Conference Agenda

The player piano and piano rolls occupy a unique space in jazz history, bridging Jazz with mechanical music reproduction. These technologies preserved intricate jazz performances and allowed artists to reach audiences beyond live venues. Yet, despite their significance, many figures central to their development remain underrecognized.

This paper examines the contributions of J. Lawrence Cook (1899–1976), a prolific yet overlooked Black artist who played a crucial role in the player piano era. As one of the most productive piano roll arrangers of the 20th century, Cook crafted thousands of rolls, many of which were widely circulated by major music roll companies such as the Q.R.S Music Company. His work extended beyond simple transcription; he infused rolls with stylistic nuance, capturing the dynamism of jazz performance in ways that mechanical reproduction often struggled to achieve.

Cook’s influence is particularly evident in his connection to Fats Waller. Some of Cook’s rolls were released under Waller’s name, highlighting the complexities of authorship and recognition in jazz history. Furthermore, Cook's contributions were not limited to performance—he also played a key role in advancing piano roll technology, refining techniques that enhanced the expressivity of mechanically reproduced music.

This paper draws on ethnographic and musicological approaches to analyze Cook’s musical journeys and piano rolls, shedding light on his stylistic innovations and technical contributions. By acknowledging his legacy, I aim to reposition Cook within jazz historiography, arguing that his work not only shaped the player piano era but also merits recognition as a significant contribution to jazz history. His artistry underscores the need to celebrate unsung masters whose influence continues to resonate within jazz and beyond.

During Poland’s catacomb era (1948 – 1953), the Polish state’s suppression of jazz imbued the genre with an ethos of resistance and freedom. While jazz was leveraged by the US as a diplomatic tool in Eastern Bloc countries (Hatschek, 2010; Saito, 2019), state-promoted folk music upheld Soviet realism, placing the genres on opposing sides of Cold War cultural politics. In the 1960s–1970s, Zbigniew Seifert, the Polish “John Coltrane of the violin,” fused folk and jazz, laying the groundwork for a uniquely Polish jazz violin complex that reconciles this duality.

Seifert’s legacy is sounded in contemporary Polish jazz violin through the reproduction of folk-jazz syncretism and his adaptation of Coltrane’s language to the instrument. Swidoba (2005) contends that Coltrane’s abstract use of modal harmonies functions as a political-affective inscription of sound in his work, aligning it with a transcendental freedom. This political-affective sonority was not only subsumed by Seifert but also resonates today within contemporary Polish jazz violin. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork and interviews with Polish jazz violinists from 2022-2023, I examine the entwined threads of freedom and folk-jazz syncretism in contemporary Polish jazz violin. Conceptually, I employ Assmann’s (2008) cultural memory framework, and Roudetemof’s (2022) definition of glocalization as “the refraction of globalization through the local” (p.403). Interviewees consistently: 1) cited both Seifert and Coltrane as influences; 2) codified jazz with “freedom” and folk with “honesty”; and 3) noted that their search for an individual, localized sound incited Polish folk-jazz syncretism.

Pietraszewski (2014) asserts that the associations between jazz and freedom in Poland continue to be expressed today in increasingly individualized ways. Building on his work, I argue that both folk-jazz hybridity and symbolic associations with freedom are defining elements of an emergent Polish jazz violin complex. Polish jazz violinists connect freedom and jazz through musical agency and self-realization. In a globalized world, they leverage folk-jazz syncretism as a glocalizing force, engaging entangled notions of cultural and personal authenticity. By examining how musicians reconcile nationalistic ideological co-options of local and global musical paradigms, this paper sheds light on the complexities of transnationalism, identity, and political signification in music.

Musician, singer, songwriter, film score composer, arranger, musical director, producer, recording artist, and professor: American artist Patrice Rushen has amassed an impressive list of accomplishments over the course of 55 years, most of which were achieved in her first decade as a professional; Emmett G. Price III describes her as a “renaissance woman...not only expanding the sound, presentation, and awareness of jazz and black music on a global stage but [also] augmenting the boundaries of black cultural expression.” Classically trained prior to navigating her way towards jazz and R&B, Rushen has maintained a steady course with both self-confidence and humility while navigating through musical environments which favor and celebrate heterosexual male participation, leaving other genders and orientations at a disadvantage.

For most of the first two decades of her career, Rushen employed a specific keyboard instrument known as the Fender Rhodes which played a key role in helping Rushen to sound as a musician and performer in both the jazz and R&B genres. This paper studies how the Fender Rhodes keyboard facilitated Rushen's negotiations and positionings first in her professional career as composer and performer in the jazz and jazz fusion genres, then as a studio musician and live accompanist, and later in her transition as a composer, performer, arranger and producer into the R&B genre. It draws on Maria Sonevytsky's “[advocacy] for a new critical organological approach that seriously considers the musical instrument as an actor in the making of musical meaning...extending the performative act to include...the dynamic between...performer, instrument, and audience.” This paper also draws on Sherrie Tucker's discourse regarding sounding and listening, and to a lesser extent from several concepts identified by Nichole T. Rustin with regards to mentoring across gender lines in order to help establish the jazz genre as an equitable space; the expectations placed on women jazz performers versus how they desire to be heard; and the support of a scholarly environment which nurtures and provides opportunities to women musicians. Through these concepts are demonstrated how Rushen utilized her mastery of the Fender Rhodes in successfully and repeatedly positioning herself as artist and professional.