Winifred Atwell and her 'other piano': 16 hit singles and a 'blanket of silence', sounding the limits of jazz by George McKay
From Tunapuna, Trinidad, Winifred Atwell (c. 1914-1983) was a classically trained ragtime and boogie-woogie style pianist who gained quite remarkable popularity in Britain, and later also Australia, in the 1950s, in live and recorded music, as well as in the developing television industry. In this chapter I outline her extraordinary international musical biography as a chart-topping pop and television star—innovative achievements for a black migrant female musician which are arguably thrown into more dramatic light by virtue of the fact that Atwell has been and remains a neglected figure in...
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Play Together, Think Alike: Shared Mental Models in Expert Music Improvisers
by Clement Canonne
When musicians improvise together, they tend to agree beforehand on a common structure (e.g., a jazz standard) which helps them coordinate. However, in the particular case of collective free improvisation (CFI), musicians deliberately avoid having such referent. How, then, can they coordinate? We propose that CFI musicians who have experience playing together come to share higher-level knowledge, which is not piece-specific but rather task-specific, i.e., an implicit mental model of what it is to improvise freely. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 19 expert improvisers from the...
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High Art
by Rashid Booker
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“Ethnicity and Musical Identity in the Lyric Landscape of Early Cyprus”, Greek and Roman Musical Studies 2 (2014), 146–76.
by John C Franklin
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