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Toward a Linguistic Approach to the Study of Jazz: The Southwestern Tradition as a Case in Point*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
One of the continuing ironies of American Studies is that jazz, among America's most important contributions to the arts, has received little scholarly attention. The new music required recognition from Europe before we could stop looking at it with disdain or condescension and it continues to arouse frowns from many who still regard it as a form of cheap popular music or simply another form of folk music, interesting for sociological purposes but of little lasting aesthetic significance. For these and other reasons jazz scholarship has developed slowly in the United States. But despite the complex problems raised in placing and illuminating a new art form, we have come a long way from the evangelical journalism of early writing on jazz and now have a number of sensitive and intelligent critics of considerable attainment, accomplished jazz-oriented musicologists, sociologists, and historians who have contributed greatly to our understanding of jazz musicians and the forces that have shaped their careers.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978
References
NOTES
1. Driggs' articles have appeared in a number of places. Perhaps the most comprehensive is Driggs, Franklin S., “Kansas City and the Southwest” in Jazz, eds., Hentoff, Nat and McCarthy, Albert J. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959), pp. 189–230Google Scholar: Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 279–318Google Scholar. Ross Russell has published on the subject for a number of years: his best-known works are two books, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar and Bird Lives! (New York: Charterhouse, 1973).Google Scholar
2. Russell, , Jazz Style, p. 232ff.Google Scholar
3. Ibid., p. 73.
4. I have taken much of this part of my article from Feld, Steven, “Linguistic Models in Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology, 18 (1974), 197–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar: see also Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963)Google Scholar; Chomsky, Noam, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1967)Google Scholar; and Morris, Charles, Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1938).Google Scholar
5. Harris, Zellig, Structural Linguistics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951).Google Scholar
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11. Ibid., p. 74.
12. Bengsston, I., Gabrielsson, A., and Thorsén, S.-M., “Empirisk rytmforskiving,” Swedish Journal of Musicology, 51 (1969), 49–118.Google Scholar
13. Feld, , “Linguistic Models.”Google Scholar