Scott DeVeaux
· Professor (Critical & Comparative Studies)University of Virginia · Music
Active 1985–2022
About
Scott DeVeaux is a professor in the Department of Music at the University of Virginia, specializing in jazz and American music, with secondary interests in ethnomusicology (Africa), popular music, and music and war. His scholarly work includes authoring the book Jazz, co-written with critic Gary Giddins, which was nominated for the 2010 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award for Best Book about Jazz. He also authored The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, which has received the American Musicological Society’s Kinkeldey Award for best book, the American Book Award, and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Additionally, his publications include Jazz in America: Who's Listening? and The Music of James Scott, among others. DeVeaux has contributed numerous articles to academic journals, exploring topics such as jazz history, popular song, and critical approaches to jazz. His research and teaching focus on the social and musical development of jazz, its cultural significance, and its place within American musical history.
Research topics
- Geography
Selected publications
New York University Press eBooks · 2022
- Geography
colleagues, mentors, coaches, and the social memory and lived experiences of African Americans, both female and male.It has been full of ups and downs, but
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2020-02-23 · 2 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAs a musicologist, I'm accustomed to forming opinions that nobody in particular wants to hear. So when Ken Burns's mega-documentary Jazz first aired on PBS in January 2001, it was an interesting time to be an aca-demic specialist in jazz. Suddenly everyone, from close friends to casual acquaintances, was asking what I thought, and a surprising number actually wanted to hear the answers.
Journal of the Society for American Music · 2018-01-25
article1st authorCorrespondingBird: The Life and Times of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. - Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. By Stanley Crouch . New York: Harper Collins, 2013. - Wail: The Life of Bud Powell. By Peter Pullman . New York: Peter Pullman, 2012. - The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop. By Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. - Volume 12 Issue 1
The Journal of Southern History · 2017-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingReviewed by: Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch, and: Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix Scott DeVeaux Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. By Stanley Crouch. (New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 365. $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-200559-5.) Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix. Music in American Life. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 188. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-252-03791-7.) As jazz enters the academy, it is surprising how little we know about some of its most important artists. Charlie Parker, the saxophonist at the center of modern jazz, lived a short and troubled life; fewer than thirty-five years separated his birth in 1920 from his drug-addled death in 1955. Chuck Haddix’s new book, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, does its best to fill in the puzzle with documented facts. A Kansas City local and director of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries, Haddix builds on many recent sources, including Chan Parker’s autobiography, the Ross Russell Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, interviews with Parker’s childhood friends in Kansas City, and a previously overlooked interview with Parker’s first wife, Rebecca Ruffin. Most of these details clarify Parker’s childhood and adolescence in Kansas City. For example, Haddix documents the youthful Parker’s enrollment in the Penn School, the first institution west of the Mississippi River for educating African American students, where, believe it or not, the kids donned wings for a school pageant entitled “Birdland.” The rest of the book [End Page 209] is thoroughly professional, even if for much of it Haddix retells familiar incidents in plain, unsentimental prose. Haddix’s account is overshadowed by the long-awaited book from the pugnacious jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, the first of what could be several volumes on Parker’s life, covers only the years leading to his stunning debut at age twenty with the Jay McShann Orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crouch has been working on this biography for over thirty years; interviews with Buster Smith, Jay McShann, and Gene Ramey date back to the early 1980s. Indeed, some of this material has already been seen. Gary Giddins’s Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York, 1987) drew on Crouch’s interviews, especially his long-standing relationship with Parker’s first wife. Armed with reels of tape recordings and his prodigious writing voice, Crouch was in a position to put all competitors in his wake. Yet its appearance is a disappointment—a biography that is often indistinguishable from historical fiction and therefore worthless as biography. Crouch derives from careful listening to his informants an intense sense of atmosphere, deepened by his poetic streak. Toward the beginning of the book, he provides a gripping description of the McShann band’s drive to New York, which makes us feel that we are riding in the car’s front seat. There are limits to this kind of novelistic description, however. Consider Crouch’s account of Parker’s humiliation at a jam session at the Reno Club, immortalized in the 1988 movie Bird by the image of Jo Jones’s cymbal crash, “dinging” Parker out. Haddix provides a paragraph-long account citing the only surviving source—Gene Ramey, who has repeated the story on radio and in oral history archives. Armed with his own interview with Ramey, Crouch stretches this incident out for seven pages. Among other things, Crouch cites Parker’s body language—“Charlie would cadge a cigarette and stand off to the side with his hand in his pocket, one leg forward and bent a little, trying to give off the look of an older player swimming deeply but easefully in the nightlife” (p. 150). Crouch even speculates on Parker’s mental state: “He could feel his every breath, almost the flow of his blood, the indifferent presence of his nervous system” (p. 153). How on earth could Crouch know such...
Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2015-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2015-10-16 · 5 citations
bookWhat is classical music? This book answers the question in a manner never before attempted, by presenting the history of fifteen parallel traditions, of which Western classical music is just one. Eachmusic is analysed in terms of its modes, scales, and theory; its instruments, forms, and aesthetic goals; its historical development, golden age, and condition today; and the conventions governing its performance. The writers are leading ethnomusicologists, and their approach is based on the belief that music is best understood in the context of the culture which gave rise to it .<BR> By including Mande and Uzbek-Tajik music - plus North American jazz - in addition to the better-known styles of the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, and South-East Asia, this book offers challenging new perspectives on the word 'classical'. It shows the extent to which most classical traditions are underpinned by improvisation, and reveals the cognate origins of seemingly unrelated musics; it reflects the multifarious ways in which colonialism, migration, and new technology have affected musical development, and continue to do today. With specialist language kept to a minimum, it's designed to help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions which may be unfamiliar to them, and to encounter the reality which lies behind that lazy adjective 'exotic'.<BR><BR>MICHAEL CHURCH has spent much of his career in newspapers as a literary and arts editor; since 2010 he has been the music and opera critic of The Independent. From 1992 to 2005 he reported on traditional musics all over the world for the BBC World Service; in 2004, Topic Records released a CD of his Kazakh field recordings and, in 2007, two further CDs of his recordings in Georgia and Chechnya.<BR><BR> Contributors: Michael Church, Scott DeVeaux, Ivan Hewett, David W. Hughes, Jonathan Katz, Roderic Knight, Frank Kouwenhoven, Robert Labaree, Scott Marcus, Terry E. Miller, Dwight F.Reynolds, Neil Sorrell, Will Sumits, Richard Widdess, Ameneh Youssefzadeh
2015-10-16 · 2 citations
other1st authorCorrespondingIt's jazz night at a local restaurant. There's no permanent stage: musicians squeeze into a small nook at the front. The drummer and bass are in the rear, their backs against the neon sign in the plate-glass window. The leader of the group, a silver-haired trumpet player, brings in the band with brief grunts on the backbeat before launching into a complicated unison line with his saxophonist. His improvisations are melodically inventive and rhythmically brisk, pulling the band into sharper focus. When he finishes playing, he strolls away from the stand to chat with a friend, while keeping an eye on the band.
Oxford Music Online · 2013-10-16
reference-entry1st authorCorrespondingReview of Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice by Tad Hershorn
Journal of Jazz Studies · 2013-03-17
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingBook Review of Tad Hershorn's 2011 biography of Norman Granz.
The Music of Django Reinhardt by Benjamin Givan (review)
American Music · 2012-01-01
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 9 shared
Barry Kernfeld
- 4 shared
Michael Beckerman
- 4 shared
Mercedes M. Dujunco
Suzhou University of Science and Technology
- 4 shared
Pauline Lum
New York University
- 4 shared
Adria La Violette
- 4 shared
Robin D. G. Kelley
- 4 shared
Michelle Kisliuk
- 4 shared
Jessica Feldman
New York University
Awards & honors
- Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for…
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