What defines a “musical work”? Traditionally, this question has been dominated by Western art music and its reliance on prescriptive scores. Yet, with the rise of recording technologies and the growing inf ...

Booker T. Pittman (1909-1969) was a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who played with greats like Louis Armstrong and Count Basie in the 1920s and 1930s. The maternal grandson of Booker T. Washington, ...

James P. Johnson (1894–1955) is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American music. However, few people other than scholars and serious fans know of his life and work. Rare jazz aficionados k ...

Contributions by Franz Andres Morrissey, Mat Callahan, Suzanne G. Cusick, James E. Dillard, Steven Garabedian, Jim Rogers, Elissa Stroman, Britta Sweers, and Dick Weissman

What exactly is American music? ...

Duke Ellington’s Symphonic Visions, the culmination of a decade-long study of Ellington’s compositions for the symphony orchestra by author Luca Bragalini, is the first book entirely dedicated to Ellington’s s ...

Jazz legend Cootie Williams left home to start his career as a professional musician at the age of fifteen. In 1940, after eleven years as one of the major soloists with the Duke Ellington orchestra, ...

In Driftin’ on a Memory: Celebrating Seventy Years of The Isley Brothers, Trenton Bailey tells the story of this groundbreaking musical act. The Isley Brothers began recording as a vocal trio consisting ...

As an American singer, conductor, composer, and actor, Frank Sinatra, Jr. (1944–2016), had a long and successful music career and was recognized for his many contributions to American popular song. Yet, h ...

Mythologists work as cultural animateurs, tracking patterns and trends, identifying archetypal and symbolic wounds and remedies. Reading cultural and environmental events via texts and patterns from such ...

Black education in the South was the great social program of the post–Civil War era. Desperately strapped for operating capital, the first freedmen’s schools resorted to a bold fundraising experiment. Stu ...