Tony Whyton | Birmingham City University (original) (raw)
My research work deals specifically with music and its place within the creative industries, from the packaging of popular music to the iconic representations of jazz artists. I’ve published widely on a variety of related topics, including jazz history, the politics of music education, the cultural influence of recordings and interdisciplinary approaches to music.
My first book, Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. My second book, Beyond A Love Supreme, will be a cross disciplinary study of the musical and cultural influence of John Coltrane's seminal album, and will be published by Oxford University Press.
As the founding editor of the international journal The Source: challenging jazz criticism, I created the first peer reviewed interdisciplinary journal for jazz studies and he now co-edit the internationally peer-reviewed Jazz Research Journal with Equinox.
I have recently been awarded just under €1 million to lead a three-year, pan-European project entitled Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities. The ground-breaking project, the first and largest of its kind for jazz in Europe, has been funded as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area's (HERA) theme 'Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity', a joint research programme funded by 13 national funding agencies to 'create collaborative, trans-national research opportunities that will derive new insights from humanities research in order to address major social, cultural, and political challenges facing Europe'. As an interdisciplinary research project, Rhythm Changes will examine the inherited traditions and practices of European jazz cultures, developing new insights into cultural exchanges and dynamics between different countries, groups and related media.
I joined the University of Salford in September 2007 after 10 years at Leeds College of Music. In my work at Leeds, I was responsible for the creation, management and strategic development of the Centre for Jazz Studies UK and the Leeds International Jazz Conference.
Phone: 0121 331 8621
Address: School of Media
Parkside Building
Birmingham City University
5 Cardigan Street
E4 7BD
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Books by Tony Whyton
This book examines the symbolic importance of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in relation to the f... more This book examines the symbolic importance of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in relation to the formation of an authoritative jazz canon. The book explores how the iconic album has come to fulfil a quasi-religious role in jazz and explores the role that seminal jazz recordings play in the everyday lives of both musicians and audiences.
The jazz volume of the Library of Essays on Popular Music is a valuable resource for researchers,... more The jazz volume of the Library of Essays on Popular Music is a valuable resource for researchers, enthusiasts, teachers and students. The featured articles in this volume provide an overview of jazz studies writings from the 1990s to the present day, and each text engages with issues that are central to the changing discourse of jazz in popular culture. The volume includes studies of specific scenes, artists and periods from jazz history, and also comments on broader aspects of musical discourse, from ontological considerations to the politics of canon formation, from issues of representation to international perspectives. The collection encourages readers to engage in comparative thinking and analysis, and contributions touch on a range of themes that will be of interest to scholars who situate jazz at the heart of popular music studies.
Today, jazz history is dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. F... more Today, jazz history is dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. From Satchmo to Duke, Bird to Trane, these legendary jazzmen form the backbone of the jazz tradition. Jazz icons not only provide musicians and audiences with figureheads to revere but have also come to stand for a number of values and beliefs that shape our view of the music itself. Jazz Icons explores the growing significance of icons in jazz and discusses the reasons why the music’s history is increasingly dependent on the legacies of ‘great men’. Using a series of individual case studies, Whyton examines the influence of jazz icons through different forms of historical mediation, including the recording, language, image and myth. The book encourages readers to take a fresh look at their relationship with iconic figures of the past and challenges many of the dominant narratives in jazz today.
Read Andrew Blake's review of Jazz Icons published in the Times Higher:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=412736§ioncode=26
Read Ian Patterson's review at www.allaboutjazz.com:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=38363
Papers by Tony Whyton
In no one's mind have the music's ties to its country of origin been severed, yet the historical ... more In no one's mind have the music's ties to its country of origin been severed, yet the historical record proves that it has for some time had global significance… Jazz exists in our collective imagination as both a national and postnational music, but is studied almost exclusively in the former incarnation. 1
Jazz Research Journal, 2014
The study of jazz in international settings has blossomed over the past ten years to the point wh... more The study of jazz in international settings has blossomed over the past ten years to the point where researchers from around the world can now draw on research into how the music works within specific national settings. Indeed, in previous issues, Jazz Research Journal has championed articles which explore jazz in different cultural and geographical settings, and future issues are planned which concentrate on jazz in Britain and Australia respectively. While the study of jazz in particular locations around the world is a necessary and welcome expansion to the field, more recent studies have sought to engage with jazz as a transnational practice, promoting a sophisticated range of interdisciplinary and international perspectives on the relationship between jazz and its social, political and cultural contexts. The creation of UNESCO's International Jazz Day in 2012, for example, provided a strong indication of the value and presence of jazz around the world and its potential to promote cross-cultural understanding. However, within these discourses, there is often an assumption that jazz operates either as a type of universal language, or from an American exceptionalist position, and so it is the task of researchers in different settings to challenge these claims and to explore the polysemic and cosmopolitan role that jazz fulfils in different cultures today. Within emerging transnational scholarship in jazz, therefore, we find that researchers from different disciplinary and national research settings present different ways of telling the story of jazz, which, in turn, comment on the changing relationship of different nations to the US. At the same time, these approaches can shed light on the complex cultural and musical exchanges that have shaped the global development and reception of jazz away from the US, and can explore ways in which the music operates as a medium for negotiating global identities. The articles within this issue deal with jazz as both a national and transnational music and cover a broad geographical and methodological spectrum, from concepts of the frontier in the alternative jazz scenes of Berlin
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2016
This chapter examines the complexity of the relationship between John Coltrane's recordings a... more This chapter examines the complexity of the relationship between John Coltrane's recordings and audivisual material following the release of his seminal album A Love Supreme in 1965. Drawing on video footage of the Classic Quartet's televised European Festival performances, I discuss the symbolic importance of Coltrane's music in relation to the notion of an authoritative jazz canon. The chapter comments ont he ways in which audiovisual mediations of jazz feed into mythoc representations of the past and enable seminal recordings and artists to accrue a series of cultural meanings that go betyond the production of sound.
The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, 2018
The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music documents the emergence of collectiv... more The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music documents the emergence of collective movements in jazz and improvised music. Jazz history is most often portrayed as a site for individual expression and revolves around the celebration of iconic figures, while the networks and collaborations that enable the music to maintain and sustain its cultural status are surprisingly under-investigated. This collection explores the history of musician-led collectives and the ways in which they offer a powerful counter-model for rethinking jazz practices in the post-war period. It includes studies of groups including the New York Musicians Organization, Sweden’s Ett minne for livet, Wonderbrass from South Wales, the contemporary Dutch jazz-hip hop scene, and Austria‘s JazzWerkstatt. With an international list of contributors and examples from Europe and the United States, these twelve essays and case studies examine issues of shared aesthetic vision, socioeconomic and political fact...
Research Papers in Education, 2008
Educational and psychological research suggests that gender and musical genre can influence music... more Educational and psychological research suggests that gender and musical genre can influence musical learning and the development of musical identities, particularly during adolescence. However, there is a relative paucity of educational studies in higher education (HE) concerning the possible impact on musical learning of gender and musical genre, either individually or collectively. As part of a two‐year comparative study funded under the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)'s Teaching and Learning Research ...
Music Education Research, 2010
This paper, following on from our previous paper focusing on findings regarding students&... more This paper, following on from our previous paper focusing on findings regarding students' approaches to learning, explores students' approaches to performance with particular focus on musical self-efficacy beliefs and experiences of performance anxiety in solo and group performances. The research design included a large questionnaire survey followed up by 13 case study interviews and six focus groups. Survey participants were 170 undergraduate musicians studying in three distinctively different higher education institutions, ...
Music Education Research, 2010
Research in higher education has established a relationship between student approaches to learnin... more Research in higher education has established a relationship between student approaches to learning and their perceptions of the learning environment. This study aims to make a contribution to music education literature by investigating undergraduate music students' perceptions of the learning context and their attitudes towards learning and performance. The research design included a large questionnaire survey followed up by 13 case study interviews and six focus groups. Survey participants were 170 undergraduate musicians studying in three distinctively different higher education institutions, encompassing classical, popular, jazz and Scottish traditional music genres. Findings suggest that the context of learning and the prevailing institutional culture are related to students' approaches to learning and performance. This paper focuses on findings related specifically to students' approaches to learning. Whilst statistically controlling for biases in gender and genre across the three institutions, differences were observed in students' self-assessment and perceived control over musical skills, as well as perceived relevance and pleasure obtained from engagement with musical activities. Our findings also highlight undergraduate musicians' perceptions of successful learning environments. A subsequent paper will focus on students' approaches to performance, in terms of musical self-efficacy and experiences of performance anxiety.
Jazz Research Journal, 2012
Beyond A Love Supreme, 2013
Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is widely... more Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is widely considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. A significant record of Coltrane's transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album is also an embodiment of the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life. The album itself comprises a four-part suite; the titles of the four parts - "Acknowledgment," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm" - along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he "recites" instrumentally in "Psalm" reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of seminal jazz recordings. In Beyond A Love Supreme, author Tony Whyton explores both the musical aspects of A Love Supreme, ...
Since at least the mid-1990s jazz scholars have challenged established jazz histories, using a ra... more Since at least the mid-1990s jazz scholars have challenged established jazz histories, using a range of critical methodologies to examine the con-structed nature of existing narratives. More recently, studies have set out either to write new jazz histories or to expose the underlying ...
This book examines the symbolic importance of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in relation to the f... more This book examines the symbolic importance of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in relation to the formation of an authoritative jazz canon. The book explores how the iconic album has come to fulfil a quasi-religious role in jazz and explores the role that seminal jazz recordings play in the everyday lives of both musicians and audiences.
The jazz volume of the Library of Essays on Popular Music is a valuable resource for researchers,... more The jazz volume of the Library of Essays on Popular Music is a valuable resource for researchers, enthusiasts, teachers and students. The featured articles in this volume provide an overview of jazz studies writings from the 1990s to the present day, and each text engages with issues that are central to the changing discourse of jazz in popular culture. The volume includes studies of specific scenes, artists and periods from jazz history, and also comments on broader aspects of musical discourse, from ontological considerations to the politics of canon formation, from issues of representation to international perspectives. The collection encourages readers to engage in comparative thinking and analysis, and contributions touch on a range of themes that will be of interest to scholars who situate jazz at the heart of popular music studies.
Today, jazz history is dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. F... more Today, jazz history is dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. From Satchmo to Duke, Bird to Trane, these legendary jazzmen form the backbone of the jazz tradition. Jazz icons not only provide musicians and audiences with figureheads to revere but have also come to stand for a number of values and beliefs that shape our view of the music itself. Jazz Icons explores the growing significance of icons in jazz and discusses the reasons why the music’s history is increasingly dependent on the legacies of ‘great men’. Using a series of individual case studies, Whyton examines the influence of jazz icons through different forms of historical mediation, including the recording, language, image and myth. The book encourages readers to take a fresh look at their relationship with iconic figures of the past and challenges many of the dominant narratives in jazz today.
Read Andrew Blake's review of Jazz Icons published in the Times Higher:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=412736§ioncode=26
Read Ian Patterson's review at www.allaboutjazz.com:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=38363
In no one's mind have the music's ties to its country of origin been severed, yet the historical ... more In no one's mind have the music's ties to its country of origin been severed, yet the historical record proves that it has for some time had global significance… Jazz exists in our collective imagination as both a national and postnational music, but is studied almost exclusively in the former incarnation. 1
Jazz Research Journal, 2014
The study of jazz in international settings has blossomed over the past ten years to the point wh... more The study of jazz in international settings has blossomed over the past ten years to the point where researchers from around the world can now draw on research into how the music works within specific national settings. Indeed, in previous issues, Jazz Research Journal has championed articles which explore jazz in different cultural and geographical settings, and future issues are planned which concentrate on jazz in Britain and Australia respectively. While the study of jazz in particular locations around the world is a necessary and welcome expansion to the field, more recent studies have sought to engage with jazz as a transnational practice, promoting a sophisticated range of interdisciplinary and international perspectives on the relationship between jazz and its social, political and cultural contexts. The creation of UNESCO's International Jazz Day in 2012, for example, provided a strong indication of the value and presence of jazz around the world and its potential to promote cross-cultural understanding. However, within these discourses, there is often an assumption that jazz operates either as a type of universal language, or from an American exceptionalist position, and so it is the task of researchers in different settings to challenge these claims and to explore the polysemic and cosmopolitan role that jazz fulfils in different cultures today. Within emerging transnational scholarship in jazz, therefore, we find that researchers from different disciplinary and national research settings present different ways of telling the story of jazz, which, in turn, comment on the changing relationship of different nations to the US. At the same time, these approaches can shed light on the complex cultural and musical exchanges that have shaped the global development and reception of jazz away from the US, and can explore ways in which the music operates as a medium for negotiating global identities. The articles within this issue deal with jazz as both a national and transnational music and cover a broad geographical and methodological spectrum, from concepts of the frontier in the alternative jazz scenes of Berlin
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2016
This chapter examines the complexity of the relationship between John Coltrane's recordings a... more This chapter examines the complexity of the relationship between John Coltrane's recordings and audivisual material following the release of his seminal album A Love Supreme in 1965. Drawing on video footage of the Classic Quartet's televised European Festival performances, I discuss the symbolic importance of Coltrane's music in relation to the notion of an authoritative jazz canon. The chapter comments ont he ways in which audiovisual mediations of jazz feed into mythoc representations of the past and enable seminal recordings and artists to accrue a series of cultural meanings that go betyond the production of sound.
The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, 2018
The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music documents the emergence of collectiv... more The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music documents the emergence of collective movements in jazz and improvised music. Jazz history is most often portrayed as a site for individual expression and revolves around the celebration of iconic figures, while the networks and collaborations that enable the music to maintain and sustain its cultural status are surprisingly under-investigated. This collection explores the history of musician-led collectives and the ways in which they offer a powerful counter-model for rethinking jazz practices in the post-war period. It includes studies of groups including the New York Musicians Organization, Sweden’s Ett minne for livet, Wonderbrass from South Wales, the contemporary Dutch jazz-hip hop scene, and Austria‘s JazzWerkstatt. With an international list of contributors and examples from Europe and the United States, these twelve essays and case studies examine issues of shared aesthetic vision, socioeconomic and political fact...
Research Papers in Education, 2008
Educational and psychological research suggests that gender and musical genre can influence music... more Educational and psychological research suggests that gender and musical genre can influence musical learning and the development of musical identities, particularly during adolescence. However, there is a relative paucity of educational studies in higher education (HE) concerning the possible impact on musical learning of gender and musical genre, either individually or collectively. As part of a two‐year comparative study funded under the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)'s Teaching and Learning Research ...
Music Education Research, 2010
This paper, following on from our previous paper focusing on findings regarding students&... more This paper, following on from our previous paper focusing on findings regarding students' approaches to learning, explores students' approaches to performance with particular focus on musical self-efficacy beliefs and experiences of performance anxiety in solo and group performances. The research design included a large questionnaire survey followed up by 13 case study interviews and six focus groups. Survey participants were 170 undergraduate musicians studying in three distinctively different higher education institutions, ...
Music Education Research, 2010
Research in higher education has established a relationship between student approaches to learnin... more Research in higher education has established a relationship between student approaches to learning and their perceptions of the learning environment. This study aims to make a contribution to music education literature by investigating undergraduate music students' perceptions of the learning context and their attitudes towards learning and performance. The research design included a large questionnaire survey followed up by 13 case study interviews and six focus groups. Survey participants were 170 undergraduate musicians studying in three distinctively different higher education institutions, encompassing classical, popular, jazz and Scottish traditional music genres. Findings suggest that the context of learning and the prevailing institutional culture are related to students' approaches to learning and performance. This paper focuses on findings related specifically to students' approaches to learning. Whilst statistically controlling for biases in gender and genre across the three institutions, differences were observed in students' self-assessment and perceived control over musical skills, as well as perceived relevance and pleasure obtained from engagement with musical activities. Our findings also highlight undergraduate musicians' perceptions of successful learning environments. A subsequent paper will focus on students' approaches to performance, in terms of musical self-efficacy and experiences of performance anxiety.
Jazz Research Journal, 2012
Beyond A Love Supreme, 2013
Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is widely... more Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is widely considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. A significant record of Coltrane's transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album is also an embodiment of the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life. The album itself comprises a four-part suite; the titles of the four parts - "Acknowledgment," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm" - along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he "recites" instrumentally in "Psalm" reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of seminal jazz recordings. In Beyond A Love Supreme, author Tony Whyton explores both the musical aspects of A Love Supreme, ...
Since at least the mid-1990s jazz scholars have challenged established jazz histories, using a ra... more Since at least the mid-1990s jazz scholars have challenged established jazz histories, using a range of critical methodologies to examine the con-structed nature of existing narratives. More recently, studies have set out either to write new jazz histories or to expose the underlying ...
Debates in jazz history are aesthetic marks which reflect discourses about the directions the mus... more Debates in jazz history are aesthetic marks which reflect discourses about the directions the music might take. In September 2013 experts from Europe and the USA met at the Darmstadt Jazzforum to discuss how such debates inform the perception of jazz to this day. The essays in this book focus on the effects of jazz debates on the aesthetic opinion. They examine historical as well as current debates within the German jazz scene. They discuss the gender debate in jazz, asking how an ideal of masculinity influences both the music and its reception as well as where in the jazz discourses one might find room for women and the LGBT community. Finally, they focus on the latest debate about the term "jazz" itself, touching questions about both historical and aesthetic ownership of music.
The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies presents over forty articles from internationally renowne... more The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies presents over forty articles from internationally renowned scholars and highlights the strengths of current jazz scholarship in a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry. Each chapter reflects on developments within jazz studies over the last twenty-five years, offering surveys and new insights into the major perspectives and approaches to jazz research. The collection provides an essential research resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts, and will serve as the definitive survey of current jazz scholarship in the Anglophone world to-date. It extends the critical debates about jazz that were set in motion by formative texts in the 1990s, and sets the agenda for the future scholarship by focusing on key issues and providing a framework for new lines of enquiry. It is organized around six themes: I. Historical Perspectives, II. Methodologies, III. Core Issues and Topics, IV. Individuals, Collectives and Communities, V. Politics, Discourse an...
A Research Agenda for Heritage Planning
14-17 April 2016. Birmingham City University, UK. The 4th Rhythm Changes conference for internati... more 14-17 April 2016. Birmingham City University, UK. The 4th Rhythm Changes conference for international jazz scholars.