To begin, I invite you to watch this clip of Esperanza Spalding and Gretchen Parlato collaborating in recording Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Inútil Paisagem,” plucking strings, clapping, clicking tongues, improvising, singing with words in English and in Portuguese, vocalizing melodies, bass lines and counterpoints.
Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music.
In 1991, American hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest released "Jazz (We've Got)" on their second album The Low End Theory, which featured a sample of Jimmy McGriff and Lucky Thompson’s live version of "Green Dolphin Street" from their album Friday the 1
Jazz improvisation is, or at least can be, a deeply resonant articulation of—and metaphor for—democratic human expression. This is axiomatic in the discourse. It is a theme that comes up again and again, virtually from jazz’s first public stirrings.
Dave DeMotta is a New York-based pianist, scholar, and adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and M.M. and B.M. degrees in jazz performance from William Paterson University. I spoke with Dr. DeMotta on the topic of his recent dissertation, “The Contributions of Earl ‘Bud’ Powell to the Modern Jazz Style.”
Submitted by AJ Kluth on September 29, 2014 - 10:56pm
Modern scholarly attempts to account for musical meaning in the academy are roughly divided among musicology, ethnomusicology, and systematic musicology.
Keep On Keepin' On. Directed by Alan Hicks. 86 minutes. Radius-TWC, 2014.
Reviewed by Ben Doleac
Submitted by Dan Tepfer on August 18, 2014 - 4:39pm
Editor's Note: Part I of this piece can be read here.
Submitted by Dan Tepfer on August 16, 2014 - 1:26pm
As I look back over the last ten years, and the peculiar journey with J.S. Bach that the time represents for me, it’s sometimes hard to believe that I’m here, now, playing the Goldberg Variations in their entirety, from memory, for sometimes sizeable audiences, well enough apparently to get enthusiastic approval from the classical section of the New York Times.
Submitted by Ben Boye on July 6, 2014 - 6:25pm
Not long ago, I was at a performance of some friends and acquaintances.* They are all masterful improvisers, each with a well-developed, innovative, singular musical approach. In the case of this specific performance, the musicians were paired with a handful of improvisers with whom they had never played.
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