Mission Statement

We are eleven KU faculty members, from 6 departments--African and African American Studies, American Studies, English, Center for Indigenous Nations Studies, Music and Dance, and Theater and Film--whose research, writing, and teaching interests intersect in the relatively new interdisciplinary field known as Jazz Studies. We are committed to presenting interdisciplinary jazz studies programming, including colloquia, speakers, films, workshops, and concerts; developing and offering jazz-related courses across the curriculum, and supporting interdisciplinary jazz research among KU faculty and students. In exploring the connections between our common, yet diverse, interests and expertise, we hope to build bridges that will be of value to others at KU, not only for those interested in jazz, but to all who wish to collaborate across disciplines, departments, and communities.

Our long-term goal is the establishment of a Jazz Studies Center at KU. The Center would not be housed in any one department, but would operate as a cross-departmental meeting ground, think tank, and workshop, bringing together scholars and artists from throughout the university and beyond for colloquia, speakers series, and curriculum development of cross-listed interdisciplinary and team taught courses in jazz studies. Under a director, the Center would present public lectures and concerts, and facilitate study groups for faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and community members. The Center would serve as a clearing house for jazz researchers in the mid-west, as well as globally through utilizing digital library resources, and through developing relationships with major jazz centers of jazz research such as the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia, the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers, the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane, and the Chicago Jazz Archive at University of Chicago. With our rich history of jazz performance, research, and writing, not to mention our proximity to Kansas City, KU is the historically right place for an internationally visible Jazz Studies Center.

In establishing the KUIJSG, we capitalize on a unique set of resources and circumstances, including:

1) A core faculty from across the university committed to and qualified to teach Jazz Studies courses.

2) A strong emphasis on jazz performance in the KU Department of Music and Dance. The KU Jazz Ensemble I specializes in playing contemporary repertory written for big band. Jazz Ensembles II and III tend to play music from the Swing Era through hard bop and other styles of the late 1950s and 1960s. There are also eight jazz combos of five to seven players each, and most years there are also two vocal jazz combos. The KU Jazz Festival, now in its twenty-sixth year, takes place over two to three days in March or April and includes players of international fame. The KU Jazz Workshop takes place for a week during the summer, including players of high school and college age and public school teachers who also take part in ensembles and study with visiting artists.

3) The Wright Memorial Jazz Archive. When the cataloguing of this archive is complete, its rare audio recordings and print materials will attract jazz scholars nationally and internationally.

4) Proximity to Kansas City, which along with New Orleans, Chicago and New York, was a key incubator of jazz. Resources include the American Jazz Museum, and the Mutual Musicians Foundation.

5) KU’s commitment to racial/gender diversity. Given that jazz has often served as a metaphor for freedom, and has functioned as a critical arena for contesting racial and gender issues, the study of jazz (in its production, reception and evaluation) is significant in terms of probing the goals and assumptions of a society aspiring to democracy and equal opportunity.

History

Fall 2002: The KUIJSG is founded by eight faculty members from five departments at University of Kansas.

January 2003: KUIJSG receives generous seed funding from the KU Center for Research and the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. These funds will be used to build our reputation and to attract outside funding for major events, such as a Colloquium Series in conjunction with the KU Jazz Festival, including a major conference on the territory bands in the Spring of 2006.

April 9, 2003: The KUIJSG kicks off our exploration of our unique possibilities for collaboration by organizing a panel for the American Seminar at the Hall Center on April 9, 2003, entitled, “Improvising Interdisciplinarity: a Multi-vocal Conversation in Jazz Studies.” With this panel, we set the groundwork for ongoing collaborations among us, and among other faculty, students, and community members interested in jazz.

September 25, 2003: With our seed funding, and additional support from the Office of the Chancellor, and our Departments, we bring Robert O’Meally, Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University to consult with our group on how to maintain a successful jazz studies group, and to present a public lecture, entitled “Louis Armstrong’s Comic Masks.” The KU Jazz Combo #1 presented by KU Jazz Director Dan Gailey open this “Evening of Jazz Studies” before a full house in Alderson Auditorium in the KU Student Union.

March 4-5, 2004: The first KU Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Colloquium, is held in conjunction with the 27th Annual KU Jazz Festival, directed by Dan Gailey. We hope to make this a regular collaborative event.

Members of KUIJSG

Crystal Anderson is Assistant Professor of American Studies and regularly teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses, including Visual Culture and the Harlem Renaissance and the Post-Soul Aesthetic.  Her research has appeared in MELUS, Ethnic Studies Review and Extrapolation, as well as in several book collections on blacks and Asians and black urban communities. 

Philip Barnard, Associate Professor of English at KU, teaches US cultural history and contemporary cultural theory. Particular areas of interest include literary culture of the early republic, contemporary theory from poststructuralism to cultural studies, and popular music studies. He has recently published Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (2004) and is working on projects on Western Swing and Texas Dance Hall culture.

Chuck Berg is professor of Film/Video at the University of Kansas; and associate chair of the Department of Theatre and Film. Chuck regularly teaches courses on American popular culture (including jazz). His publications include the often-cited, “Cinema Sings the Blues,” (Cinema Journal; Spring 1978), and “Jazz and Film and Television” for The Oxford Companion to Jazz (2000).

C. C. Herbison in an Instructor in the Department of African & African-American Studies at KU. He teaches, “Introduction to Jazz” a distance education course. His in-residence courses include “Studies in Black Music of the 1960s,” and “Studies in African American Popular Culture".

Dan Gailey, Associate Professor and Director of Jazz Studies at KU, is well-known as a composer for jazz ensemble. He was awarded a Gil Evans Fellowship from the International Association of Jazz Educators and “Meet the Composer,” an international award. The KU Jazz Ensemble I has won the Downbeat Magazine award for the “Best Collegiate Jazz Band” three times in the last decade.

William J. Harris is an associate professor of English at KU. He is a permanent member of the multidisciplinary jazz studies group housed at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies in New York City. He has published a major study of the performance poet, Amiri Baraka, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985). He teaches courses in jazz and American Literature.

Clarence Henry, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, teaches the introductory course on jazz to non-music majors and a course on great jazz innovators. A major part of Henry's research focuses on the globalization and the emergence of "world jazz."

Paul R. Laird is Associate Professor of Musicology at KU. Laird's major publications include jazz festival listings for The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1st edition, 1988; 2nd edition, 2001). Laird devotes a significant amount of time to jazz in undergraduate and graduate courses that he teaches on twentieth century American music.

Roberta Freund Schwartz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and Dance. She is currently working on a book on the transmission of African-American music to England.

Sherrie Tucker is Associate Professor of American Studies at KU, where she teaches “Jazz and American Culture.” She is the author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (2000). She is currently researching women in New Orleans jazz for the New Orleans Jazz National Parks. She will be the Louis Armstrong Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University for the academic year 2004-5.

Kevin Whitehead is a lecturer in English and American Studies, and jazz critic for National Public Radio's Fresh Air. His writings on jazz have appeared in many publications including the Chicago Sun-Times, Down Beat and Village Voice. He is an editorial advisor and contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2001), and author of New Dutch Swing (1998), about improvised music in Amsterdam.

Michael Yellow Bird is a citizen of the Sahnish and Hidatsa First Nations. He is the director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies (www.ku.edu~/insp) and Associate Professor of American Studies. He is a member of WUNSKA, the Canadian Aboriginal Social Work Faculty and Educators Network, and a member of the Association of American Indian and Alaskan Native Professoriate. He is a member of the board of directors for national American Indian Studies Consortium and serves on the editorial boards of the American Indian Quarterly and Wicazo Sa Review. His most recent publications are "Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism" published in Wicazo Sa Review, 19, no 2, (fall 2004), and "Reservations: Spiritual and Cultural Implications" (forthcoming) in American Indian Religious Traditions: An Encyclopedia, edited by Suzanne J. Crawford & Dennis F. Kelly.