articles and book chapters

“Jelly Rolls, Jungle Music, and the Eternal Tom-Tom Beating of the Negro Heart: Teaching Jazz and Blues in the Harlem Renaissance.”  Teaching the Harlem Renaissance.  Ed. Venetria K. Patton.  New York: Modern Languages Association, forthcoming.  14pp.

“All That Jazz: Black Music as Muse.” The Cambridge History of African American Poetry. Ed. Keith Leonard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming. 20pp.

“Jazz and American Popular Culture.” The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture. Ed. Lauren Rabinovitz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming. 21pp.

“Red Carpet Radicals: Public Feminist Scholarship and the Sexism|Cinema Film Series.” (authored with Donald E. Lavigne, Elizabeth A. Sharp, Jessica E. Smith, Dana A. Weiser, and Allison Whitney). Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community. Ed. Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn. Ann Arbor, MI: Lever Press, 2023. 19-36.

“Jazz, Performance, and Modernist Embodiment in Hughes’s Early Writing.” Langston Hughes in Context. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Anthony Reed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2023. 21-32.

“Steely Dan at 50,” Rock Music Studies 9.3 [Special Issue: “Steely Dan at 50”] (2022): 249-64.

“The Harlem Renaissance.” Ralph Ellison in Context. Ed. Paul Devlin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 219-229.

“‘Schoolboy Takes the Stage’: Albert Murray’s The Seven League Boots as Dramatization of an Aesthetic and Philosophy of Music.” MELUS 45.3 (2020): 129-151.

“The Sound of Jazz as Essential Image: Television, Performance, and the Modern Jazz Canon.”  Jazz Research Journal 12.1 (2018): 12-35.

“‘Pushing Into Open Air’: Poetry, Art, and Public Space in Educating Audiences about Mass Incarceration.”  (authored with Alfredo Aguilar, Shayla Corprew, Jill Murphy Elberson, Apryl Lewis, and Amelia Reyes).  Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal. 

“‘The Blues Always Been Here’: African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”  Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism.  Ed. Katherine O’Callaghan.  New York: Routledge, 2018.  237-52.

“The ‘Professional’ Singer-Songwriter in the 1970s.”  The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. Eds. Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.  89-99.

“True Tales and 8 Mile Memoirs: Exploring the Imaginary City of Detroit.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41.1 (2008): 107-34. 

“‘So Black, So Blue’: Ralph Ellison, Louis Armstrong and the Bebop Aesthetic.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. Special Issue: “Blue Notes: Toward a New Jazz Discourse.” 37.2 (2004): 261-84.

“A Synthesis of Racial Caress: Hybrid Modernism in the Jazz Poetry of William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy.” Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. Ed. Ian D. Copestake. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2004. 255-71.

“Queen of the Colonial Exposition: Josephine Baker’s Strategic Performance.” Critical Voicings of Black Liberation: Resistance and Representation in the Americas. Eds. Kimberley L. Phillips, Hermine Pinson, Lorenzo Thomas and Hanna Wallinger. Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. Volume 11. Munster, Germany: LIT, 2003. 47-65.

“Noisy Modernism: The Cultural Politics of Langston Hughes’s Early Jazz Poetry.” Langston Hughes Review. 17.1-2 (2002): 4-22.

“An Intelligence of the Body: Disruptive Parody through Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker.” EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance. Eds. Alison Goeller and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. Volume 4. Munster, Germany: LIT, 2001. 41-58. 

Reprinted in The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist.  Ed. Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017.  128-140. 

book reviews

Rev. of Gettin’ Around: Jazz, Script, Transnationalism by Jürgen E. Grandt. The ALH Online Review Series XXIV. 28 August, 2020.

Rev. of The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture by Dale Chapman, and Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon by Maxine Gordon. African American Review 52.3 (2019): 308-11.

Rev. of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz and People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds. ESC: English Studies in Canada 41.4 (2016): 132-8.

Rev. of Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature by Keren Omry and Writing the Future of Black America: Literature of the Hip-Hop Generation by Daniel Grassian. American Literature 82.4 (2010): 855-57.

Rev. of The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble. ESC: English Studies in Canada. 31.2-3 (2005): 349-52.

Rev. of Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems by Michael S.Harper. H-PCAACA: H-Net Reviews. November, 2000. <http://www.hnet.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=5599974403148.>

Rev. of Tadd: The Life and Legacy of Tadley Ewing Dameron by Ian MacDonald. Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music March/April 2000: 40.

Rev. of How My Heart Sings, by Peter Pettinger. Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music  March/April 1999: 15.

Rev. of The Progress of an Object in Motion, by Curtis Gillespie. Other Voices 11.1 (Spring 1998): 105-7.

Short articles, notes, encyclopedia entries

“Heard and Seen: Barry Harris Trio at the Village Vanguard.”  Coda October/November 2008: 12.

“Jazz and Film at the Museum of Modern Art: Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses (1974).”  Coda October/November 2008: 20.

“Jazz Conquers Communism! Moscow on the Hudson (1984).” Coda August/September 2008: 19.

“Jazz is Weird Again: DOA (1950) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).” Coda May/June 2008: 43.

“OP’s Thriller of a Soundtrack: The Silent Partner (1978).” Coda Magazine March/April 2008: 12.

“‘Viva Italia!’: Jazz in Films by Italian Directors of the 1960s.” Coda Magazine January/February 2008: 12.

“Sun Ra in Space is the Place.” Coda Magazine November/December 2007: 14.

“Heard and Seen: Wynton Marsalis with the LCJO and Odadaa!” Coda Magazine November/December 2007: 16.

“Kansas City and American Theatricality.” Coda Magazine Sept/Oct 2007: 8.

“John Cassavetes’s Shadows: Blending Improvisation and Composition.” Coda Magazine May/June 2007: 10.

“Mysterioso Marketing.” Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music September/October 2006: 12.

“Whither Eclecticism?” Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music July/August 2006: 8.

“Good Night, and Good Jazz: Jazz in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck.” Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music January/February 2006: 9.

“Romare Bearden.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. 102-03.

“Detroit, Michigan.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature . Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. 417-21.

“Jazz.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. 844-49.

“Albert Murray.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2005. 1141-43.

“Not Without Laughter.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 2004. 917-18.

“Shuffle Along.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1108-10.

“The Weary Blues.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1244-46.

“The Spread of Jazz-and-Literature Resources on the World Wide Web.” Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature 1.2 (Summer 1997): 41-7.