BRUCE JOHNSON

This folder is dedicated to the writings of Professor A J B (Bruce) Johnson, perhaps best-known as the author of the Oxford Companion to Australian jazz (1987). A prolific writer on Australian jazz, his articles on this website already appear in many folders, and in the fulness of time they will hopefully be uploaded to this folder. Click on the INDEX button for a list of articles in this folder.

JAZZ AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF AUSTRALIAN MUSIC

by Bruce Johnson

Context Journal of Music Research No 10 Summer 1995

I wish to address an issue which is central to current debates relating to Australian culture and the arts. Multi-culturalism, sexual politics, deconstructionist aesthetics and political correctness are some of the issues besieging notions of aesthetic worth and calling into question the idea of 'excellence' as formally inherent rather than politically attributed...

BRINGING UP THE BODIES: COGNITIVE AGENCY IN JAZZ

by Bruce Johnson

Paper presented at the first national conference of the Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network, in Melbourne, June 2-4,  2017.

What I want to argue for today is a revision of the dominant discourse framing creative agency in jazz. There are three reasons for this objective. First because that discourse tries to fit jazz into a box that was designed to contain something else, and it therefore deforms our understanding of the music. Second, that deformation functions to situate jazz as a second-rate category of music. Third, it also limits the potentiality of studies of improvisational forms to take a leading role in developments in the understanding of cognition...

THE AUSTRALASIAN JAZZ AND IMPROVISATION RESEARCH NETWORK: BIRTH OF A NOTION

by Bruce Johnson, Chris Coady, Rob Burke

Speaking from my own experience, the seeds of what is now the Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network were planted well over a decade ago, in informal conversations I had with John Whiteoak about the growing interest among young researchers in Australasian jazz history.  There have been attempts to document that history as far back as the 1930s…