Statement of ResearchTom SmithProfessor of Music

There are those from the ranks of intelligentsia who forward a premise that jazz history is inexplicably readjusted every few years, to qualify an artificial line of succession or to right a real or imagined injustice. To some, historical truths shift much in the same way tides shift in the ocean. One day, a musician is revered, only to be unrepentantly savaged by a succeeding generation with different perspectives. Once discounted as the mere rantings of the disenfranchised, recent high profile publications and documentaries about jazz history have in the minds of these people added qualification to their once tenuous assertions. In their estimations, the new history of jazz is based upon group consensus of a real or imagined injustice, resulting in the incessant repetition of an incorrect thought. Such practices usually begin with the unfortunate proclivity of journalists (unknowing of academic discipline) to repeat something already written and incorporate it into a new article or review. Although the quotation may be properly footnoted, the opinion is accelerated, to where issues of taste and conjecture are often mistaken for truth. Trumpeter/ scholar Donald Byrd once called this phenomenon “the lie agreed upon,” and spent much of his career fact checking biographical entries written by jazz critics he believed unqualified to observe the traditions of formal research. As he saw it, critics were in the beginning a necessary evil, for were it not for them, there would be little written about jazz, in light of academia ignoring the genre for most of its history. In the present, jazz history is a formative mixture of critic generated anecdotes, alongside over compensating jargon and self appointed musician/spokespersons, while a unified language for jazz research in of itself, goes wanting.

Over the years, I have been called a music detective, for helping clarify any number of lost and/or unidentified tangents within the history of jazz... this at a time when formalized jazz history (in search of common ground between critic/spokesperson and academic) has leaned towards celebration of the smallest handful, while research indicates there having been hundreds of musicians simultaneously innovating in different locations, while under the influence of great social and technological change. For those musicians not in a position to defend their historical legacies, evaluative analysis occasionally transforms once revered substantive figures into secondary personalities, undeserving of pantheon elevation, whereas my task has been to reach the most truthful consensus possible, so as to create a sense of fair and equitable balance. Through publishing and conference presentations, I tend to champion contributors deserving of wider recognition, and the mostly unknown (but interesting) works of iconic figures, while attempting to eradicate inaccuracy where it is found.

A 2014 Brubeck Institute Research Grant recipient, my topics have been featured on programs like National Public Radio's Weekly Edition, Tech TV, and the Rutgers Jazz Roundtable, and have included answering questions about the death of clarinetist Frank Teshemacher, Duke Ellington's Silk Road inferences in The Far East Suite, " lost years of Charlie Ventura/ Bill Harris, and discovery of the musical fingerprint that led to positive identification of personnel on early unlabeled recordings. I have also contributed entries and chapters to: Teaching Music Through Performance In Jazz, Bakers Dictionary of Music and American National Biography, while currently developing larger works exploring the present state of jazz perception (to be titled: Stealth Jazz), the authorized Charlie Ventura biography, and an anecdotal account of my time as a jazz educator in China (to be titled: Jazz Kids of Ningbo).

In these early years of the twenty-first century, it is still considered somewhat of an historical impropriety to mention my subject material alongside better known events and more vaunted contemporaries. However, it must be asserted that all things of importance to jazz are deserving of a fair and unbiased accounting, before “the lie agreed upon” becomes permanently and irreparably etched in stone.

Supplemental:

Tom Smith: Music Researcher/ Historian:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2flfkTbqcXc&list=UUEutV6vmwrfSotDTMUDo9zA