Beyond popular press reviews and criticism, iconic jazz recordings have recently become objects of scholarly investigation. Inasmuch as live performance is so celebrated (and even fetishized) by audiences and scholars, jazz music from its earliest days has been attached to recording technologies and industries, raising questions of representation, authenticity, and appropriation. Because of the prevalence of recorded jazz, listeners and consumers have driven trends and shaped the interpretative meanings of jazz through their attitudes about and treatment of their favourite recordings. With the exception of ethnographic works (such as those by Berliner, Monson, and Jackson) which employ specific methodologies and vocabularies for dealing with live performance, scholarship on jazz tends to focus on recordings because their iterability invites the careful consideration, transcription, and reflection that academic work relies on.Footnote ¹ With the advent of New Jazz Studies (marked most notably by volumes by Gabbard and O'Meally et al.), jazz recordings have enjoyed a host of new analyses that use interpretative frameworks borrowed from African American studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, interpretative theory, and media studies, sometimes in conjunction with – but other times in lieu of – more ‘traditional’ music-theoretical and musicological approaches.Footnote ² Notable examples include the monographs by Kahn, Pond, and Griffin and Washington, with Miles Davis's watershed album, Kind of Blue (1959), inspiring the most scholarly attention, no doubt related to its status as the best-selling jazz album of all time.Footnote ³

The series Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz can be read within this history – as a continued explication and theorization of the jazz record – or as a collection of individual volumes that provide not just in-depth analysis but also an aesthetic that makes analysis accessible to diverse readerships. Series editor Jeremy Barham's introduction that appears in each volume advertises a narrative of comprehensiveness of methodological approach and subgenres. The series offers a particular scholarly imperative: that in order to fully understand the jazz album, one must not only study the recording as text but also as context, with emphasis on its processes of production, marketing, and audience reception. It is an expressed goal of the series to develop ‘languages and vocabularies for analysis of recorded jazz performance’, which is accomplished through various applications of the series’ call for methodological diversity. It is a credit to the series editor that he encourages scholarly attention and engagement with the ways audiences and musicians actually use records rather perpetuating a notion that live jazz is the only meaningful medium worthy of investigation. The first five books of the series – published between 2011 and 2014 – treat a mix of live and studio recordings, advancing a balanced approach for theorizing recorded jazz. The books, though, are not uniform: each author takes a unique approach that couples their own formidable research skills with the particular histories of the recordings they write about. As a result, reading each volume individually yields distinctive insights while, read together, the collection delivers on its promise to present a wide range of perspectives on the relationship between recorded media and jazz music.

The first of the three volumes published in 2011 was written by Brian Harker and examines trumpeter Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. Harker's focus is on Armstrong's integration of jazz's stylistic influences and the consolidation of listening practices around his music. Harker views these Armstrong recordings as unique in their widespread attraction across audiences that preferred either ‘sweet’ or ‘hot’ styles of jazz, suggesting that part of Armstrong's initial appeal and his legacy as one of the United States’ most important jazz musicians derives from his abilities as an artist of montage. Aligning Armstrong with modernist movements and the social politics of Booker T. Washington, Harker believes that Armstrong's skill at rearranging existing materials in novel ways fit into an existing, contemporary aesthetics of inventiveness and suggests that perhaps for that reason his recordings did not invite the same praise at the time of their release that they would in subsequent decades.Footnote ⁴ Under the rubric of ‘integration’, Harker discusses several sides from these recordings, including ‘Cornet Chop Suey’, ‘Potato Head Blues’, ‘S.O.L. Blues’, and the perennially celebrated ‘West End Blues’. Another paradigmatic shift in jazz music Harker attributes to these recordings is Armstrong's development of soloistic (as opposed to group) improvisation. Through careful analysis of Armstrong's solos, Harker demonstrates the trumpeter's innovation in regards to motivic development and incorporation of various influences, even including novelty artist Guy Lombardo, whom the author views as emblematic of Armstrong's love of the popular, an aesthetic that proved particularly polarizing in Armstrong's later years. Contending that ‘the Hot Fives are all we have to listen to’, Harker points out the importance of oral histories and archival research for gleaning a sense of the live music-making that was technologically impossible to record. In the end Armstrong's relative indifference to the recordings and Harker's charge that ‘we should prize [the recordings] more than Armstrong did himself’ reinforces the primacy of the live jazz event even though the reiterability of recordings yields new discoveries and insights ‘of which Armstrong himself might not have been aware’ (171).

The second of the 2011 volumes, written by British jazz scholar Catherine Tackley, celebrates Goodman's contributions to the jazz world, drawing on the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert as a particularly formative moment in the clarinetist's career. Additionally, Tackley points to contemporary innovations in recording technology – to capture, reproduce, and disseminate live recordings – as part of the 1938 concert's legacy and continued importance in jazz history. The author details how a reissue of the concert in the 1950s amplified the influence and impact of Goodman's concert and how audiences have conflated the recording with the event. This observation fuels a discussion of mediation, authenticity, and listening practices in jazz recordings, such as the nostalgia that informed producer Phil Schaap's decision not to edit out noise from the original recordings in his 1999 reissue of the concert in order to allow access to what was heard ‘back in the day’ (even though the original recording was archival and not broadcast). Tackley's analysis of the concert repertoire – which occupies the majority of the text – is augmented by studied consideration of musical scores, comparative analysis to other extant recordings, and reportage of the event, and shows a consistency among renditions of the concert programme. For its lengthier improvisations, dynamic interplay, and the quality of Goodman's performance, the 16-minute jam session featuring a small group (with members of Goodman, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington's orchestras) earns special mention in the book. Tackley also draws attention to the socio-cultural importance of an interracial group's performance on the Carnegie Hall stage, which lent prestige to jazz as a genre as well as to Goodman's music. This prestige carried into the immediate reception of the concert and informed a nostalgia in subsequent decades as several reissues were released. Throughout the entire text, Tackley engages productive and insightful questions about the relationships between live performance, recordings, public and journalistic discourses, and media technologies as they pertain to the 1938 concert.

The third of the 2011 volumes, The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965–68, written by music theorist Keith Waters, is noteworthy for several reasons: the higher number of recordings it covers, its length (just over 300 pages, the longest so far of these relatively short volumes), and its commitment to a primary scholarly method. Waters admits in the volume's Introduction that ‘it may be that those interested in jazz as seen through a cultural lens are interested in asking questions different from those with a more analytical focus’ (x), a sentiment to which I would agree with a slight revision – ‘with a focus more centred on music theory analysis’ – for certainly music scholarship that relies on music theory analysis is not the only type of investigation that has analytical focus. In its insistence on disciplinarity as an essential element, Waters's text is masterful in its own right and provides the kind of thorough grounding in musical specificity from which more interdisciplinary studies can derive a firm foundation. I find this text particularly compelling for its riff on the series’ call for ‘full context’ in that it suggests ‘that allowing for a plurality of views about music acknowledges more richly the breadth of its traditions’ and insists on the author's freedom to answer the call for interdisciplinarity and attendant questions of breadth versus depth as s/he sees fit (x). Accordingly, Waters establishes from the outset a clear focus on discussing the second Miles Davis Quintet's recordings from the perspective of music theory and then delivers a definitive text on the albums E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro, bracketed on either side with chapters on his analytical approach and the legacies of the quintet.

Peter Elsdon authored the next volume – Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert – which was published in 2013 and demonstrates the wide breadth of methodological approaches Oxford University Press allows in this series. Unlike Waters, Elsdon adopts a more inclusive approach and uses a range of research methods to call attention to the complexities of performance, production, and reception of The Köln Concert. In this way he follows Tackley in her volume on Goodman – but, in the half the number of pages, is only able to begin an analysis that he knows would never be complete. Those who read these volumes consecutively, as I did, will be struck by the contrast in authorial styles and methodologies, but, as Waters suggests, promoting and appreciating a plurality of approaches is most certainly a positive development for jazz studies. Elsdon's text is also compelling for his analysis of Jarrett's vexed attitudes towards his own album, particularly as it relates to the pianist's aesthetic and artistic goals for his improvised solo piano concerts, of which the Köln concert was just one. In short, as Tackley and Harker demonstrated in their respective volumes, the recording of the Köln concert acquired a host of meanings and a level of importance and prestige that in many ways eclipsed the concert itself and especially Jarrett's hopes for it. (An important theme in all the five volumes emerges here: the artists themselves differ from the public and critics in their perceptions of the recordings, as Harker also showed in his discussion of Armstrong.) Elsdon elaborates on earlier work by David Ake regarding Jarrett's connection to Euro-American and European aesthetics and ideals, including how the pianist's performance of Western European classical repertoire and his collaboration with Manfred Eicher and the ECM label both opened up new audiences for his music and polarized listeners.Footnote ⁵ In the wide range of scholarly perspectives, Elsdon's approach to writing this volume similarly invites readership from many different audiences; however, in contrast to some of the other volumes, the flow between the chapters suffers as a result – while Elsdon is adept in navigating cultural studies, music theory, music history, media studies, etc., his reliance on distinct bodies of scholarship for each chapter leads to some jarring shifts. Each chapter ends with compelling, well-supported conclusions, which unfortunately are left unfinished and unattended as each subsequent perspective is adopted.

The latest edition in the Studies in Recorded Jazz series, published in 2014, returns to Carnegie Hall as the site of another live recording. Gabriel Solis continues his scholarship on Thelonious Monk with this volume exploring the album Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, which was discovered and released to much acclaim just in the last decade.Footnote ⁶ Solis's text is built around enquiries into the various roles and meanings that repetition has in performance practice, technological production, and discourse surrounding the 1957 concert and the release of the previously unknown recording of it almost fifty years later. Solis draws on repetition as a means of complicating the false divisions between composition and improvisation, live and mediated performance, original and copy, among others. Solis devotes the majority of his text to an in-depth analysis of the repertoire from the live concert – grouped by song types and augmented with substantial transcriptions – with contextual chapters on the collaborative relationship between Monk and Coltrane, the concert's setting, and the discovery, production, and reception of the concert's recording in 2005, drawing on the theme of repetition to provide overall unity. Solis's arguments are compelling and wide ranging, covering the specifics of this concert and recording but reiterating essential points for jazz studies research pertaining to the musical work, issues of authenticity and reproduction, nostalgia and reissued recordings, and academic institutionalization, among others, that make the book applicable and engaging beyond just the scope of its primary object of study.

As a series, the different backgrounds and the analytical goals of each of these authors point to the varied possible interpretations of any record or concert and reflect the diversity of scholarly perspectives in jazz studies. Series editor Jeremy Barham and Oxford University Press should be commended for their promotion of this interdisciplinary approach. The series will significantly enrich and augment already existing scholarship on each of these records. When read together, these five volumes offer key insights into the nature of jazz music, its performance practices, media and audience relations, and its reliance on and obligations to capitalist economies of production. This type of expansive approach to jazz studies will no doubt continue with future publications, including those forthcoming: Samuel Barrett's Kind of Blue and the Modality of Modern Jazz; Mervyn Cooke's Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1976−1984; and George Burrows, Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy.

Although the diversity of disciplinary approaches is much needed and very laudable, the omission of other types of diversity in the series as it exists thus far reveals gaps that will hopefully be redressed in future volumes. With regards to the five volumes reviewed here and the three forthcoming, the relative uniformity among objects of study – in terms of both recordings and musicians – unfortunately reinforces canonical hierarchies and historiographical biases that jazz studies has been attempting to dismantle for the last twenty years. (I think it significant that two of the first five volumes are based on performances in Carnegie Hall, one of the most canonical venues in the history of US music.) While editors are beholden to the submissions of their potential authors, there are most certainly well-qualified scholars currently working in the field of jazz studies who could produce compelling volumes that address recordings by female, Latino, and Afro-diasporic musicians and vocalists, as well as recordings that reflect the historical and current stylistic and cultural diversity in jazz within and outside the United States. Viewed in this light, the series’ descriptive language of ‘comprehensive’ coverage, even when considering all the current and forthcoming books, rings a little false. The investigations offered in the already published volumes certainly provide depth and detail, but the language of ‘complete context and full methodological and subgenre coverage’ runs counter to the arguments of the individual authors who definitively demonstrate how any one study of a recording or musician is inherently incomprehensive. At best, the variety of approaches and perspectives offered by these initial five volumes of the series can help us come to a clearer and better informed perception of the uncircumscribable complexities of jazz performance practice, media production, and reception. Although each volume relies on transcription and analysis (to varying degrees), those not familiar with Western musical notation will still derive many insights from these books. Surely, the volumes in this series will be valuable classroom resources (including in jazz history courses for undergraduate music majors) as well as provide compelling reading for educated listeners and aficionados.