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This PhD project examines the central issue of intertextuality and dialogism m jazz trom a range ot critical, analytical and practical perspectives. A Lcal vocabulary drawn from theories of 'codes', including work in the fields of intertextuality studies and semiotics, is applied to the study of jazz performance in order to further expand on theories of signifyin' already popular in jazz studies. The concept of 'code-mixing' is central to the thesis, and various methods by which jazz musicians juxtapose and blend codes, often representative of different cultural areas, are identified and analyzed using notated examples.

The notion of groove is fundamental to jazz culture and the term yields a rich set of understandings for jazz musicians. Within the literature, no single perspective on groove exists and many questions remain about the relationship between timing processes, phenomenal experience and musical structures in making sense of groove.

Talmage Holt 'Tal' Farlow (1921–1998), American jazz guitarist, is only mentioned briefly in general jazz histories but his exceptional talent meant that he worked from the mid-1940s at the heart of the New York's modern jazz world. His repertoire for such creative and virtuosic music drew upon a surprisingly narrow range of sources; the 'imaginary' American Popular Songbook was at his playing's core, alongside his own and other jazz artists’ compositions. However, his radical approach to such familiar-sounding material was that of a true 20th century artist, and the various connections between jazz and Modernism are scrutinised here. Close readings, transcriptions, comparisons, and analyses of Farlow's approach to this music allows us to examine the place of jazz improvisation within the established discipline of taking popular tunes as the basis for improvised performance, and his performances of three 'jazz standard' songs are transcribed in full. Another chapter explores Johnny Green's song, 'Body and Soul': Farlow's fascination with this standard illustrates well his harmonic innovations. Two solo guitar performances of this song are transcribed in the appendices. A considerable amount of Farlow-related film material and recordings exist alongside his catalogue of commercially released recordings (1945–1997). Furthermore, in the 1980s and early 1990s I had the privilege of meeting this modest and affable musical genius several times, attending fifteen memorable concerts by Farlow during several UK tours. These resources and experiences offer other insights into his fascinating and complex playing techniques. A recognised virtuoso on the electric guitar, Farlow's guitar style and its extended techniques are examined in a technical chapter. Finally, Farlow's compositions are considered: his original themes are only a small percentage of his output but these offer interesting comparisons of composer and jazz improviser, highlighting the common ground between original compositions, contrafacts, and the Songbook.

This Practice-as-Research PhD suggests ways in which nineteenth-century Romantic musical forms and textures can be implemented in contemporary solo jazz piano performance. In order for solo piano narratives to be expanded without negotiating their location within jazz, the enquiry engages with an examination of the possible ways in which narrative techniques of nineteenth-century Romantic pianism may have found their way into certain modern jazz piano strands. The discussion focuses on Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett because of their educational background and of the frequency in which the two pianists are associated by critics and scholars. One aim of this project is explanatory: to elucidate what are those features in the styles of the particular modern jazz pianists that have contributed to labeling them as ‘romantics’. To achieve this, the thesis begins first with an observation of how Romantic ideology is projected onto these artists. Following, the analyses of their performances draw their vocabulary from the conceptual territory of musical narrative, since Narrative is largely connected with Romanticism. The other aim is paradigmatic: the appropriation of formal and textural models taken from nineteenth-century Romantic pianism, and their application to contemporary solo jazz piano. Through this practice, the narrative possibilities of contemporary solo jazz piano styles are expanded, via the stylistic dialogism between jazz and romanticism. Specifically, the troping of jazz codes with romantic textures, allows the transformation of themes, through the combination of textural topics with chromatic transpositions. The resulting ‘shifts in musical discourse’ are akin to the spirit of nineteenth-century Romantic musical narratives.

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This thesis treats the composer-bandleader as a novel critical concept that illuminates the subtly complex relationship between musical culture, ideology and subjectivity during the interwar years of the twentieth century. Four case studies, based upon the work of Reginald Foresythe, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Raymond Scott and Duke Ellington, paint a picture of the composer-bandleader as a usefully discursive figure occupying a special position between, around or about the categories of genre and role that arose with music’s commodification. From this unique location composer-bandleaders are shown to explore socio-political issues in a usefully critical way that might otherwise be impossible within the standard ideological framework of music. The composer-bandleaders are used to reconsider critical theories as much as interdisciplinary critical approaches are utilised to examine the work of the musicians. Thus Theodor Adorno’s dismissal of a socio-political function for jazz is critiqued by Foresythe’s camp modernism. Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation is articulated with John Mowitt’s concept of drumming in exploring the critical relationship between jazz culture and feminine subjectivity in Hardin Armstrong’s work. Scott’s “Quintette” compositions are subjected to a Lacanian reading to highlight music’s critical function in fantasising Jewish subjectivity and Michel Foucault’s notion of polemics and Henry Louis Gates’ concept of Signifyin(g) are articulated in the discursive relationship between musical culture and race politics in Ellington’s work. Ultimately these figures are taken to embody Slavoj Zižek’s “Spectre of Ideology” that covers over the Real of the antagonism within the musical-ideological system of Symbolic “reality” in which they operate. The thesis argues that by listening to, and fantasising about, such “spectral apparitions” we can hear things in music that might otherwise be silenced by the workings of ideology. In this way we can use the composer-bandleader figure to amplify how music can challenge ideological structures and shape society.

This study focuses on three albums of original music performed and recorded by the author as the leader of the Haftor Medbøe Group and released variously by Linn Records and Fabrikant Records between 2006 and 2010. Through the prisms of historiography, community and boundary, cultural migration, and collaboration, the thesis explores creative identity and practice as formatively and summatively applied in the realisation of the published works. The thesis employs personal reflection on the composition and performance of the published works to present an account of evolving engagement with current and historical thinking on narrative, trope and identity in jazz music and its communities. The discussion will challenge accepted constructions of linear, canonical history in jazz, offering instead a pluralist understanding of its stylistic and aesthetic development over the past century. The assumptive and selective modalities through which jazz histories and practices are collectively constructed will be viewed in parallel with the author's retrospective understanding of personal creative history and cumulative identity. The imagining of global, national and local communities of jazz production and reception will be examined in relation to their influence on the cultural positioning of the author as a jazz composer and performer. In looking beyond historical perceptions of jazz as an instrument of American cultural diplomacy and dominance, it will be shown that the European adoption of the musical language of jazz has, using the example of Nordic Tone, given rise to discrete reinterpretations and divergences from the genre's ethnic roots. The role of national identity in non-American conceptions of jazz is consequently examined in the context of the author's experience of creative and collaborative practice through the published works. It will be argued that in spite of being culturally rooted in early 20th Century America, jazz has become a ‘glocally'-informed music, with locally and individually framed values of genre authenticity and guardianship extant alongside traditionalist claims to heritable lineage. Through considering and reflecting on cultural and national identities and communities, the thesis will demonstrate that musical practice and collaboration are informed and affected by complex conscious and subconscious relationships with these themes, that are ultimately synthesised in the published works.

Kind of Blue remains one of the most influential and successful jazz albums ever recorded, yet we know surprisingly few details concerning how it was written and the creative roles played by its participants. Previous studies in the literature emphasise modal and blues content within the album, overlooking the creative principle that underpins Kind of Blue – repetition and variation. Davis composed his album by Signifyin(g), transforming and recombining musical items of interest adopted from recent recordings of the period. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary framework that combines note-based observations with intertextual theory. It maps out the intertextual associations of each piece on Kind of Blue, illuminating Davis’s creative practice and more generally, Signifyin(g) in jazz. The study presents a more rounded account of the trumpeter, identifying Significations that possess a transformative power indicative of his idiosyncratic voice. This derives from the trumpeter’s skill in recognising the musical potential implicit in each borrowed item. Davis employed varied modes of revision in response to each insight, which nevertheless exhibit common traits – simplicity/neatness of approach, economical use of materials and revisional instinct. The study catches Davis in the act of revising musical tradition, as the trumpeter renegotiates African-American traditional forms using contemporary jazz devices. Some tracks exhibit “indirection” by saying one thing but meaning another. Thus, while the bluesy vamps of “All Blues” appear to affirm the blues tradition, a series of intertextual readings reveal a hidden dialogue concerning the mutability of style, as musical items traverse stylistic boundaries with ease courtesy of Davis’s Signifyin(g) voice.

Josef Zawinul (1932-2007) holds a rare place in the world of jazz in view of the fact that as a European he forged a long and distinguished musical career in America. Indeed, from a position of relative obscurity when he arrived in New York in 1959, he went on to become one of contemporary jazz’s most prolific and commercially successful composers. The main focus of this dissertation will be Zawinul’s rise to prominence in American jazz during the 1960s and 1970s. In this vital period of his creative life he is associated with a variety of jazz contexts: performing with Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley’s band as a hard bop pianist in the early 1960s; developing new approaches as a composer and keyboard player for Adderley’s group during the ‘soul jazz’ period (1966 to 1969); recording independently under his own name (1966 to 1970); collaborating with Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and co-founding the influential contemporary jazz ensemble Weather Report (early 1970s onwards). Most significantly, he was a key figure (both as a performer and composer) in the new electro-acoustic jazz that emerged in the mid-1960s and his unwavering commitment to this hybrid idiom has left a substantial and wide-ranging body of work. Given the impact and scale of Zawinul’s contribution to contemporary jazz in the second half of the twentieth century, it surely prompts the question: why has there been a dearth of scholarly discussion concerning his artistic legacy? With the aim of rectifying this omission, it is hoped that this dissertation will therefore go some way towards bringing long overdue critical engagement with his music. To this end, this study will examine a selection of Zawinul’s mature works and attempt to explicate not only the diverse range of influences (musical and cultural) that were essential to his artistic development but also the nature of his aesthetic eclecticism from which he created an individual compositional language.