Dr. Nathan Davis, founder and director of the Jazz Studies Program and a Pitt faculty member from 1969 to 2013, passed away April 9, 2018, in Palm Beach, Florida, at age 81.  In 2017, he was named to the International Academy Jazz Hall of Fame, which he created to honor the great musicians with whom he had performed and many of whom he brought to campus in the Annual Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert.

The Department of Music is pleased to announce three upcoming doctoral dissertation defenses. Graduate Faculty of the University may attend and participate in the examination. All Music graduate students are invited. All defenses will take place in 114 Music Building.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Jazz Studies Program in collaboration with the University of Illinois Press seek research articles for Issue No. 2 of Jazz and Culture.

PhD candidate Ben Barson is one of 15 recipients of the 2018 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards. ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) has made the awards since 2002 to encourage jazz composers under the age of 30. Barson received an award for his composition Insurrealista which he describes as an,

“…homage to the revolutionary surrealism of the father of Negritude, Aime Cesaire. In terms of influences, the piece employs a 20-string koto, within a jazz-hip hop rhythmic section.”

In the 1970s an avant-garde jazz scene flourished in the lofts of lower Manhattan. Yet this energetic era had not been extensively documented until the recent publication of Pitt jazz studies professor Michael C. Heller’s Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (University of California Press).

According to the publisher,