Conference Agenda

Despite jazz studies' growth as a field, we lack a comprehensive understanding of its research trends and methodological orientations. This paper presents the first quantitative survey of recent English-language jazz scholarship, analyzing 73 dissertations (2014-present) and 485 peer-reviewed articles (2011-present) from 12 major journals. Using systematic content analysis methodology, we coded each work for subject matter, methodology, and institutional affiliation. The analysis spans diverse topics (historical moments, media studies, labor analysis, popular culture) and methodologies (ethnography, critical theory, music analysis, gender studies).

A selection of notable preliminary findings includes race/ethnicity as the dominant theme in dissertations (56%), with subtopics ranging from jazz during the American Civil Rights era to correlations between political and musical expression. Politics also appears frequently in dissertations (43%), in tandem with race; indeed, 86% of dissertations that engage with race also discuss politics. Articles on major artists (35%)—overwhelmingly male (95%)—remain highly prevalent, revealing a significant gender disparity that warrants scholarly attention. Meanwhile, transnationalism has emerged as an increasingly prominent theme, increasing in frequency over time. These patterns reveal that while jazz studies has productively centered discussions of race and Black American musical traditions, significant gaps remain: an oversaturation of focus on 'great figures," overwhelming male, suggests systemic underrepresentation of female jazz musicians in scholarship, and the gradual rise in transnational research indicates a necessary correction to the field's previously Americentric bias.

We analyzed seven dedicated jazz journals (including Journal of Jazz Studies, Jazz Perspectives, Jazz Research Journal) and five major music journals (JAMS, Ethnomusicology, Acta Musicologica, Journal of SAM, Black Music Research Journal). This quantitative metadata study—the first of its kind in jazz studies—provides an empirical foundation for understanding the discipline's research patterns. Our findings inform future research directions in underexplored areas and assist scholars in targeting journals most receptive to their work. In our presentation, we will divulge the full findings through easily digestible graphic visualizations and establish an open-access digital bibliography for ongoing research use in the scholarly community.

Jazz in the United States has long served as a medium for public witness, carrying the capacity to register social crisis not only through texted protest but through musical structure, timbre, and affect. Using orchestration and form to reflect the emotional realities of contemporary American life, Marshall Gilkes’s My Unanswered Prayer (2024), written for the WDR Big Band, participates in this tradition through a composition that frames collective mourning as a recurring, unresolved ritual.

This paper argues that My Unanswered Prayer engages expressive codes associated with American patriotic ceremonial music, shaping its central melody as a gesture of collective remembrance. Gilkes foregrounds a diatonic trumpet theme in C major whose narrow contour and emphasis on open intervals evoke the sonic world of Taps and related memorial idioms. Yet this ceremonial melody is repeatedly denied its expected cadential closure: across the work, dominant preparations return again and again without resolution, creating a formal and affective structure defined by deferral.

Drawing on hermeneutic approaches associated with Michael Klein's utopian interruption and Edward Cone's promissary note, I show how Gilkes stages fleeting moments of clarity only to undo them. A brief D-major sonority in the contrasting middle section functions as a promissory harmonic event, projecting the possibility of release before collapsing back into modal mixture. Later, the piece delivers its only full cadence into C major during the improvised piano solo, momentarily granting the listener a sense of stability. This “utopian” space is quickly shattered by an eruption of densely voiced major triads; A♭, G♭, and D♭, superimposed over the C-centered melody, producing a conflict in which consonance and dissonance become difficult to distinguish.

In My Unanswered Prayer, Gilkes mobilizes these musical strategies to render audible the collective grief, frustration, and mounting anguish that arise when national identity is forced into confrontation with ongoing social crisis. The piece ultimately demonstrates what happens when ceremonial gestures of remembrance are no longer capable of producing closure: resolution remains imaginable, even notated, but persistently unheard.

The pentatonic scale has become a mandatory tool in the arsenal of modern jazz improvisers, connecting the consonance of the past with the dissonance of the present; this paper maps the historical development of anhemitonic pentatonicism around the globe to contemporary jazz. Pentatonicism has long provided a source for extramusical meaning whether a composer is representing their own nation through folk melodies or pointing outward through exoticism. How is it that this collection can look towards the occidental, oriental, boreal, and austral, both into one’s own past and at the alterity of another’s present? Despite the assumed prevalence of pentatonicism, its historiographic scholarship is surprisingly limited. This paper therefore relies on the few modern texts and looks to historic treatises, global music theory, ethnography, and folkloric studies to paint the fullest picture possible.

The primary modern text regarding pentatonic prevalence, Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy, carefully considers the manifestation of pentatonicism throughout the history of Western art music and touches on its origins through means of anachronistic semiotic signification (Day-O’Connell 2007). This only narrowly answers the seeming ubiquity of the collection, though. Rameau discussed this collection as a connection between Pythagoras and Chinese theorists in his Code de musique pratique (1760), although the name pentatonic would not come until Carl Engel coined it in his The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864). This paper will connect these dots of pentatonicism with writings and music from such wide-reaching locations as China, Scotland, Ethiopia, and Appalachia.

This omnipotent presence has afforded unique manipulations in jazz improvisation. A novel contribution of this paper includes the documentation of pentatonicism's unique implementation throughout the development of jazz styles. The collection finds its way into harmonic realization, melodies, and improvised lines alike, and not only in its anhemitonic form. Jazz musicians have employed techniques such as superimposition, side-slipping, and chromatic alteration to achieve dissonant sonorities from the historically consonant collection. Using pedagogical works from practitioners alongside ample transcription, this paper outlines the specific ways in which pentatonicism both entered into jazz and became a vessel for chromatic exploration.