I am a music researcher, author, educator, and archivist. I have been fortunate to have studied performance, composition, and improvisation with many great artists including Kenny Barron, Joanne Brackeen, Mulgrew Miller, Ted Dunbar, William Fielder and Michael Philip Mossman. I have studied jazz research with Dan Morgenstern and Ed Berger of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies and with Dr. Lewis Porter. In addition to B.M. and M.M. degrees, I also hold a M.S.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science and wrote a comprehensive masters paper on Jazz Archives in the United States.
One of my recent projects is Current Research in Jazz, an online open access journal designed to publish peer-reviewed articles of original jazz research. In addition to shorter articles of a scholarly nature, it publishes bibliographies, indices, chronologies, and other research aids to serve and support jazz scholarship.
I am co-author with Noal Cohen of the definitive biography of alto saxophonist and composer Gigi Gryce. The book Rat Race Blues – The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce is now available. It has been featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and has received favorable reviews worldwide, also winning the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) award for excellence in 2003. It features a biography, musical analysis, composition index, comprehensive discography and bibliography as well as an extensive photo section with many never-before seen items. Over seventy-five interviews with family, friends and colleagues of Gryce’s were conducted and numerous errors from previously published works have been corrected and myths that have been perpetuated (some for nearly fifty years) have been dispelled. An earlier Gigi Gryce article co-written by Noal Cohen and me was the cover story of the January/February 1999 issue of Coda Magazine. Our Gryce research was featured at an IJS roundtable on November 16, 2000, at the Southeast Music Library Association conference on October 19, 2007, and at the Clifford Brown Symposium at University of the Arts on October 31, 2008.
The Verve Elite series limited edition reissue of the 1954 EmArcy albums Blakey and Introducing Joe Gordon features my liner notes and the Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions 7-CD set includes my biographies of the performers (available through Mosaic Records). Coda Magazine published my Art Davis discography in the May/June 1997 issue, the Jimmy Giuffre discography I compiled with Matthew Snyder in the July/August 1998 issue, and a version of my Perry Robinson discography in the September/October 1999 issue. I have also contributed to publications including the centennial edition of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Music, The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra by Robert L. Campbell, Rahsaan Roland Kirk by Guy Cosson and Bright Moments by John Kruth, Paul Bley’s autobiography Stopping Time, The Musical World Of J.J. Johnson by Joshua Berrett and Louis Bourgois, Perry Robinson: The Traveler by Perry Robinson with Florence Wetzel, and issues of the IAJE Jazz Educators Journal (September 2002), Jazz Research News (September 2002), the Green Mountain Jazz Messenger and the New Brunswick Banner. The Winter 2003 issue of Signal To Noise magazine includes my profile of the bassist Henry Grimes. I currently review jazz books for the ARSC Journal.
I have lectured on jazz at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ and at two IJS jazz research roundtables. The notes from the first of these roundtables are online here at my site. I serve as a consultant for the W. Eugene Smith Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and for several jazz documentary films including Music Inn, produced by Projectile Arts.
This WWW site has been featured in a number of periodicals including Jazziz, The Toronto Globe & Mail, Swing Journal, Marge Hofacre’s Jazz News, the IAJRC Journal, as well as Coda Magazine and the Green Mountain Jazz Messenger. It also appears in Loren Schoenberg’s book, The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Jazz and in John F. Szwed’s book Jazz 101.
I can be reached via e-mail at mike at jazzdiscography.com