Jazz studies remains a robust academic field, with scholars exploring many subjects, including:
- How musical practices normalize or subvert cultural constructions of race, gender and their intersections;
- How music acts as a form of political resistance and a force for social change;
- How musical artists work with and against genre constructions, industry structures, and educational institutions;
- How place, space, and musical interactions that happen during performance create cultural meaning;
- How musical performance, practice, and processes draw on and construct theories of improvisation;
- How critical discourses, visual aesthetics, and literature intersect with musical practice;
- How music helps formulate notions of genius and celebrity;
- How music of the Black diaspora circulates transnationally; and
- How historical knowledges become constructed and understood.
What are we missing? Please send additions, corrections, and inquiries to [email].
Selected Bibliography
Acosta, Leonardo. Cubano Be, Cubano Bop : One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003.
Ake, David. Jazz Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
____. Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time Since Bebop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Ake, David, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark, eds. Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Atkins, E. Taylor. Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Armstrong, Louis. Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas David Brothers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Berish, Andrew. Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Bohlman, Philip and Goffredo Plastino, ed. Jazz Worlds/World Jazz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Borge, Jason. Tropical Riffs : Latin America and the Politics of Jazz . Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Print.
Braggs, Rashida. Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Brennan, Matt. When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. doi:10.5040/9781501319051.
Brothers, Thomas D. Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
____. Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
Burke, Patrick. Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Cawthra, Benjamin. Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Chapman, Dale. The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.
Cohen, Harvey. Duke Ellington’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Cooke, Mervyn and David Horn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jazz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Epperson, Bruce. More Important than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Feld, Steven. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Fellezs, Kevin. Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Fischlin, Daniel, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz. The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Gabbard, Krin. Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
____. Jazz among the Discourses. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
____. Representing Jazz. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
____. Better Git it in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
García, David F. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Gebhardt, Nicholas, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton, eds. The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Givan, Benjamin M. The Music of Django Reinhardt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Gordon Williams, James. Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space. University of Mississippi, 2021.
Greenland, Thomas H. Jazzing: New York City’s Unseen Scene. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t be Free, be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine and Salim Washington. Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.
Harker, Brian. Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Hayes, Elaine M. Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan. New York, NY: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017.
Heble, Ajay and Rob Wallace. People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Heller, Michael. Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
Howland, John. “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Jackson, Jeffrey H. Making Jazz French : Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003
Jackson, Travis. Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. New York City: Free Press, 2009.
Kernodle, Tammy L. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lewis, George and Benjamin Piekut. The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lock, Graham. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
Lopes, Paul. The Rise of a Jazz Art World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
McMullen, Tracy. Haunthenticity: Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019.
Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
____. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Muller, Carol Ann and Sathima Bea Benjamin. Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Myers, Marc. Why Jazz Happened. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Okiji, Fumi. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford University Press, 2018.
O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds. Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Phillips, Damon J. Shaping Jazz : Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Pond, Steven. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Porter, Eric. What is this Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Perchard, Tom. After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Prouty, Ken. Knowing Jazz : Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Print.
Radano, Ronald M. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Raeburn, Bruce Boyd. New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Ramsey, Guthrie P. The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
____. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Riccardi, Ricky. What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years. New York: Vintage, 2012.
Rustin, Nichole and Sherrie Tucker, eds. Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Durham, Duke University Press, 2008.
Rustin-Paschal, Nichole. The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus Jr. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
Saul, Scott. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Shim, Eunmi. Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Solis, Gabriel. Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
____. Thelonious Monk Quartet Featuring John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Stewart, Alex. Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Big Band Jazz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Tackley, Catherine. Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Walser, Robert, ed. Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Whyton, Tony. Jazz Icons : Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition. Cambridge ;: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Wilf, Eitan Y. School for Cool : the Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Wriggle, John. Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big Band Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Woideck, Carl. Charlie Parker: His Music and Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Scholarly Journals Specifically Dedicated to Jazz
Jazz Perspectives Jazz and Culture Jazz Research Journal Journal of Jazz Studies
Other Scholarly Journal That Have Published Jazz Scholarship
Journal for the Society of American Music American Music Black Music Research Journal Critical Studies in Improvisation
Journal of Popular Music Studies
Journal of American Studies
The Musical Quarterly