This has been the main focus of my research activity for the last five years, the results of which are published by Ashgate in ‘The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880-1935’. In this publication I investigate:
Jazz has entered the academy through the efforts of its supporters to establish it as an important art form in its own right, and as a result, jazz has received academic attention as a field of study largely separate from both contemporary musicology or popular music studies. Jazz has remained a specific and marginalized area within twentieth century music scholarship, although with a history that spans the period, it has played an integral and influential part in the evolution of music in the modern world. Therefore, I am interested in the musical, philosophical and cultural consequences of the fusions between jazz and other musics. My work in this area has been published as follows:
"The popularity of jazz - an unpopular problem:
the significance of Swing when you’re winning"
in The Source: Challenging Jazz Criticism Volume 1, 2004
Robbie Williams’ album Swing when you’re winning, released in November 2001, is primarily significant as a fascinating artefact of popular music in the early twenty-first century. The album contains fourteen ‘covers’ of songs made famous by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr. and Dean Martin and one original song written by Williams with his long-term collaborator Guy Chambers. The 2001 Christmas number one, Somethin’ Stupid, on which Williams’ duetted with Nicole Kidman, was drawn from Swing when you’re winning, which was also number one in the album chart for several weeks over the Christmas period.
This paper responds to the challenge of writers such as Robert Walser and Derek Scott, who have respectively called for serious evaluation of the popular mainstream and the consideration of mass consumerism as a creative act. This paper develops a methodology for critical analysis of popular music by breaking down the concept of “significance” into importance (to whom and why), meaning (socially located and constructed) which mediates in the final aspect of meaningfulness (communication and reception).
"Approaching jazz-influenced wind music"
in the Journal of the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles Volume 10 2003
Although Bernstein’s Prelude Fugue and Riffs, Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue may be grouped together under the “jazz-influenced” heading for convenience, they are in fact very disparate, as they represent both American and European responses to jazz in the 1920s, when jazz was a relatively young form, and the 1940s, when it was approaching maturity. Thus, the nature of the jazz influence on the composers and the way this manifests itself musically is different in each case, suggesting the necessity for an individual and informed approach to each work. The article will explore some problematic aspects of these pieces and outline a multi-faceted approach to understanding and performing these works, which can then be applied to the increasing amount of jazz-influenced repertoire now available for wind ensemble.
Detailed analysis of each of these pieces has also been published in Winds, the magazine of the British Association of Symphonic Bands and Wind Ensembles.
Recording technology developed in parallel with jazz and continues to influence the ways in which the music evolves and changes. The importance of non-notated and improvisational components in jazz means that recording is significant as a way in which jazz performances can be fixed temporally. The dissemination of this essence of the music via recordings rather than scores has ensured that it has retained something of its orality. Unlike some other musics, the distinction between the musical material and its performance can be blurred in jazz recordings, where improvisation represents simultaneous composition and performance. All this has ensured that recording has remained an integral part of encountering, learning and performing jazz.
I am currently exploring the versatility of jazz recordings, which can function variously as artefacts, collectibles, sources, texts and textbooks for collectors, enthusiasts, historians, musicologists, students and teachers. In this knowledge, I am investigating how jazz musicians analyse recordings and approach the recording process themselves.