“Skid-Dat-De-Dat,”

Master Artistic Research, 2020

Improvisation, the art of creating at the moment, is the main reason that I started singing jazz. It allows me to express my musical thoughts, while being the biggest struggle in my musicality. I was suggested by many of my mentors and colleagues that my ideas were nice but needed to be connected. These artistic needs introduced me to taksims, improvisations based on melodic development. In this research, I demonstrate how elements such as phrasing and melodic development can be integrated into vocal improvisation of jazz and arranged folk songs by analysing selected pieces in hicaz and huseyni makams. In this context, the recordings from Refik Fersan, Salim Bey, Andon Efendi, Cemil Bey and Tanrıkorur analysed and the stylistic elements implied into my daily practice with exercises. These exercises made my improvisations more solid and consistent by prioritizing melodic development. My findings, i.e. exercises and technical explanation, will help musicians, particularly vocalists who would like to apply the makam practice into their improvisation skills. By application of this process their musicianship will profit from the linear melodic approach, odd meters and the technique.

Stereotypes and segregation played an important role in Jazz industry from its very first steps at the beginning of the twentieth century. Women vs. men, where the first had to overcome many obstacles of a man'sheld business. Black women vs. white women; the second were often considered "soulless" as singers. Finally, blacks vs. whites; it was daring for a black singer such as Billie Holiday to

Exegesis, audio recordings, video footage and video demonstrations submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree:

American Literature, June 2015

2011

The creation of song is a natural activity in early childhood. As every child learns to speak so does every child learn to sing. Whether singing or speaking comes first is a matter of definition, but it is safe to say that the child's speaking or singing relies on exposure to cultural models of speech and song respectively. This period of exposure to 'two distinct sound systems'(Patel, 2008: p.

Following popular exposure in France to the proto-jazz of James Reese Europe and his 369th “Harlem Hellfighters” Infantry Regiment during the latter years of WW1, the jazz bug took hold and, in the period that followed, spread throughout Europe. This new mu- sic from the USA, drawing on the ethno-cultural melting pot of New Orleans, provided a soundtrack to the new order that was forged following the two world wars. Its spread marked the beginning of Europe’s complex relationship to jazz, a music associated vari- ously with exoticism, vice, youth, cultural decay, liberation, US imperialism, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and intellectual elitism. During the past century, the cultural status of jazz has gone from popular to specialist, from entertainment to art, and in Europe, from an imported to an appropriated and repur- posed music form. The initial eagerness by European musicians to emulate the American founding fathers of jazz has over time given way to national and regional reinterpretations of the genre. Examples of emergent European sensibilities in jazz creation and perfor- mance can be heard in the German free scene of the 1960s, and the “Nordic tone” as- sociated with the ECM label in the 1970s. These departures from the genre’s American narrative, traditionally so intrinsically intertwined in its understanding, have necessitated the revisiting of the ontology of jazz in its post-globalisation context. Continental Drift: 50 years of jazz from Europe took place in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 16th and 17th of July, 2016. A co-production between Edinburgh Napier University and the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, the conference was conceived to reflect the fes- tival’s theme, a celebration of fifty years of European jazz. The notion of European jazz as divergently distinct from the genre’s American conception constituted the basis for inves- tigation through a series of panel sessions. v vi INTRODUCTION The conference welcomed eminent panellists and presenters from across Europe and the United States drawn from academia, creative practice, and industry to interrogate and unpack the origin story, development, and emerging practices of jazz from Europe. The proceedings opened with ECM recording artist Marcin Wasilewski in interview with Haftor Medbøe as an introduction to the four themed panel sessions respectively titled “People and Histories”, “Places and Events”, Scenes and Networks”, and “Futures”. The chaired sessions probed themes of provenance, authenticity, hybridity, and innovation as applied to Europe’s contribution to the global jazz scene. Video and podcast legacies of these panel sessions are available from the conference website: www.continentaldriftconference.co.uk On each day the conference gave the floor to contributors on a variety of specialist top- ics. These took the form of 20X20 slide presentations and provided the basis for lively audience discussions. The conference organisers subsequently invited contributors to ex- pand on their presentations, and the resulting papers are collated in this publication.