People | Faculty | Travis A. Jackson

Travis Jackson

Appointments:

Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities

Education:

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1998

Contact:

Office: Goodspeed 302
Phone: (773) 834-1933
Email: travieso@uchicago.edu
Website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~travieso

Photo: Petra Richterova

I am interested, above all, in two intertwined processes: the ones through which musical sounds come into being and those that occur when groups and individuals engage with sounds—through listening, dancing, writing, etc. Much of my work, then, sits at the place where ideas about composition, recording and distribution meet those about reception and its embeddedness in culture, society, race, history and geography. What I hope emerges from my writing and teaching is the sense that music is an essential, rather than ornamental, element of daily life, something human beings use to do more than reflect their times.

As someone trained in the methods of ethnomusicology, I focus attention on what people say and do where music is concerned. Taking those words and actions seriously, I analyze them to determine what potential they hold for helping my students and readers understand the complex and situated interactions we might have with music and musicians. Applying that approach to jazz and rock has required that I learn about things that most people might never attach to music—urban geography, economic development, graphic design, and legal theories of race, among them—but it has also resulted in work that, I hope, matches my aims.

Recent Courses Taught

  • Eclecticism (Spring 2008, seminar)
  • Rock (Autumn 2007)
  • Scenes and Spatiality (Spring 2007)
  • Jazz (Autumn 2006)
  • Music and Poetry (Spring 2005, co-taught with Robert von Hallberg of the English Department)

Selected Works

  • Forthcoming: Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (Berkeley: University of California Press)
  • 2007 “Play It (Over and Over Again).” Review of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben
    Ratliff. The Nation, 12 November, 41– 44.
  • 2007 “Rearticulating Ethnomusicology: Privilege, Ambivalence, and Twelve Years in
    SEM.” Ethnomusicology 50(2): 280–6.
  • 2005 “Interpreting Jazz.” In African American Music: An Introduction, edited by
    Portia Maultsby and Mellonee Burnim (New York: Routledge): 167–83.
  • 2004  “‘Always New and Centuries Old’: Jazz, Poetry, and Tradition as Creative
    Adaptation.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards and Farah Jasmine Griffin. (New York: Columbia University Press): 357–73.
  • 2002 “Jazz as Musical Practice.” In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, edited by David Horn and Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 83–95.
  • 2001 “Jazz” (Bibliography). In the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan).
  • 2000 “Spooning Good, Singing Gum: Meaning, Association, and Interpretation in Rock
    Music.” Current Musicology 69: 7–41.
  • 2000 “Jazz Performance as Ritual: The Blues Aesthetic and the African Diaspora.” In The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, edited by Ingrid Monson (New York:
    Garland), 23–82.