An Eclectic Portfolio of Jazz and Jazz-Punk Scores and Recordings: Showcasing Skills in Jazz Arranging, Performance, and Analysis

Wyatt A. Salus

doi:10.7273/000006424

As a professional within the field of music, it is essential to maintain a portfolio of one’s work to present to potential employers and collaborators. This project is meant to be such a portfolio for the author by showcasing skills in jazz arranging, performance, and analysis while also presenting an opportunity to explore some of the elements and conventions of punk music via composition. Performance skills are exhibited in the accompanying recordings, while this document provides an environment to showcase skills in arranging, composition, analysis, and academic writing. Punk music was chosen for analysis and fusion with jazz partially because of the author’s personal connection and appreciation for the genre, but also because the style has been subject to relatively little in-depth academic analysis. While there are many books and articles that discuss the cultural and political natures of punk, there are only a few pieces of scholarship by authors like David Easley and David Pearson that address the musical qualities in-depth. The project itself consists of three jazz standards arranged for a small group, as well as an original jazz-punk fusion composition based on research and analysis of punk music. For each jazz standard, some historical background is provided along with a basic analysis of the tune before discussing the arrangement. The analysis for each of these begins with a formal summary of the arrangement before identifying and discussing one or two topics of significance. After this, there is a brief summary of the history and characteristics of jazz-fusion along with a couple of short sections detailing the origins of punk and previous examples of jazz-punk music respectively to prepare for discussion of my original piece. This analysis is somewhat different from the rest, focusing more on the compositional process and specific influences or examples from punk music that were used to write the tune. Therefore, along with presenting scores, recordings, and analyses of each composition or arrangement, this document will also offer some insight into the general characteristics of punk music while elucidating the processes used for arranging standard jazz tunes and composing songs which feature elements from both punk and jazz.

An Eclectic Portfolio of Jazz and Jazz-Punk Scores and Recordings: Showcasing Skills in Jazz Arranging, Performance, and Analysis

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