John Murphy's faculty site at the University of North Texas College of Music

Today was a good day: two trips to campus by bike, 18.4 miles total.
Now relaxing with two essays from 1973 about the disadvantages of cars:

essay 1 | essay 2

我喜欢听音乐。
This means "I like to listen to music." I am studying Mandarin in preparation for returning to China in May 2010 to do a workshop at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

Once in a while I publish something. Here are two recent items.

1.
"Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society," edited by Bruno Nettl and Gabriel Solis, has just been published by the University of Illinois Press. It includes my article entitled "Beyond the Improvisation Class: Learning to Improvise in a University Jazz Studies Program." Gabriel Solis summarizes it this way in the introduction: "Murphy's study takes an explicitly ethnographic tack in seeking to advance understanding of institutional jazz education, a topic that has been much discussed, in print and more informally, by jazz scholars, musicians, and critics. Having taught jazz studies at the University of North Texas and conducted extensive research with students and faculty there, he argues that far more goes into learning jazz there than can be found in official classroom curricula. It is, his interlocutors say, a process that occupies their whole selves and that continues, despite its institutionalization, to incorporate much of an older oral-tradition model" (p. 13).
Page for the book at University of Illinois Press

2. Review of Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser's Art by Andy Hamilton. Society for American Music Bulletin 34/3 (Fall 2008): 63-64.

"A good writer can make you care about anything." --Ann Norris, copy editor at The New Yorker
Students: if you want to become a better writer, read The New Yorker every week.
This interview with Ann Norris tells you how much care is given to the writing in it.

I'm a member of Naked Lynch, the Steely Dan tribute band. Here's tonight's set list for Dan's Silverleaf in Denton. The horns use excellent charts prepared by Scott Covey, UNT alumnus.

SET 1
Green Earrings
Pretzel Logic
Night By Night
Bad Sneakers
The Caves Of Altamira
My Old School
Bodhisattva
GAUCHO album in its entirety:
Babylon Sisters
Hey Nineteen
Glamour Profession
Gaucho
Time Out Of Mind
My Rival
Third World Man

SET 2
AJA album in its entirety:
Black Cow
Aja
Deacon Blues
Peg
Home At Last
I Got The News
Josie

Here At The Western World
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
Jack Of Speed
Don’t Take Me Alive
Sign In Stranger
Parker’s Band
Kid Charlemagne

Bike to work. That's the distance I covered on the bike this week in five days of biking to work and short ride on Saturday.

Most of the skills listed here

http://personalmba.com/core-human-skills/

are things you could work on while earning a degree in jazz studies at UNT.

Here's an mp3 of my new tune "Start Again" as played on April 17, 2009 at the North Texas Jazz Festival. JM, tenor; Steve Weist, trombone; Tim Goynes, guitar; Lynn Seaton, bass; Ed Soph, drums. Lead sheet: concert | B flat

I like to play with Garage Band drum loops. Here is some ordinary practicing on my tune Out of A Dream on April 16, 2009.

In late May I will visit Xinghai Conservatory in Guangzhou, where UNT jazz alumnus Landon Mattox teaches.
In June I will be part of a UNT delegation to universities in the other cities on the map.

larger map