I have published writings on Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Brad Mehldau, Robert Glasper, and Bill Evans, as well as theoretical and educational materials. |
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Motive, Collection, and Voice Leading in Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”
Jazz Perspectives, 2020 People often attribute awareness of compositional structure to composers in the Western European tradition, but are less likely to do so for jazz composers, especially if they are African-American. Both the complete set of melodic tones in Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and the complete set of chord roots adhere strictly to the same symmetrical, nonatonic (nine-note) collection. Could this have occurred by chance or was it necessarily part of Coltrane’s compositional design? I ask that question (and many others) in the article. It turns out to be a surprisingly complex mathematical problem, and I consulted extensively with my colleague Rohit Patra in the University of Florida Department of Statistics to solve it. |
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Preface from the Guest Editor
Jazz Perspectives, 2020 I am pleased to have served as Executive Guest Editor for a special issue of Jazz Perspectives devoted to John Coltrane. The articles presented here highlight the multifaceted nature of Coltrane’s career by utilizing a wide scope of methodologies, including transformational, set-theoretical, reductive, rhythmic, textual, historical, statistical, and computational analytical approaches. I would like to thank the other guest editors for their expert reviewing and editing work: Keith Waters, Daniel Shanahan, and Keith Salley. I am grateful to Lewis Porter for his input and for contributing a foreword to the issue. I would also like to thank the editorial team at JP for their assistance, especially Ken Prouty. |
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Detail, Reduction, and Organicism: A Response to Philip Ewell
Journal of Schenkerian Studies, 2019 Philip Ewell gave a seminal plenary address on racism in music theory at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, which has already helped bring about direly-needed transformative work in the white-male dominated world of college music studies. (Here is a link to the article version of his talk.) Shortly after, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies put out a call for essays discussing Ewell's research on the Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker. I took the opportunity to reiterate Ewell’s rallying cry—“music theory is white”—and discuss the issue in terms of jazz. I also addressed the question of hierarchical structure in music versus social and political hierarchies. When the symposium was published a significant controversy ensued, as several of the articles simply proved Ewell’s point. The story has been covered by the New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, and more. |
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Stable Norms and Salient Deviations: Multilayered Listening in Jazz and Common-Practice Music
Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, 2016 In this article I talk about the relationship between the most obvious features of jazz and what goes on beneath the surface. The essay contains fifty-four hypermetric conducting exercises drawn from both the classical and jazz repertories, organized in order from easy to difficult, each with links to scores and playlists. Though designed for undergraduate students with a classical background, these exercises are useful for anyone who wishes to better understand jazz. The article is best viewed in its original online format. |
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A Selected Review of Chords and Scales in The Schillinger System of Musical Composition
Музыкальное Искусство и Образование, Теория, Методология, Практика (Musical Art and Education: Theory, Methodology, Practice), 2016 My research on the composer and theorist Joseph Moiseyevitch Schillinger was included in a volume about Russian music. I initially became interested in the subject because the Schillinger System of Musical Composition (1946) played a significant role in the development of jazz, and was the initial basis for the Berklee College of Music (which was originally called Schillinger House). In this article I compare the Schillinger System with a work published one year later by another Russian theorist-composer, Nicolas Slonimky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947), which was also influential on many jazz musicians (Coltrane, in particular). |
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Schenkerian versus Salzerian Analysis of Jazz
Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler, 2016 In this article I use a Bill Evans improvisation on “Stella by Starlight” to illustrate how jazz musicians create linear structure with chord extensions. I also talk about Evans’s use of metric displacement and thematic reference. |
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On Jazz Analysis: Schenker, Salzer, and Salience
PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2013 During my doctoral research at the University of Washington in Seattle, I took a deep dive into a recording of “Green Chimneys” by the Thelonious Monk Quartet (the lesser-known 1966 version appearing on the 1996 re-release of Straight, No Chaser). The dissertation features extensive transcription and analysis of the performance, and examines how various forms of layer analysis may be used to understand deep-level structure in jazz. |