This article examines three improvisations by the Miles Davis Quintet from their recording The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 through the lens of a new theory of musical interaction. It shows how the quintet favored divergent over convergent interactional strategies in the interpersonal, referent, role, and style domains in its quest to…[Read more]

This dissertation examines aspects of the creative practice of Muhal Richard Abrams, composer, improviser, pianist, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Abrams’s work intersects with various facets of creative music. I focus on free improvisation, both as a stand-alone performance and in conjunction w…[Read more]

In this dissertation, I present a method for developing tonal jazz pitch-listening skills (PLS) which is rooted in scientific experimental findings from the fields of music cognition and perception. Converging experimental evidence supports the notion that humans develop listening skills through implicit learning via immersive, statistically rich…[Read more]

Previous theories emphasize tonal jazz’s undeniable continuity with European tonality. Here, I argue that some of its features are better understood as developments of the African-American musical tradition. As a simple example, consider the gesture ^3–1 to end a phrase. Schenkerian theory would explain this as an elided ^3–2–1, a gesture commo…[Read more]

In this article, I examine the nonfunctional harmony of three tunes from the mid-1960s by Wayne Shorter from the perspective of transformational theory. While some transformational approaches to jazz have taken the seventh or ninth chord as the basic unit, I use the more inclusive and abstract concept of a “chord scale” to encompass more of the…[Read more]

This article discuss the ways rhythm changes can be used in music theory instruction.

This chapter proposes an application of topic theory to jazz improvisation. It introduces the concept of a “groove topic” and defines the expressive correlations of a variety of common jazz grooves. The chapter then traces the unfolding groove topics in Miles Davis’s celebrated 1964 solo on “My Funny Valentine.”