How Bebop Came to Be: The Early History of Modern Jazz

Bebop, despite its rather short lifespan, would become a key influence for every style that came after it. Bebop’s effects on improvisation, group structure, and harmony would be felt throughout jazz for decades to come, and the best known musicians of the bebop era are still regarded as some of the finest jazz musicians to ever take the stage. But the characteristics of bebop can easily be determined from the music itself. [excerpt

Playing Bebop: Culture and Bebop’s Reciprocal Influence

Following the sweet, pleasant Swing era style music of the 1930’s, Bebop emerged within the United States as an aggressive, percussive, musician-focused style in the 1940’s. However, Bebop’s creation was not spontaneous. Its composers, John Birks Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, wrote for the sake of the music itself as a form of self-expression, not as entertainment for an audience. Bebop’s dissonant sound expressed political and cultural frustrations, stemming from World War II and similarly shown in the early Civil Rights Movement. I will argue that not only did Bebop develop out of such conflicts, but in a reciprocal manner it shaped society, giving legitimacy to black musicians’ technical abilities in a white-dominated music industry

Strategic Afro-Modernism, Dynamic Hybridity, and Bebop's Socio-Political Significance

In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afromodernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put

Machito and His Afro-Cubans: Selected Transcriptions

Machito (Francisco Raúl Grillo, 1909–1984) was born into a musical family in Havana, Cuba, and was already an experienced vocalist when he arrived in New York City in 1937. In 1940 he teamed up with his brother-in-law, the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauzá (1911–1993), who had already made a name for himself with top African American swing bands such as those of Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. Together, Machito and Bauzá formed Machito and his Afro-Cubans. With Bauzá as musical director, the band forged vital pan-African connections by fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms with modern jazz and by collaborating with major figures in the bebop movement. Highly successful with Latino as well as black and white audiences, Machito and his Afro-Cubans recorded extensively and performed in dance halls, nightclubs, and on the concert stage. In this volume, ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz and bandleader and professor Jere Laukkanen (both experienced Latin jazz performers) present transcriptions from Machito’s recordings which meticulously illustrate the improvised as well as scored vocal, reed, brass, and percussion parts of the music. Austerlitz’s introductory essay traces the history of Afro-Cuban jazz in New York, a style that exerted a profound impact on leaders of the bebop movement, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who appears as a guest soloist with Machito on some of the music transcribed here. This is MUSA’s first volume to represent the significant Latino heritage in North American music.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1106/thumbnail.jp

Improving Performance of Iterative Methods by Lossy Checkponting

Iterative methods are commonly used approaches to solve large, sparse linear systems, which are fundamental operations for many modern scientific simulations. When the large-scale iterative methods are running with a large number of ranks in parallel, they have to checkpoint the dynamic variables periodically in case of unavoidable fail-stop errors, requiring fast I/O systems and large storage space. To this end, significantly reducing the checkpointing overhead is critical to improving the overall performance of iterative methods. Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a novel lossy checkpointing scheme that can significantly improve the checkpointing performance of iterative methods by leveraging lossy compressors. (2) We formulate a lossy checkpointing performance model and derive theoretically an upper bound for the extra number of iterations caused by the distortion of data in lossy checkpoints, in order to guarantee the performance improvement under the lossy checkpointing scheme. (3) We analyze the impact of lossy checkpointing (i.e., extra number of iterations caused by lossy checkpointing files) for multiple types of iterative methods. (4)We evaluate the lossy checkpointing scheme with optimal checkpointing intervals on a high-performance computing environment with 2,048 cores, using a well-known scientific computation package PETSc and a state-of-the-art checkpoint/restart toolkit. Experiments show that our optimized lossy checkpointing scheme can significantly reduce the fault tolerance overhead for iterative methods by 23%~70% compared with traditional checkpointing and 20%~58% compared with lossless-compressed checkpointing, in the presence of system failures.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, HPDC'1

Interstitial Soundings: Philosophical Reflections on Improvisation, Practice, and Self-Making

In Interstitial Soundings, Cynthia R. Nielsen brings music and philosophy into a fruitful and mutually illuminating dialogue. Topics discussed include the following: music's dynamic ontology, performers and improvisers as co-composers, the communal character of music, jazz as hybrid and socially constructed, the sociopolitical import of bebop, Afro-modernism and its strategic deployments, jazz and racialized practices, continuities between Michel Foucault's discussion of self-making and creating one's musical voice, Alasdair MacIntyre on practice, and how one might harmonize MacIntyre's notion of virtue development with Foucauldian resistance strategies