Letter from the Editor

Abstract

Recently I was asked to conduct a series of classes on jazz history for a group of middle and high school students for a week long “jazz camp” at Michigan State University. As one who is more accustomed to teaching advanced undergraduates and graduate students, I must confess to a bit of trepidation, not knowing how this group of young people would react to a musicologist. I quickly found that my fears were misplaced, as it was a joy to work with a group of young men and women who were respectful, attentive, and deeply committed to jazz. But what I was most impressed with was the enthusiasm that these students had not just for playing, but for talking about the complex issues that surround jazz today; they were not at all shy about stating their opinions on topics as wide ranging as Wynton Marsalis, Kenny G, and Lady Gaga. Scholarly curiously is not, it seems, limited to those of us with letters after our names, or who write about the music for a living. A recent trip to the Jazz Utopia conference hosted by Birmingham City University demonstrates well that jazz scholarship, too, is thriving, and that our work is limited only by our imagination. I can only hope that some of the teenagers in my group will someday be presenting at conferences such as that, and writing in journals such as this. It is my hope that the current issue of Jazz Perspectives will do justice to this idea. The first article in this issue is contributed by John Meyers of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Meyers engages in what I might would term a “micro history” of Miles Davis’s repertoire in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on the Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn standard “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” the “last standard” in Davis’s repertoire, outlasting even such stalwarts as “My Funny Valentine.” Meyers deftly traces the various versions of the song from the “Second Classic Quartet” through the Bitches Brew period, and in so doing, he demonstrates how Davis’s performances of the song during this critical transitional time illuminate important elements of the trumpeter’s changing approach and philosophy, as well as significant fault lines between jazz and popular music. Next, Alexander Gagatsis, currently a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham, offers an extensive study of the work of legendary vibraphonist Milt Jackson. Combining probing musical analysis, rich contextual accounts, and drawing on both deep scholarship and his own experience as a performing jazz vibraphonist, Gagatsis attempts to shed light on Jackson’s improvisational approach, which draws on influences ranging from his community to motor-mechanical processes unique to the instrument. By focusing on Jackson’s work outside the context of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gagatsis opens a new front in Jazz Perspectives, 2015 Vol. 9, No. 2, 111–112, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2015.1204045