The purpose of this study is to provide a historiographical and musical analysis examining the jazz ride cymbal pattern, from its inception on woodblock, small accessory cymbals, hand cymbal mechanisms and brushes through what becomes known as the modern-day ride cymbal pattern. This research examines a wide array of drummers and bandleaders, with the objective of identifying the earliest recordings of this important addition to jazz drumming, and popular music history while analyzing the ride cymbal pattern's evolution through definitive recordings. The study begins with the earliest known recordings that clearly display the pattern as it is played on any of the instruments mentioned above. The research concludes with the jam sessions of the early 1940s at Minton's Playhouse, where the pioneer of bebop drumming, Kenny Clarke, experimented with altering the pattern. At this point, the pattern reach its final level of maturity and has since experienced no subsequent major modification. The historical and geographical analysis uses relevant literature from the field of jazz history in order to interpret and evaluate the impact of the the overall trajectory of the music and players. By surveying newspaper and magazine articles, archival interviews, and photographic sources, combined with audio and film analysis, it is clear that drummers navigated a path to the maturation of the pattern.

Jazz and rock have been historically treated as separate musical traditions, despite having many similar musical and cultural characteristics, as well as sharing significant periods of interaction and overlap throughout popular music history. The rift between jazz and rock, and jazz and rock scholarship, is based on a set of received assumptions as to why jazz and rock are different. However, these assumptions are not naturally inherent to the two genres, but are instead the result of a discursive construction that defines them in contrast to one another. Furthermore, the roots of this discursive divide are to be found in the history of popular music journalism. In this thesis I challenge the traditional divide between jazz and rock by examining five historical case studies in American jazz and rock journalism. My underlying argument is that we cannot take for granted the fact that jazz and rock would ultimately become separate discourses: what are now represented as inevitable musical and cultural divergences between the two genres were actually constructed under very particular institutional and historical forces. There are other ways popular music history could have been written (and has been written) that call the oppositional representation of jazz and rock into question. The case studies focus on the two oldest surviving and most influential jazz and rock periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. I examine the role of critics in developing a distinction between the two genres that would eventually be reproduced in the academic scholarship of jazz and rock. I also demonstrate how the formation of jazz and rock as genres has been influenced by non-musicological factors, not least of all by music magazines as commercial institutions trying to survive and compete in the American press industry.

A significant body of solo literature for the trombone has been written in the last fifty years that draws as much from the jazz tradition as from that of European classical music. While much attention has been paid to these works' use of characteristic jazz rhythms, harmonies and melodic inflections, there has been little focus on timbre, the musical element that perhaps most readily distinguishes jazz from other styles of Western music. This paper focuses on the important role jazz timbres should play in a performer's interpretation of those works that are significantly influenced by jazz. It includes explorations of the significant differences in concepts of timbre between European classical music and jazz, some of the ways in which these timbral differences are produced, and methods by which performers can develop the skills necessary to produce these varied timbres. Particular attention is paid to the importance of timbre to idiomatically appropriate performances of two significant works from the solo trombone repertoire, Robert Suderburg's Night Set (Chamber Music III) and Richard Peaslee's Arrows of Time.

Explains how Afro-Cuban culture influenced African-American jazzmen and led to the formation of Afro-Cuban or Latin jazz in 1947 by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo. Explores the musical connections between the physical plane of Cuba and the United States, and the esoteric spiritual world of the orishas and myths coming to life in sacred and secular music forms.