Writing about jazz often emphasizes urbanity and focuses on a geographically bounded scene. This can obscure what people do with jazz to affirm community across distances, in the context of Black suburbanization. Likewise, the construction of jazz as an art music oriented around a canonical past does not allow a full understanding of what musicians do with commercial culture to construct community in the present. In this article, I present the notion of sonic suburbanization to foreground the ways Black people exert agency through musicking, claiming suburban space and affirming community across urban and suburban lines. This is live performance that is “both/and”: Both suburban and urban; both community and commercial. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cleveland, this research focuses on the ways live smooth jazz performers invoke multiple musical histories while congregating heterogeneous Black identities across boundaries. To demonstrate the crossovers of live smooth jazz, I begin by outlining the idea of sonic suburbanization. I then note the proximity of Black music genres in a context of racial segregation. Despite suburbanization's role in dislocating Black geographic cohesion, live musical performance continues to affirm a crossover Black community through interposing an array of sensibilities. Finally, I point to the conceptual schemas of musicians in the scene who foreground continuity with jazz, pop, and gospel. Live smooth jazz performers take pride in rhetorical effectiveness and genre versatility as part of connecting to the audience. Although some scholars attend to smooth jazz outside “real jazz,” musicians in the scene view smooth jazz as real jazz.

Amplifiers from Fender's so-called Tweed era (1948–60) are among the most valuable instruments in all popular music. Inside most Fender Tweed amplifiers is a piece of masking tape bearing the signature of the worker who hand-wired the amplifier's circuit. Today, collectors have elevated several of Fender's previously unknown Latina employees into legendary figures with near cultlike followings. In the absence of biographical information about these women, however, the contemporary discourse about them is often highly romanticized. In this article, I present novel historical information about Fender's Tweed-era employees to counter the misinformation surrounding them and Fender's mid-century Fullerton, California factory system more broadly. Analyzing contemporary discourses surrounding Fender's earliest employees, I also critique the persistence of gendered and racialized stereotypes about Fender's female employees being naturally equipped for labor-intensive assembly work due to their supposedly “nimble fingers.” This article also details the social processes through which Fender's Tweed amplifiers have been made “vintage,” and the company's mid-century mass-production techniques have since been attributed the same artisanal values associated with vintage string instrument making. Ultimately, I show how the builder-signatures contained within Fender's Tweed-era amplifiers have been central to the discursive production of value among collectors.

Since the 1980s, the Nonesuch label, a longstanding subsidiary of the Warner Music Group (WMG), has become noteworthy for its steady market performance during a period of volatility for media multinationals. Nonesuch Records, having once been an adventurous boutique classical label under Teresa Sterne, has developed over the last three decades as a creatively idiosyncratic and commercially successful “adult” imprint under Robert Hurwitz, the erstwhile director of the Munich-based Edition of Contemporary Music jazz label.

Nonesuch has not historically been understood as a jazz label, though it has served as a home for a few jazz acts, including Bill Frisell, Fred Hersch, and the World Saxophone Quartet. By the early years of the new millennium, though, Nonesuch had become one of the few major label subsidiaries willing to maintain an active roster of jazz instrumentalists, harnessing its diversified roster as a source of strength.

This paper examines the Nonesuch label's cultivation of a distinctive jazz niche and situates this development against the backdrop of a period of structural turbulence for the WMG. The leveraged buyout of WMG in 2004, which precipitated the dissolution of the Warner Jazz subsidiary and the transfer of much of its jazz roster to Nonesuch, reflects a contemporary logic of financialization, where value extraction has become the overriding goal of corporate restructuring. Mergers and acquisitions enacted at the uppermost reaches of major label corporate hierarchies pass along significant costs to the label subsidiaries and their artist rosters, installing precarity at the core of the music industry's creative ecologies.

Beginning around the mid-1930s, clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman engaged with classical music, adding standard solo pieces to his regular performance and record portfolio. He also stimulated the emergence of a modern clarinet repertoire by granting commissions to composers, such as Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and others. In this article, I explore why and how these projects evolved and how the collaborations unfolded. My focus is on the commissions to Hindemith (1941/47) and Milhaud (1941). The newly found correspondence of Eric Simon, a Viennese-born clarinetist who advised Goodman and initiated contact with Hindemith and Milhaud, reveal Goodman's “double life” as a multilayered sphere for various actors, each with their own specific background and agenda. My analysis follows three topics that decisively shaped the investigated projects: Goodman's relationship with classical music, which I discuss in light of the intersectionally biased structures of U.S. musical life; the situation of European émigré artists experienced by Hindemith, Milhaud, and Simon; and the promotion of new music, which linked the lives, networks, and agendas of the aforementioned protagonists and even defined their relationships. By highlighting Goodman taking center stage as a performer-commissioner, I argue for more serious attention to performers’ impact on musical production and repertoire formation, given that they represent the ultimate gatekeepers to the living repertoire.

The U.S. Supreme Court has for decades served as an unlikely venue for the performance of music. Between 1988 and 2020, more than 125 musicians, including some of the country's most prominent performers, appeared for intimate audiences in the Supreme Court's East Conference Room. The concerts were officially “off the record,” but details survive in records kept by the U.S. Supreme Court, papers of former justices and friends of the court involved in the creation of the programs, and in interviews with individuals who supported and participated in the events. This article reconstructs the history of this long running but little-known music series and contextualizes it within the court's culture and broader themes of access and power.

Florence Price (1887–1953) was instrumental in establishing a “black musical idiom” in the twentieth century (Samantha Ege, 2020) by embedding vernacular songs into her works, including Violin Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor, built on “I'm workin’ on my Buildin.’” In 1940 she arranged the melody as the second of the Two Traditional Negro Spirituals, finished on March 26, 1940. On March 29 and 30, 1940, she quickly dispatched Fantasy No. 2. Price often performed the piano part of her works herself. The performative act of playing Fantasy No. 2 with its embedded spiritual “I'm workin’ on my Buildin’ […] All for my Lord” would have solidified her faith, which rested in part in her own interpretation of its lyrics: Her “work” on her “buildin” and foundations, in composition and in life. Furthermore, each performance of Fantasy No. 2 would have created an embodied performed commemoration, from her perspective, of historical events of injustice and oppression in the Jim Crow South, which she abandoned in 1927 for Chicago. By engaging with Price's fantasies through the lens of performance studies and genre theory, and by drawing on Ege (2020), Rae Linda Brown (2020), Cooper (2019, 2020), and Douglas Shadle (2021), this article examines Price's vernacular foundation and sonic foundation-building symbolically. Meanings of freedom emerge on several levels, which we relate to creative freedom and to “freedoms in the most oppressive of social environments,” such as Price's environment, to which she responded with “a powerful musical language” (Ege, 2020).

During World War II, Japanese nationals and U.S. residents Shigezo Iwata and Masaru Ben Akahori were arrested and interned while their wives and children were incarcerated separately. Though wartime correspondence sent from Mr. Akahori to his wife and daughter and from Mrs. Iwata to her husband clearly identifies the United States as “home,” the primary emphasis on home is as a marker of familial reunification. This article posits that the memories and sounds imaginatively recollected and conveyed within the correspondence sent from Sonoko Iwata to her husband, Shigezo, and from Masaru Ben Akahori to his wife, Kiku, and their daughter, served to signify and nurture an ongoing sense of belonging to and togetherness with their respective family members with whom they hoped to once again be home, together.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the intensification of IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, and People of Color) activism during this time have prompted many in the classical music industry to pause and reflect on the ways in which we perpetuate colonialism and racism in our leadership and governance structures, programming, casting practices, performance practices, and treatment of IBPOC artists. This article focuses on Messiah/Complex (2020) by Toronto's Against the Grain Theatre (AtG). All soloists were Indigenous or people of color. Based on conversations with several Indigenous artists involved in this project, this article argues that we need to move from thinking about how to include more Indigenous artists to thinking about how we can create space for Indigenous sovereignty. That is going to involve giving over decision-making power to Indigenous artists at all levels. Messiah/Complex could have made a more decisive move toward sovereignty if it had begun with conversations with IBPOC artists about what they want to say at this moment. The performers should have been able to decide not only what language to perform in but also whether they want to perform Handel's music at all, who they want to collaborate with, and how they want to work together.

The prevailing white racial frame surrounding discourse on the sailor work songs called chanties (popularly, “sea shanties”) means that discussions tend to ignore or minimize these songs’ African American heritage. Articulating revised and more just historical narratives of chanties is additionally challenged by the normative approach of setting discussions within the spatial frame of the sea. We may overcome these challenges by recentering the frame of discussion on an adjacently situated space of shoreside labor and its actors, cotton screwmen. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States’ cotton export trade depended upon screwmen's work of stowing cotton bales aboard ships in port. Although all screwmen were Black men during the profession's formative period, by mid-century, white men had joined the profession in complementary proportion. This created an unusual case, not only of both racial groups performing the same labor but also of white men entering and accommodating to an already-established “Black” labor environment. Importantly, from the advent of their profession, screwmen practiced singing to coordinate their labor. I argue that white sailors who came to work seasonally as screwmen were compelled to acculturate to existing African American work singing, and thus acquired the material and conceptual bases to develop the shipboard work songs best remembered as “chanties.” As the first ever sustained exposition of screwmen's forgotten singing, this essay contests both popular narratives’ granting of exclusive agency to white seafaring and academic discussions that tokenize African American heritage as an “influence” rather than the chanty genre's foundation.

In this article, I analyze a rhythmic device in musical theater performance that is often used but rarely discussed: The sudden break into halftime. Breaking into halftime—a rhythmic shift that is performed and perceived as occurring at half the tempo (or speed) of the groove in preceding and subsequent sections—has the effect of abruptly stretching out and slowing down musical temporality. With a break into halftime, a song's groove is suddenly broader, more open, and expansive. When accompanied by lyrics, the move suggests deliberateness, calls attention to the lyrical address, and invites a considered response from the listener. It is a musical device akin to drastically slowing down a spoken cadence to ensure that the listener is fully grasping the significance of one's words. With or without lyrics, this temporal disruption has a powerful effect on listeners’ bodies as, suddenly, the established timing of one's musical experience is disrupted and immediately set to half the speed of the previous pace. By analyzing the use of halftime in three filmed musicals—Newsies, Rent, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show—I show how the rhythmic device carries with it social coding of solidarity and collective power among queer, marginalized, and/or otherwise outcast individuals and ultimately alters the broader narrative of the shows. Ultimately, I articulate how halftime serves to queer time and forge collective action, allowing us to reimagine what sort of politics, formations, collectives, and futures are possible.

Muhal Richard Abrams's ground-breaking work as a composer, improviser, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is far reaching and multifaceted. Russian composer, theorist, and polymath Joseph Schillinger appears repeatedly in discussions of Abrams and the AACM, suggesting that music theory played a generative role in Abrams's creative practice and pedagogy. This article focuses on Abrams's engagement with The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. It theorizes Abrams's incorporation of Schillinger's work into his broader creative pallette, analyzes Abrams's compositional application of Schillinger's theory, and suggests conceptual resonances between Abrams's creative practice and the text. Ultimately, this article suggests a larger network of African American theorists, which I conceptualize as “fugitive music theory.”

Ginger Smock (1920–95), an African American jazz and classical violinist, was a popular Los Angeles entertainer and one of the first African American women bandleaders on television. This article traces her career from Los Angeles’ Central Avenue to Las Vegas showroom orchestras, drawing on archival materials from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Through a close reading of a 1951 DownBeat profile of Smock, I interrogate racialized constructions of gender in that magazine and frame mid-century jazz reporting on women instrumentalists via a “narrative of perpetual discovery” that positions these women as waiting for a career break that never comes. As an antidote to the effacement implicit in such narratives, I propose close documentation of sustained artistic practice: That is, the day-to-day facts of a working musician's life. This article reads Smock's professional trajectory through an intersectional lens to offer a critical perspective on the ways in which social identities, especially race and gender, may shape both musical careers and our historicization of those careers.

Joni Mitchell's life was completely transformed in 1965–67: She became pregnant, was abandoned by the child's father, gave birth to her daughter, placed her baby for adoption, married and subsequently divorced Chuck Mitchell, and moved between several cities in North America. In this article, I center this often overlooked period of Joni's life—which she herself has referred to as “this three-year period of childhood's end”—and move away from the usual focus on her studio albums. I contextualize this discussion within 1960s counterculture and examine how these turbulent changes are refracted through her music making, specifically through a selection of early recordings of her song “Urge for Going.” In so doing, I seek alternatives to the prevalent and influential theories of musical persona in popular music studies, arguing instead for the merits of an approach which strives for an intellectual disposition of care.

Religious music served a political function in the southern United States during the antebellum period. This article examines catechisms and hymnbooks used by white evangelical missionaries and slaveowners in the antebellum South, arguing that the planter elite deployed hymns as a medium to assert white supremacy. The term sonic domination identifies processes whereby sound functioned as a social tool to maintain discipline and order among the enslaved population. Black and white people sang hymns in church, at interracial revivals, and during civic services; they were also heard on bells and cited in poetry. English texts and tunes included in slave catechisms and white portrayals of Black singing highlight the role of evangelical hymns in maintaining plantation order in the Old South. At the same time, enslaved Black Christians found creative ways to circumvent the oppressive power of the white elite through song. African Americans employed English hymns in their own religious rituals and used them to convey hidden meanings on the plantation. Both genres, which interacted and ultimately influenced each other, contributed to an eventual codification of American evangelical hymnody.

The discussion of narrative in mashups typically involves how a preexisting message is reinterpreted by the incorporation of new musical material. However, many scholars note how DJ Earworm's technique of creating new lyrics through the combination of samples from up to fifty different tracks conveys an original message that is distinct from its borrowed sources. In his various interviews, DJ Earworm elaborates that his mashups are original compositions that act as musical time capsules that capture the zeitgeist of the age. Nevertheless, DJ Earworm only provides brief commentary on the meaning of his mashups and there is no close examination of these narratives in the literature. This raises the question: To what degree do DJ Earworm's mashups reflect cultural issues in American society? By merging Zbikowski's concept of conceptual integration with Almén's theory of musical narrative, this paper will demonstrate how DJ Earworm's mashups show a consistent pattern of having complex narratives with cultural messages that resonate with contemporary issues in American society, including fossil fuel dependence, income inequality, and political and racial division.

Reissues of recordings are commonplace, yet rarely examined by scholars. This article considers how reissuing is a creative act akin to museum curation. Through this lens, reissuers emerge as crucial interpretive figures, making decisions that affect how music and music history are understood by listeners. I take as a case study the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), one of the most canonic and widely praised reissues. Created by record collector and avant-garde artist Harry Smith and distributed by Folkways, the Anthology comprises eighty-four commercially released recordings made between 1926 and 1932, accompanied by an idiosyncratic set of liner notes. At the time, folk music was beset by various mythologies, notably an idealization of racial purity and an antithetical stance toward commercialism and modernity. When reissuing the material, Smith carefully selected, sequenced, and annotated the recordings in ways that unsettled these mythologies. In 1994, the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on compact disc. Drawing on archival documents from the Smithsonian, I demonstrate how their decisions reframed the Anthology in various ways to fit their goals and concerns. Through marketing, reproduction, cover design, and the soliciting and editing of additional notes, the Smithsonian elevated Smith as a racially progressive auteur while navigating commercial concerns and historical preservation. In particular, the editing of notes avoided controversial statements during an era of politically contentious museum exhibitions. Nevertheless in doing so, the very myths that Smith unsettled in his reissuing were replaced by an idealized race-blindness, anti-commercialism, and historicism.