The purpose of this study was to design and develop instructional units for teaching jazz piano comping to collegiate music students possessing basic piano skills but limited experience in jazz performance. In establishing bases and rationale for the instructional units, a number of issues were considered. These issues were (1) the need for teaching jazz piano comping, (2) a definition and explanation of the musical elements and characteristics of jazz and jazz comping, (3) an understanding of the African and European transmission traditions and musical characteristics that contributed to the development of jazz, (4) a review of literature relating to jazz piano comping, including jazz, music teaching and learning, and learning theory literature, and (5) a review of jazz piano comping practice from the swing era to the present, as reflected in the work of selected central jazz pianists. The twenty-four instructional units present basic harmonic and rhythmic materials of jazz piano comping. Harmonic materials include seven basic chord structures, harmonic extensions and alterations, upper-structure triads, II-V-I cadences, tritone substitution, chord successions, and typical chord progressions. Rhythmic materials include typical jazz rhythms. Each instructional unit is comprised of (A) presentation of a theoretical concept, (B) exercises for learning the particular concept, (C) a chord progression containing the particular concept, (D) a list of recorded examples of the chord progression for examination, and (E) suggested song titles for realization by the student. The instructional units are organized into four chapters of six units each. Instructional Units I through VI focus on individual voicings, organized into cycles of descending fifths. Units VII through XII focus on the II-V-I cadence and tritone substitution. Units XIII through XVIII focus on short chord successions. Units XIX through XXIV serves as a "summing up" of material presented in the first eighteen units. Overall, this work is designed to guide the student to technical proficiency, theoretical understanding, idiomatic fluency, and a creative approach to jazz piano comping. / School of Music

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Universität Frankfurt (Main), 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (D.M.A.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Steven Stusek; submitted to the School of Music. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Sep. 4, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-101).

Both researchers and jazz professionals believe the expansion of jazz performance programs in universities over the last several decades warrants a need for critical research into the processes and experiences by which jazz students develop into professionals. Although the number of colleges offering degrees in jazz performance has risen dramatically during this time, instructional approaches remain relatively standardized throughout the schools. The purpose of this study was to investigate the experiences of five working professional New York City jazz musicians in an attempt to better understand how they learned to improvise and develop their individual voices. These musicians included Joe Lovano, Otis Brown III, Francisco Mela, James Weidman, and Matthew Wilson. In this study I used Wenger's (2008) theory of Communities of Practice as the theoretical framework for an exploration of the meaning, practice, community, and identity of these five professional jazz musicians. Data collected for this case study entailed interviews, observations, and collection of artifacts. The interview data provided by the participants were transcribed and coded for the purpose of identifying emerging themes. The themes were then woven into a narrative based on the participants' responses to a series of open-ended questions. The themes that emerged included auto-biographical recollections of the participants' earliest musical experiences. The musicians spoke openly about their childhoods and various aspects of the context of their learning experiences on the way to becoming jazz professionals. The discussion included the musicians' views on communicating through improvisation, mentoring, and the value of relationships created through involvement in a jazz community on the development of a unique improvisational voice. Two major themes emerged in data analysis. First, Joe Lovano and Us Five experienced university jazz educations but in interviews and observation, the musicians seemed not dependent on, or even utilizing that part of their past. Instead, the musicians strongly emphasized community and community building, professional on-stage experience, and longitudinal exposure and life study that many college jazz majors may never experience. Second, the musicians eschewed certain viewpoints within the music profession, within university music programs, and within the public sector that musicians can simply blend technical prowess with diligent study of a prescribed curriculum to become a professional jazz musician. Here the interviewees uniformly suggested that a unique, individual voice was necessary for acceptance within the field. Finally, I present an example based upon the data from this study of how Wenger's (2008) community of practice could be used to develop a new understanding of the process of jazz improvisation and the development of a unique improvisational voice in an institutional setting.

xxv, 492 p. ： music / This study applies Schenkerian theory to Chet Baker's jazz improvisations in order to uncover the melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal hallmarks of his style. Analyses of short excerpts taken from multiple recorded improvisations reveal Baker's improvisational vocabulary, which includes recurring underlying structures that Baker embellishes in a wide variety of ways and places in a wide variety of harmonic contexts. These analyses also explore other traits (rhythmic, timbral, etc.) that appear in Baker's improvisations throughout his career. The dissertation culminates in three illustrative analyses that demonstrate the ways in which Baker constructs single, unified improvisations by masterfully controlling the long-range voice-leading tendencies of his improvised lines. As he weaves his vocabulary into these lines, he creates improvisations that unfold in a way that is logical, satisfying in the fulfillment of expectations, and motivically cohesive on multiple levels of structure. / Committee in charge: Steve Larson， Co-Chair； Jack Boss， Co-Chair； Stephen Rodgers， Member Anne Dhu McLucas Member； George Rowe， Outside Member； Timothy Clarke， External Contributing Member

The purpose of this study was to develop and test systematically a theoretical model that delineated the constructs and subsumed variables of jazz improvisation performance. The specific research questions were; what specific performance variables are related to single line jazz solo improvisation performance? and; what is the most cogent groupings of variables into underlying constructs which characterize single line jazz solo improvisation performances for all performers, student performers, and professional performers?

This dissertation uses multi-sited ethnography to explore how the technological manipulation of sound in live jazz performance conditions the meanings, feelings, and politics of racial difference. Situated primarily in two multi-room jazz venues, Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) and the Montreux Jazz Festival, I analyze three years of participant observation with musicians, audio technicians, acousticians, and sound system designers. I analyze four main categories of technology: (1) physical acoustics; (2) sound isolation, (3) sound reinforcement (amplification); and (4) digital measurement, prediction, and manipulation technologies. My overarching goal is to provide new ways to understand live performance with more attention to the technologies, architectural designs, and human labor crucial to any sonic event. I show not only how the built physical spaces and technologies I observed are inscribed with human judgments about music and sound, but how the spaces themselves exhibit their own agentive force in conditioning social behavior. I thus rethink live performance as a dynamic network of materials, technologies, and human and nonhuman practices and meanings. My second intervention uses the figure of jazz—and, more specifically, the sound of jazz—to investigate how the intersection of technology and sound exposes new ways to think through questions of human difference. Focusing primarily on race, I show how ideals of scientific objectivity and “pure and clean” aesthetics challenge racial tropes of Black sound as “noisy” or disordered while complicating jazz’s political force as an agent of oppositional energy and Black cultural distinctiveness. Chapter one, “‘Some Rooms Make You Shout’: Physical Acoustics and the Sound of Jazz,” shows how the designers of JALC’s Rose Theater, a prestigious 1,300-seat concert hall, acoustically encoded musical and social values into the physical materials of the room and the building that surrounds it. Namely, I show how particular aspects of the hall’s physical acoustics reveal overlapping investments in western aesthetic values and Afro-diasporic priorities, including call and response, participatory interaction, and heterogenous timbral palettes. Chapter two, “‘Some Rooms Make You Whisper’: The Art of Isolation and the Racial Politics of Quiet,” focuses on Rose Theater’s acoustic isolation, accomplished through a rare and expensive “box-in-box” construction that physically disconnects the hall from any vibratory connection with the outside world. This unique architecture fosters an uncannily quiet, sequestered aural environment that counters a range of histories of racist white listening that associate Blackness, Black bodies, and Black spaces with various forms of “noisy” sonic excess. The hall’s extraordinary quietness also reinforces a culture of attentive listening that enmeshes the sound of jazz with western ontologies of aesthetic musical autonomy. Relatedly, chapter three, “‘Make Yourselves Invisible’: Transparency, Fidelity, and the Illusion of Natural Sound,” demonstrates how ideals of fidelity and transparency are embedded within electroacoustic sound systems, and how my interlocutors design and operate such systems to foster a “pure and clean” aural environment. I show how my interlocutors aspire to an illusion of a “natural,” technology-free sonic experience but deploy an array of technological systems to do it. My analysis challenges traditional notions of fidelity—and sonic mediation itself—by revealing musical experience as a constellation of vibrant interactions between acoustic vibrations, amplified sound energy, and physical human bodies. Chapter four, “Tuning the Room: On the ‘Arts’ and ‘Sciences’ of Sound and Space,” analyzes how my interlocutors design and calibrate sound systems using state-of-the-art digital equipment to foster what they call a neutral, “colorless” sonic environment with “the same sound everywhere.” This process of “tuning the room” conjures novel ontologies of sound and space as objects of detached observation and technoscientific manipulation. In chapter five, “Black Boxes, Pink Noise, and White Listening: Rationalizing Race, Gender and Jazz,” I demonstrate how the objectification of sound and space is entangled with raced and gendered epistemologies of scientific knowledge production. I further analyze these approaches to sound and space for their underlying entanglements with what Lipsitz calls a “white spatial imaginary”: an ostensibly neutral environment conducive to discriminatory systems of capital accumulation. These and other entanglements complicate the oppositional, counter-hegemonic potential of jazz and other forms of Black performance.

No description available.

I detta arbete har jag haft för avsikt att utmana mina färdigheter i komposition. Detta gjorde jag genom att sätta upp ramar i form av stjärntecken att hålla mig inom. I genomförandet av undersökningen har jag läst horoskop från diverse tidningar och utefter dessa texter improviserat fram melodiskt och harmoniskt material för att skapa fyra låtar. Även stjärntecknets astrologiska ”personlighet” har vävts in i kompositionerna. Namnen på låtarna är Fiskarna, Vågen, Oxen och Skytten. Varje låt är baserat på stjärntecknet med samma namn. Arbetet resulterade även i en femte låt som bär namnet Zodiac och är en sammanfattning av de andra fyra styckena. Målet för kompositionerna var att skrivas i genren frijazz. Jag har därför lyssnat mycket på den sortens musik för att få inspiration under arbetets gång. Även grupper som rör sig inom modern jazz har givit mig oväntat många idéer för fria improvisationskoncept. Jag har också utmanat min kompositions frekvens, delvis genom att skriva de fem låtarna på nio dagar och även försöka att inte överarbeta det jag skrivit. Med detta arbete hoppas jag kunna inspirera andra kompositörer till att utforska nya typer av kompositionsmetoder och skapa annorlunda tankesätt som kan inspirera nya fantastiska melodier och konstverk.

L'objectif général de cette recherche est d'élaborer un processus d'apprentissage d'accompagnement au piano jazz, dans le but de concilier mes deux instruments : le piano, de formation classique, et ma voix, entraînée au style jazz principalement. Elle fait état de mon parcours dans ma quête vers la synthèse de mes connaissances et le développement de ma personnalité artistique à travers la création jazz contemporaine. Celle-ci m'a menée vers l'étude de pianistes chanteurs modèles dont j'ai écouté et transcris la musique. Je me suis interrogée à savoir en quoi la transcription de chanteurs pianistes accompagnateurs peut influencer ma relation voix et piano à travers mes créations. Je suis allée plus loin dans ma compréhension grâce à l'étude de manuels théoriques, de cours maître/élève et de tutoriels. De là, j'ai pu déceler certains types de jeux majeurs en jazz pour l'accompagnement au piano de chanteurs. J'ai réuni ces types d'accompagnement en une typologie qui m'a servie tout au long de mon parcours de création. Dans ma pratique quotidienne, j'ai utilisé la recherche-action, qui se traduisait comme un processus itératif de développement - réflexion - correction. La relation entre mes deux instruments est devenue de plus en plus fusionnelle, créant ainsi un contrepoint polyphonique. Au fil des répétitions quotidiennes, j'ai apporté des modifications à mes créations comme le contrepoint entre la voix piano évoluait en un contrepoint polyphonique circulaire. En groupe, j'ai pu parfaire l'ensemble de mes œuvres, comptant cinq compositions et cinq arrangements originaux. Finalement, des similitudes qui unissent mes œuvres sont apparues, faisant émerger les caractéristiques de ma personnalité artistique. Cette recherche est une invitation aux vocalistes à s'auto-accompagner.