Jazz and Culture is a bi-annual publication devoted to publishing cutting-edge research on jazz from multiple perspectives. Founded on the principle that both scholars and musicians offer invaluable contributions, the journal juxtaposes groundbreaking work by researchers alongside oral histories and articles written by master artists in the field.
Every year, the “Fall – Winter” issue of the journal is dedicated to a specific theme. Check out some of the recent special issues below:
Jazz Publics in Southeast Asia (Volume 7, Issue 2, Fall – Winter 2024)
This themed issue takes as a point of departure the movement, representation, and practice of jazz in Southeast Asia as a complex entanglement within and beyond select sonic territories. Each article investigates the history of jazz in the region as a globally circulating form of popular culture that local agents embed in societies by relating, resembling, and harnessing existing cultural forms. The authors draw upon various methodologies including ethnography, archival study, and media critique to address the ways in which jazz continues to become meaningful in the lives of Southeast Asian people.
In this themed issue, James Heazlewood-Dale, Marvin McNeill, Kate Galloway, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye offer complementary approaches to listening for, to, in, and with jazz across contemporary screen media. In doing so, they offer insight on how the music, performances, musicians, listeners, cultural ideas, and icons of both jazz and “jazz” as heard on screen play a sustained role in the reception, understanding, and classification of jazz as a genre and performance practice.
Nocoastjazz (Volume 5, Issue 2, Fall – Winter 2022)
The term “nocoastjazz” can be defined by geography—often marking differences in place, practices, style, and demographics (of both artists and audiences) that depart from what we might expect to see and hear in the jazz metropole. As a concept, however, nocoastjazz decenters exceptional discourses stemming from mass-mediated representation of the music and its scenes within the jazz metropoles. Contributions to this issue interrogate how jazz sustains itself in places hidden by the metropole’s towering effect on the jazz imaginary and editors prioritized alternative perspectives, sounds, spaces, and authorial subjects in this issue.
“Jazz” in the Present Tense (Volume 4, Issue 2, Fall – Winter 2021)
This issue is an attempt to take a snapshot of jazz (or “jazz”) in early 2020, right after the globe had plunged into the COVID-19 lockdown. In designing this special issue, editors sought out contributors who could grapple with questions of the “now” in the improvised music called jazz and speak to the challenges that artists and audiences face on where the music is going. Along with articles on whiteness, the #MeToo movement, and other topical issues, the editors of this issue put together a virtual roundtable discussion on COVID-19-era precarity and community.
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- Check out our other music journals: American Music, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, Ethnomusicology, and Music and the Moving Image
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