Publication Date
2018-04-17
Availability
Open access
Embargo Period
2018-04-17
Degree Type
Doctoral Essay
Degree Name
Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)
Department
Studio Music and Jazz (Music)
Date of Defense
2018-04-03
First Committee Member
Martin Bejerano
Second Committee Member
David Ake
Third Committee Member
John Hart
Fourth Committee Member
Dante Luciani
Abstract
This paper offers a case study of the iconic jazz bassist Eddie Gomez. By locating his negotiations of timbre within historical and social contexts, and examining how others have interpreted his sound, I show that jazz bass timbre can communicate meanings and facilitate discourses of identity, authenticity, gender, and race. Specifically, I rely on a close hearing of Gomez’s tone on the 1981 recording Three Quartets, framing my analysis in research from the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, African American studies, gender studies, timbral and sound studies, and music phenomenology. In doing so, I portray timbre as a common thread in the stories of jazz musicians, a shared axis of interpretation where musicians, critics, historians, and listeners can either hear or sound their own meanings, thereby further establishing bass timbre as an important hermeneutical vantage point in jazz studies.
Keywords
jazz bass; double bass; electric bass; timbre; Three Quartets; Eddie Gomez
Recommended Citation
Ge, Tianyuan (Ken), "Bright Bass Timbres in the "Dark Age" of Jazz: Eddie Gomez, Three Quartets, Transgression, and Transcendence" (2018). Open Access Dissertations. 2032.
https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/2032