Alex W. Rodriguez's blog

When I first spoke with jazz saxophone legend Sonny Rollins in May 2011, interviewing him in advance of a concert in Newark, I remember being struck by the combination of confident dedication and playful curiosity in his approach to music and life.

On January 26, my fieldwork in Santiago, Chile took an unforgettable turn when I took to the patio of a shared artists’ house to perform a set of improvised music with three Chilean jazz musicians. This concert came about as part of a transnational collective effort among Chilean jazz aficionados, a Danish web startup company, and my own network of family, friends, and fellow music lovers.

In December 1917, U.S. Merchant Marine Truman Blair Cook wrote a diary entry describing his crew’s arrival in Arica, Chile—a small mining town near the country’s northern border. The following is excerpted from Oregon Historical Quarterly, where Cook's diaries were published in 1976:

Editor’s Note: Ethnomusicology Review Editor In Chief Alex W.

Earlier this month, Routledge announced a new monograph series, Transnational Studies in Jazz.

Happy 2014, fellow ethnomusicologists! My name is Alex W. Rodriguez, and it is with great pleasure that I am stepping into the position of Editor In Chief for Volume 19 of Ethnomusicology Review, in our 30th year of publication.

“There's trombone playing in all parts of the world, but the heart of all that is here at Trombonanza.” –trombonist Paul Compton

People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now! Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

“Thus it is in our own roles as teachers, musicians, and scholars that we come to this project with passion, energy, and love. The creation of this book has been a collaboration called and responded to one another in both music and in writing, as we have developed this volume.”

Book of Omens. By Daniel Rosenboom. Los Angeles: Daniel Rosenboom Music, 2013. More information: http://danielrosenboom.com/book-of-omens

As a part of their June series "Music Scenes," the website for US Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music has recently posted a pair of essays on jazz and space that speak to one another in a way that ethnomusicologists may find useful.