Brilliant Corners: Approaches to Jazz and Comics

The call for papers Brilliant Corners: Approaches to Jazz and Comics was published on 30 July 2015. In it, the editors made a public invitation for scholarship that proposed meeting points between the disciplines of jazz studies and comics studies. This editorial discusses the motivations for the collection, the editorial methodology, and the research articles included. Finally, the editors suggest some areas in which jazz studies and comics scholarship might address under-researched and fertile topics.


Background
The popular forms of jazz and comics have shared similar historical and cultural tendencies. As expressions of modernism, they have been subject to the demands of the marketplace and consumed by wide and varied audiences. Yet the liberatory qualities of comics and jazz have provoked concern in moral guardians, particularly in relation to the subcultures they have generated. Recalling Bourdieu, we might note that, within these subcultures, very divergent and often incompatible judgements are fiercely defended (1993: 30).
In the 21st century, both jazz and comics are accepted as art forms. However, this elevated cultural position has arguably come at a price, contributing to the restriction of some forms of jazz and comics to specialised spaces of purchase and consumption.
Over the last forty years, the fields of jazz studies and comic studies have gained currency within the academy and have been enriched by interdisciplinary approaches.

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The New Jazz Studies has invigorated the discipline beyond its musicological roots, while Comics Studies has thrived in the digital age.
When we published the call for papers Brilliant Corners: Approaches to Jazz and Comics on 30 July 2015, we aimed to find meeting points between the disciplines of jazz studies and comics studies (Pillai and Priego 2016). We were encouraged by the fact that distinguished jazz musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock and Vince Guaraldi have each stated the influence of comic books on their musical development, while artists and writers have frequently turned to jazz for inspiration and jazz musicians themselves have created comic strips (Wally Fawkes/Trog).
We were interested in encouraging the development of existing scholarship on jazz and comics as cultural and artistic practices within specific contexts and specific material conditions. As editors, we wanted to provoke open access work that emphasised interconnection and the multimodal. We also assumed that comics and jazz are popular forms and that, needless to say, they are of interest to public audiences.
As Heller and Gaede point out in a recent article,

The Collection
Each of our authors faced a methodological challenge common to interdisciplinary work: in this case, how to synthesise/integrate jazz historiographies, vocabularies and narratives in a meaningful way for comics studies? For us as editors, this was the overriding question that framed the collection, one that each article approached in a slightly different way.

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In 'Playing Together: Analyzing Jazz Improvisation to Improve the Multiframe' In this way, the collection presents three distinct approaches to comics scholarship but also three very different conceptions of jazz. A range of case studies are presented: superhero comics, indie comics and the often-neglected form of the newspaper cartoon. It hardly needs to be said that the work here is not exhaustive; rather, the collection aims to be a first step towards continuing work on jazz and comics, and a provocation for future scholars.

The Shape of Scholarship to Come
In 2015, Kamasi Washington released his debut studio album The Epic. Clocking in at nearly three hours of music, this virtuosic work confounded trends in modern jazz-making. When interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine, Washington revealed that he was working on a graphic novel and that its concept had directly influenced the We are convinced that the combination of jazz and comics is likely to produce interesting and challenging future scholarship. This research to come could play an important role in building bridges between different disciplinary approaches and, importantly, between academic research and the public. The Comics Grid will be delighted to consider future work on jazz and comics through its ongoing open submissions process through http://www.comicsgrid.com/submit/start/.