eighth notes pattern played on the guacharaca (a type of scraper), is the main inspiration in the Coconut version, but there are quite a few deviations from the cumbia form. Notably, Schmidt opts to sample a marimba rather than the more typically used keyboard. There’s a brass section that points to North American jazz influences, while the melodic style of the male vocals invoke both the Beach Boys and reggae. The song also features a sampling of various Latin American popular musics including salsa, merengue, and Tejano conjunto. There is another break away from the cumbia pattern in the instrumental bridge section. While both versions evoke traffic noise on the Autobahn, in the Coconut version, Schmidt manipulates the brass and percussion samples to emulate street noises instead of sampling actual traffic noises, as in the Kraftwerk version. He also uses samples from Latin radio, and snippets of popular Mexican melodies like “La Cucaracha,” commonly used for car horns in Mexico, and the lullaby “Duérmete niño, duérmete ya.” The overall effect is that of a salsa or Latin jazz band playing cumbia tinged with various Latin American influences, in what is a fairly faithful rendering of Kraftwerk’s song.

World musics and postnational soundscapes

Is Schmidt’s Señor Coconut effort just some sort of gimmicky marketing ploy trading on kitsch, irony, and exotica? On the surface, this charge can certainly be leveled against Schmidt. We might view El Baile Alemán as an updated Latin take on exotica, a genre popular in the 1950s-60s specializing in depictions of ersatz paradises and conventionalized natives from a non-native perspective. Coconut takes us on an armchair journey into an imagined Latin America via essentialized representations of ‘exotic’ locales created by easily recognizable sonic signifiers. It is a process of what Veit Erlmann (1996) has called the fetishization of marginality: an effort to seek out cultures or places that are relatively unaffected by processes of commodification in order to reify and romanticize the extent to which this culture or place is isolated from others. As Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid observe in their study of postnational musical identities:

It is almost too easy to compare these procedures with earlier imperialist economic systems, where raw materials were acquired from the colonies, manufactured in the West and commercialized in both the West and the colonies, but profits staying mainly in the West (Corona and Madrid 2008:10).

On the other hand, I wonder if it might be possible to consider Schmidt’s efforts in a less negative light. Schmidt’s music exists in a postnational space, one where the composer, artist, and listener are no longer part of the same cultural context but instead occupy a new and shared space. Here, cultural meaning and aesthetic values cannot be taken as a given. It might be more fruitful then, to view the transnational work of Schmidt and others like him as an instance of what Josh Kun calls an audiotopia. As a play on the Foucauldian heterotopia, Kun defines audiotopia as “sonic spaces of effective utopian longings,” where several sites that are normally considered incompatible are brought together not only in a particular piece of music, but in the mapping of geographic spaces and production of social spaces (Kun 1997:289). El Baile Alemán is after all, a German musician’s imagination of a Latin American re-imagination of a quintessentially German pop culture icon, and as such, it is a contact zone between disparate sonic and social spaces. This album is, to borrow from Baudrillard, a musical simulation of something that never existed in the first place—a hyperreal audiotopia where a transnational exchange is made possible. This is complicated further by the fact that Schmidt is working alone. There is no actual exchange between him and any Latin American musicians beyond the initial recording of some sounds, and none of these musicians are involved in the final mixing process.  Like other electronica musicians who are the direct heirs to Kraftwerk’s syncretic “man machine” musical tradition, Schmidt revels in this newly decentralized and deterritorialized soundscape where ties between culture and place are weakened, creating border-crossing music for a similarly cosmopolitan audience. In this way, Schmidt’s audiotopic work can be read as a meta-commentary about the global flow of localized musical traditions which are co-opted and marketed around the world, mirroring a similar flow of peoples and capital around an increasingly decentralized world.

Notes

[1] In this context, by reterritorialization I mean that while this exchange is made possible by increasingly deterritorialized global networks of cultural production and consumption, each appropriation of this music—from Motown to Germany and back to Detroit--doesn’t necessarily point to a weakening of ties between place and culture. Instead, this music gains special meaning in each new place it travels to, and these meanings are not lost as they travel from place to place.

[2]Jorge González (vocals), Lisa Carbon  (background vocals), Atom Heart (keyboards), producer Argenis Brito  (vocals), Ricardito Tambo (shaker, MIDI). Lisa Carbon and Atom Heart are two of Schmidt’s other aliases.

References

Bussy, Pascal. 2001. Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music. London: SAF Publishing Ltd. Corona, Ignacio, and Alejandro Madrid, ed. 2008. Postnational Musical Identities:                              Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario. New York: Lexington Books.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum.

Electronic Beat. 2008. “Senor Coconut – Put the Lime in the Coconut – Interview.” electronicbeat.net. http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/interviews/senor-coconut-put-the-lime-in-the-coconut-interview. (accessed October 30, 2014).

Erlmann, Veit. 1996. “The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s.” Public Culture 8(3):467-487.

Ford, Phil. 2008. “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica.” Representations 103, Summer: 107-135.

Hofer, Sonya. 2006. “I Am They: Technological Mediation, Shifting Conceptions of Identity and Techno Music,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. London: Sage Publications.

Hollings, Ken. 2002.  “Robot in Disguise.” Wire Magazine 223, September:26-29.

Kun, Josh. 1997. “Against Easy Listening: Audiotopic Readings and Transnational Soundings.” In Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latino/a America, 288-309. North Carolina: Duke University Press.

--------2009. Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

L’Hoeste, Héctor Fernández. 2007. “All Cumbias, the Cumbia: The Latin Americanization of a Tropical Genre.” In Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame, 338-364. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lipsitz, George. 2006. Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Seago, Alex. 2004. “The Kraftwerk-Effekt”: Transatlantic Circulation, Global Networks and Contemporary Pop Music.” Atlantic Studies, 1(1):85-106.

Jennifer Chu is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Yale University.Her dissertation engages with critical studies in voice, identity, and embodiment through an exploration of the sonic and visual representation of musicians who adopt alter egos in performance.

World Flutelore: Folktales, Myths and Other Stories of Magical Flute Power. By Dale Olsen. Urbana- Champaign, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014. [XX, 264 p. ISBN 9780252079412. Paperback: $28:00; Cloth: $85:00].

Reviewed by Rose Boomsma / University of California, Los Angeles

In his book World Flutelore: Folktales, Myths, and Other Stories of Magical Flute Power, Dale Olsen sets out to uncover recurring themes about flutes from around the world, displayed through various types of stories. Taking from anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, and organology, Olsen presents stories from every corner of the world to highlight topics such as gender, morality, sexuality, and power. Within each chapter, a main story serves as the foundation for this topic and the author then provides other examples to prove his point, including case studies, other myths, and personal experience. This book is stock full of information from various parts of the world, displaying the popularity of the flute, not only throughout the world, but also throughout history.

In the introduction entitled “Prelude,” Olsen lays out three reasons that flutes have magic and power, which he reiterates in the conclusion. First, power is imbued to flutes because they are breath instruments, connecting them to the human body. Secondly, whistle tones or overtones produced by flutes let them be heard from afar and subconsciously. Thirdly, flutes are often pointed to as being capable of playing beautiful and appealing melodies (xvii, 192-193). These themes can be seen in different aspects throughout the inner chapters of the book and are the most solid connecting material presented in this work.

While Olsen does take some time to discuss organology, mostly in the first chapter and then briefly throughout when he describes crafting processes and flute types, he does so in a way that is exclusive to his works, instead of relating it directly to widely accepted practices. In the first chapter, he introduces his own created organological system of classifications instead of a more widely utilized system, such as Hornbostel-Sachs. He refers to this system as “Olsen Categories” (4) and discusses seven different categories of flute, which he exemplifies with pictures. While his categorization is detailed and accurate, it would have been more helpful to use a general system that readers could apply outside of his book.

While Olsen does include a brief transition at the end of each chapter, the individual segments do not necessarily flow well into one another, as the topics are often varied, even within one chapter. For example, chapter two is prefaced by a story from Brazil, in which a turtle creates a flute from a jaguar’s bone and later passes the instrument on to a taunting monkey (13). This story leads into a chapter that discusses flute making and materials, includes three case studies from various cultures, and then ends with a brief discussion of flute symbolism. Chapter seven details the legend of how the knowledge of maize cultivation came to the Yupa of Venezuela—through the wisdom of a flute-playing stranger named Oséema (90). This Venezuelan story leads into a discussion of flutes and nature, where Olsen discusses topics including procreation, harvests, and wind representation. Chapter ten, entitled “Flutes and Death” is prefaced with a version of the famous Pied Piper story, where a rat catcher lures rats and then all the children of the town away with a flute (129). This chapter includes a tangential segment which debates whether flutes or oboes are being discussed when the word “pipe” is utilized. These are just a few examples of the plethora of topics covered both within each chapter and throughout the entire book. Because of the numerous stories and topics covered, the book has an overall eclectic feel, rather than coming across as a work with a singular thesis.

In Olsen’s brief conclusion, he promotes the need for ethnologists and folklorists to focus more on the flute in their analyses and he reiterates his three points about why flutes have magic and power, adding that the flute creates a unique connection between humans, animals, and the spirit world, and that it has widespread healing capabilities (194).

Theoretical principles are not central to this book though he does reference Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff’s interpretation of his works in regards to sound symbolism. In the beginning of his book, when he discussed the myriad of story types that he would utilize within his work, including contributions from religious books, opera, and oral legend, I was struck with the seeming disparity of these story types and wondered what kind of legitimate connections he could make among them from an academic standpoint. He left out much of the settings of stories and this takes away much of the necessary understanding needed to fully grasp them. As the book moved on, I began to think of this book more as an exploration of interesting flute stories for the flute player and enthusiast, rather than an in-depth historical or anthropological study of cultural similarities.

Gary Olsen loves flutes and his passion about them shines throughout the pages of this book. For the fellow flute lover, this book could be an intriguing read. For the anthropologist or ethnomusicologist, however, this book is a sweeping generalization that tries to band a myriad of different things together through the flute. While I do believe that the flute plays important roles throughout the world, and that folklore and storytelling often help uncover different aspects of culture, historical background and context are needed to do this scientifically. So while it is interesting to hear many stories around the world about your favorite instrument, perhaps this book should be looked at as merely a starting point for in-depth study of what the flute means as a worldwide phenomenon.