Marian Jago | Hearing Impairment: Disability, Autonomy, and Jazz Performance Practice – A Case for Lennie Tristano

Event details

Speaker: Marian Jago (University of Edinburgh)

Date: 31 January 2019

Time: 5.15 - 6.30pm.  

Venue: Lecture Room A, Alison House, 12 Nicolson Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9DF

Abstract

In 1956 blind jazz pianist Lennie Tristano released an album for Atlantic records on which he made use of studio techniques—multi-tracking, overdubbing, and the manipulation of tape speeds—which were, and remain, rare in jazz. The album was a critical success, but there was also heated debate in the jazz press around the techniques used. In large part, Tristano’s reputation never recovered. This talk will consider the underlying causes of the controversy as well as more recent attitudes toward liveness in jazz as a potential approach for reconsiderations of genre. It will also consider links between disability studies and jazz performance practice, positing that some of Tristano’s aesthetic decisions were linked to his blindness, while at the same time calling into question some of the ways in which jazz has recently been characterized by this burgeoning field.

Biography

Marian Jago is currently Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Edinburgh, where her research interests include jazz studies, ethnography, and American popular music of the mid-20th century. She has published on a variety of jazz topics for Jazz Perspectives, Jazz Research Journal, the Journal of Jazz Studies, the Journal of the Art of Record Production, Bloomsbury, Routledge and others, and her first monograph, Live at the Cellar, was published in October 2018 by the University of British Columbia Press.