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

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.