[Commlist] CfP – Speculative Jazz Histories – Jazz Research Journal special issue

“WHAT IF?”: Speculative Histories of Jazz
Jazz Research Journal special issue, November 2022

Editors: Liam Maloney, University of York; Nicolas Pillai, University 
College Dublin

1964: Dizzy Gillespie begins his first presidential term.
1971: Nina Simone and Huey Newton marry.
1989: Kenny G’s smooth jazz is used in the Vatican siege forcing Noriega 
to surrender within four hours.
1990: Miles Davis and Prince release their collaborative album Motherfunker.
1996: Alice Coltrane institutes the Jazz at Lincoln Centre programme.
2016: Beyoncé Knowles releases her sixth jazz album GatorAidalongside 
her own bid for the presidency.

What if Dizzy Gillespie had actually been president? What if Miles Davis 
had produced a truly great hip hop jazz fusion record? What if…?

In recent years, speculative history has gained traction within academia 
as a provocative methodological tool. These imagined temporal junctures 
have allowed vivid (re)interpretations of sonic presents and futures. 
Furthermore, scholars have gone beyond simple speculation on possible 
alternate histories and into realms of fiction that reconceptualize the 
very nature of musical activity. In one of the landmark Afrofuturist 
texts, Kodwo Eshun (More Brilliant Than the Sun, 1998, Verso) leverages 
such approaches to ‘happily delete familiar names… and historical 
precedence,’ enabling partial or wholesale amendments to our musical 
landscape. More recently, Holger Schulze (2020) has further explored the 
possibilities afforded by sonic fictions; narratives and structures 
wholly reengineered to grant greater agency and affordances to certain 
cultures. Popular music has seen the impossible manifest in recent years 
with artists pressed into service from beyond the grave, reanimated 
holographically, or enjoined into surprising (and sometimes 
inappropriate) collaborations (e.g. Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Maria 
Callas, Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur).

This special issue will interrogate the conjectural mode as a new 
beginning for the understanding of jazz and its culture. We contend 
that, despite the destabilizing intentions of New Jazz Studies, 
discourse has remained centred on ahistorical canon formation and 
racialized conceptions of genius. In this, the statues of jazz have 
remained firmly in place. We invite submissions to this issue which 
directly challenge these monolithic narratives.

This collection invites submissions in a variety of formats – 8000 word 
essays, 1000 word provocations, short fiction, poetry, and other 
non-linear models for distributing research – to be published in the 
November 2022 edition of Jazz Research Journal[Equinox].

Possible topics include:

  *
    Speculative, sonic, or alter- social histories of jazz
  *
    Afrofuturist narratives
  *
    The content, role, or use of fictional or falsified biographies
  *
    Perspectives that employ sonic or speculative fiction to explore jazz
  *
    Conceptual collaborations
  *
    Critiques and defences of yellow journalism
  *
    Constructing authenticity in speculative or fictional narratives
  *
    Jazz, VR, and the metaverse


300-word abstracts should be submitted to (liam.maloney /at/ york.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(liam.maloney /at/ york.ac.uk)>by 14 January 2022, with notifications 
of success sent out 28 January 2022. First drafts will be due 15 April 
2022, with peer review completed 17 June 2022. Second drafts will be due 
19 August 2022 with publication in November 2022.


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