Hook‐Ups and Train Wrecks: Contextual Parameters and the Coordination of Jazz Interactions

This article discusses the importance of several parameters of context integral to jazz musicians' ability to hear musical signs as meaningful, such as performers' individual backgrounds and the various other styles of music available in the aural landscape, and how those parameters influence what the musicians play. Several examples from an ongoing ethnography of jazz jam sessions suggest that context is constituted by several variables, that different variables may become salient at different times, and that different interactants vary in their ability to attend to these variables. This study thus extends and elaborates frame analysis by showing that, while an interaction frame of the sort described by Goffman (1974) may perdure, it is subject to change, and the nature of the context it provides for interactions can change whenever a new interaction is initiated.     

little sister: An Afro-Temporal Solo-Play

ABSTRACT

little sister: An Afro-Temporal Solo-Play is at once a memory-scape and a mytho-biography set to poetry, movement, and mixed media. A performance poem spanning from the Antebellum South to present-moment Chicago, it tells the story of a nomadic spirit named little-she who shape-shifts through the memories and imaginings of her sister, the narrator. Through the characters little-she and the narrator, the solo-performance explores embodied ways to rupture and relieve the impact of macro forms of violence in the micro realm of the everyday. To this end, little sister witnesses and disrupts the legacy of violence in the lives of queer Black women through a trans-temporal navigation of everyday encounters within familial, small groups and intimate partner spaces.     

Kvetching and carousing under Communism: old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish city of sin

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city.” Much like their counterparts in New York and Warsaw, Odessa’s Jews have historically played a fundamental role in the city’s demographic makeup, economic life and culture. But Odessa is unique among Jewish cities because it has been mythologised as a city of sin, a frontier seaport boomtown whose commercial prosperity and balmy climate attracted legions of adventurers, gangsters and swindlers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance. Odessa’s carnivalesque environment was fertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jews spearheaded this process, adopting a Yiddish‐inflected Russian as their language for celebrating their profligate city. By the 1917 Revolution the foundations had been laid for the emergence of Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the many other Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior. They would go on to disseminate the Odessa myth using literature, comedy and music, and their immense popularity ensured that Odessa was indelibly marked as a Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourful escapades were rooted in an idiom of Jewishness.     

Considering Improvisation: Play,Transitional Space,and Discovery

This article explores the concept of improvisation in the therapeutic setting as a complex construction when elaborated in the idiom of jazz music. A composite clinical case is offered that illustrates an impasse and how improvisational thinking offers a way forward. Improvisation has recently been conceptualized through the metaphor of theater improvisation, dance, and rhythm. The therapeutic hour is considered an improvisational dialogue with the main theme (melody) and counter melodies, and harmonic possibilities that underlie the rhythmic pulse of the hour. Improvisation requires a reflective/interpretive process that draws on patterns, structures, and experiences reformulated in the relational field of the participants. The client initiates the call and response pattern, from which improvisation emerges as a mutual process of discovery. A more relaxed, receptive, and reflective posture extends Winnicott’s 1971 notion of play to integrate classic understanding and relational interaction.     

论流行音乐元素与管弦乐编配的融合

流行音乐与传统音乐形式的结合是近一个世纪以来作曲家不断作出尝试的领域,本文通过对管弦乐与爵士乐元素的结合以及其在流行歌曲演唱中的运用进行举例说明,并具体对笔者根据流行音乐元素进行编创的两首管弦乐合奏作品进行作曲技术上的分析,使管弦乐中编配技术中的流行音乐元素得以更为清晰的展示,从而说明流行音乐与古典音乐形式相互结合产生的新的音乐美感。     

一首灵魂的变奏曲——《爵士乐》中人物身份的解构与建构

《爵士乐》重述了美国黑人集体经验的基本故事:奴隶制下灵魂与肉体的分裂。这种分裂使得个体贬低自我、替换自我,把自我最好的部分置于他者之中。小说中乔的"痕迹"和维奥莱特的"裂缝"成为这种分裂的典型象征。叙述者将这些裂缝和痕迹归拢起来,放置在小说叙事的中心地位,并借用爵士乐的即兴变奏特点揭示人物角色和小说身份叙事的后现代性。     

《了不起的盖茨比》中的大河意象

本文拟从原型批评角度分析《了不起的盖茨比》中的大河意象,表明盖茨比的一生正如一条神秘的河流,其中的波澜起伏也恰好暗合了“喧嚣的二十年代”歌舞升平浮面下潜藏的人类精神危机。     

黑人音乐与美国非裔族群的自我表达

黑人音乐与美国流行音乐的关系反映了美国非裔亚文化与主流文化之间相互影响和渗透的关系的一种特殊情形:它在后者的强烈挤压和制约之中形成,却又强烈地影响了后者,它已被认同为美国文化的重要特征。文章选取1920年代的纽约哈莱姆区为视点,从跨文化交流的角度对其进行一个切面式的考察,旨在证明:在种族隔离的大环境中,在黑人文化无法进入主流话语的情况下,爵士乐成为黑人族群自我表达的一种方式,它的广泛传播使得黑人得以逐渐被认识和接受,它事实上也促成了黑人族群意识的进一步觉醒。     

爵士乐的和谐之音——论爵士乐对拉尔夫·埃利森创作的影响

19世纪末,爵士乐在美国兴起,受到美国白人和黑人的欢迎.美国黑人作家拉尔夫·埃利森从中学时代就开始接触爵士乐,深受其影响.从爵士乐产生的背景入手,分析爵士乐对埃利森创作的影响,并深入探寻爵士乐所传达出的融合思想在埃利森的两部重要小说《无形人》和《六月庆典》中的体现,对研究埃利森的作品具有重要意义.