Conference Agenda

Frameworks for understanding musical improvisation typically foreground melody, harmony, or rhythm as core structural elements. In this presentation, focusing on the creative practice of Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Júlia “Bella” Silveira, I analyze an underexamined dimension of group improvisation: timbre. A prolific instrument constructor, electronic music specialist, and participant in São Paulo’s experimental music scene, over the past decade Bella has performed collective improvisations with over one hundred different artists from such diverse genre backgrounds as MPB, hip hop, free jazz, electronic music, heavy metal, sound art, and baião. In almost all of these collaborative projects, she performs without playing melodies, chords, or delineated beats. Drawing from interviews with Bella and several of her creative partners, this paper elaborates the distinct dynamics of Bella’s approach to timbral improvisation: a process in which collective improvisation is structured not by melodic or rhythmic frameworks, but instead by timbral configurations. Drawing from scholarship on timbral harmony (Hasegawa 2019) and free improvisation (Borgo 2005; Bunk 2011), I show that timbre can constitute an ideal realm for fostering improvisational relationships across traditional stylistic boundaries. As case studies, I examine creative projects Bella developed with traditional rabeca fiddle player Thomas Rohrer and heavy metal guitarist Nahnati Francischini. The paper concludes with a discussion of the dualistic nature of timbral improvisation, concentrating on how factors such as sexism can complicate improvised conversations and render them aggressive rather than communicative or transformative processes.

When Snarky Puppy won their first “Best R&B Song” Grammy for “Something” in 2013, it made the group visible and popular in both jazz and popular music. Since then, they have garnered four additional Grammys in the “Best Contemporary Instrumental Album” category, as well as several “Best Jazz Group” and “Favorite Jazz Fusion Group” awards in publications like Downbeat and JazzTimes. Although Snarky Puppy’s success is now undeniable, these various accolades highlight a general disagreement over exactly how the band should be categorized—a disagreement that stems, in part, from the band members themselves, who remain reluctant to explicitly claim any association with jazz or jazz fusion.

In this paper, I argue that Snarky Puppy represents a contemporary style of jazz that I term “post-fusion.” Post-fusion bands share many of 1970s jazz fusion’s musical characteristics—including expanded instrumentation and timbres, virtuosity, episodic forms, and rhythmic complexity. However, their wider incorporation of diverse musical styles such as various kinds of pop, soul, gospel, and hip-hop; their ability to emphasize musical characteristics beyond technical virtuosity; and their ambivalence towards being categorized stylistically ultimately sets them apart from their predecessors. Building on the work of Kevin Fellezs, Steven Pond, and John Covach, I contextualize Snarky Puppy’s relationship to 1970s jazz fusion, highlighting the stylistic similarities between them and early fusion groups. Then, using their 2014 album We Like it Here as a case study, I demonstrate how the group has adopted a more modern approach that significantly diverges from this lineage. Ultimately, “post-fusion” further demonstrates the increased permeability of genre boundaries in contemporary popular music. Moreover, it provides a useful framework for understanding how many musicians experience and conceive of jazz in the twenty-first century.

Jazz guitarist, pharmacist, and “super theoretician” Ted Dunbar (1937–1998) wrote four method books between 1975–1979. The first installment, A System of Tonal Convergence for Improvisors, Composers, and Arrangers (1975), was written as an extension of George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953). In this presentation, I provide a general overview of Dunbar’s treatise and discuss how Dunbar expanded Russell’s theory in two ways.

The first involves his deployment of Russell’s chordmode substitutions within cadences, or what Dunbar calls “convergent zones.” Important to convergent zones is the resolution of the “mysterious tritone interval” in each of his scales. In addition to analyzing these scales, I will show that Dunbar’s focus on the tritone stems from his close reading of Paul Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition (1937 [1945]), which uses the tritone as its primary organizing principle in his theory of harmonic fluctuations. Dunbar’s convergent scales are summarized in his “circle of gravities” that contains twenty-four tritone-containing scales in motion toward the tonic. As a result, Dunbar’s treatise is a theoretical prototype of the “tritone substitution,” a term not yet labeled nor codified at the time of its publication.

The second expansion involves Dunbar’s faithful application of Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s teachings, known as The Fourth Way, into his own System. Russell’s connection to Gurdjieff’s methods has been well documented by the likes of Hannaford (2021), Bivins (2015), Monson (2007), and others. However, Dunbar draws on some different aspects of Gurdjieff’s philosophy—specifically the “Law of Octaves” which is depicted similarly to a neo-Platonic diatonic scale on a monochord. Like other occult representations of the monochord, each pitch (given solfege labels in Gurdjieff’s system) represents both a Pythagorean ratio, and a stage in the process of spiritual awakening. Traversing from the lowest vibration to highest is equal to physical matter becoming spiritual. Gurdjieff’s esoteric teachings aim to awaken the soul for the purposes of inner development.

Dunbar believed that the jazz soloist could unlock the full potential of their own individual voice through music’s sympathetic resonances. The chromatic freedom allotted by the tritone substitution opened the pathway to this spiritual system.