Circle dance ; The colors nobody wanted ; Color blind ; That long brown hair ; Mid citizen ; St. Johns River / Tarik Hassan. / text

Song for my family / Joseph Colarusso -- What a difference a day made / Maria Grever, Stanley Adams -- Love for sale / Cole Porter -- But not for me / George Gershwin -- When I fall in love / Edward Heyman, Victor Young -- Stardust / Hoagy Carmichael. / text

Yes or no ; Fee-fi-fo-fum ; Fall ; Wild flower ; Nefertiti ; Juju / Wayne Shorter. / text

Not available / text

Jazz improvisation represents one of the more impressive examples of human creative behavior, but as yet there has been little systematic investigation of its cognitive bases. The results of three studies that this investigation comprises illustrate the optimizations of thinking and behavior that underlie the capacities of skillful jazz improvisers, enabling them to meet the demands of improvised performance effectively and efficiently. Studies 1 and 2 provide evidence of a process for generating and controlling musical ideas that improvisers can enact with little conscious mediation. In Study 1, this was demonstrated by the ability of experienced improvisers to generate well-formed improvised solos during dual-task conditions, in which they allocated attentional resources to a secondary nonmusical task. In Study 2, the contributions of nonconscious processes to jazz improvisation were inferred from experienced improvisers’ descriptions of their intentions for upcoming music during improvised solos. Their descriptions contained almost no explicit details of the music they were about to play; v inexperienced improvisers, contrastingly, conceived of upcoming music largely in terms of its specific details (e.g., note selection, the quotation of licks). Study 3 examines the perceptions of two musicians performing as a duo, both serving at different times as soloist and accompanist. Here, the soloist’s attention was focused on the developmental and associative implications of his musical ideas, whereas the accompanist’s attention was devoted primarily to assessing the aesthetic and logistical implications of the soloist’s part while remaining vigilant for opportunities to directly interact. The findings in these studies illustrate the extent to which expert jazz musicians acquire and refine procedures for generating well-formed musical ideas at a minimal cognitive cost. The efficiency of the improvisational process was evidenced by the limited demands that generating novel music placed on the skilled improvisers’ attention, and in the abstract relationship between experts’ musical intentions and the specific actions they produced in bringing their intentions to fruition. / text

This dissertation investigates various issues at play in the development and perpetuation of jazz in Bulgaria from the early-20th century until the present. In particular, I explore jazz’s emergence within the conceptualization of subjective experience unique to modern Bulgaria. In this way I move away from the relatively static notion of a “transcendent” subjectivity centered on the “improviser” that constitutes a great deal of jazz historiography and discourse. Through an examination of jazz musicians, listeners, and government critics in different periods of Bulgarian history, I seek two broad but not mutually exclusive goals. The first is trace how “jazz” was conceptualized in different quarters of Bulgarian society and how those conceptualizations factored into the composition, recording, and patronage of music. This second is to posit alternatives to a subjectivity of “transcendence” in jazz performance, using the Bulgarian case as an example. Throughout the dissertation, I use “fascination” and “boredom” as the two concepts through which to ground a historically and materially-bound subjectivity that better takes into account social, cultural, and economic factors unique to Bulgaria. Ultimately, these concepts feature prominently in understanding jazz’s role in framing the fractured subjectivities of Bulgarians within modernity, as well as the constant historical struggle by Bulgarians to center senses of self and place within a changing Bulgaria, a changing Europe, and a changing world. / text

This thesis examines the life and work of Japanese jazz composer, pianist and band-leader Toshiko Akiyoshi (b. 1929), one of the most successful women in modern jazz. Over the course of her career, Akiyoshi performed and traveled extensively with musicians in Japan and in the United States, courting two audiences through and earning respect and success in both countries. Analysis of three pieces, from three albums representing different stages of her career, and a live performance from June 2010 are used to illustrate the maturation of Akiyoshi's work and how she combined American and Japanese musical traditions and styles, including bebop and Japanese Noh, to create her own style and a new type of jazz fusion.

Examensarbete 15 hp

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Mus.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1993.

The purpose of this thesis is to review some of the folk and analytical evaluations concerning the nature and function of the blues tradition. It has been hypothesized that the term "gutbucket" signifies a distinctly negative attitude. This notion has wide-spread acceptance among American blacks as well as whites. The form of musical expression known as the blues has been traditionally regarded as "gutbucket" music. This attitude has resulted from definite misconceptions concerning the cultural, historical and aesthetic meaning of the blues. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the basis for these presumed negative attitudes while either substantiating or refuting the above premise.