I am pleased to announce the receipt of a 2015 ICCC (Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity) Linking Fellowship Award, from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. The fellowship, in the amount of $4150, will be matched by a $6000 grant by the university’s College of Arts and Science.

The award will be used to fund an expense-paid two-week fellowship at USASK in Saskatoon in late May, to complete work on the assessment, cataloguing, and purposing of the two-hundred-plus world music instrument collection owned by the Department of Music. The collection was donated to the department by the long-time resident composer and educator David Kaplan, who recently passed away at the age of ninety-one. Collected over a lifetime of travel, it was Dr. Kaplan’s wish that the instruments in the collection be used by students and faculty in the department for creative and academic purpose. The collection is currently housed in nine specially-designed display cases in Room 1038 in the Education Building.

As directed, the ICCC Linking Fellowship will combine scientific study and acoustic classification of the four basic instrument groups: idiophones (self-sounding instruments), membranophones (instruments with stretched heads, aka drums), chordophones (stretched string instruments), and aerophones (wind instruments). The majority of the instruments were collected globally in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The collection also contains some clarinets personally played by David Kaplan.

The period clarinet cabinet includes a pre-WWII all-metal clarinet (second from the right), which was David Kaplan’s very first instrument.

With the exception of a few membranophones, the majority of the instruments in this cabinet are idiophones, or instruments, like rattles, gongs and bells, where the body of the instrument itself produces the sound.

The majority of instruments in this cabinet have stretched membranes which vibrate when struck. Their origin includes Africa, South America, and India. The row in the front contains lamellaphones or African tongue-sounding idiophones.

The stretched-string instruments in this cabinet include plucked, strummed, and bowed instruments from North and South America, the Middle East, and China.

As a woodwind player,  David Kaplan had a soft spot for aerophones, or instruments that produce sound through a disturbance or interruption of the air stream.  His collection contains a wide variety of flutes and reed instruments.

A sequel to Saxspectrum (2009), Saxspectrum 2 presents an eclectic variety of contemporary works for solo alto saxophone, as well as saxophone duets with piano, trumpet, and didgeridoo. Released on the MSR Classics label, Saxspectrum 2 features special guest performers and composers. Some of the highlights of this well-reviewed album include: Gillis’ solo “Doppler Wah Wah Air-Jig;” the grey wolf-inspired sax/e-flat cedar didgeridoo duet “Canis Lupus,” with James E. Cunningham; and “Spectrum Mashup,” in which Gillis and recording engineer Wayne Giesbrecht cohesively combine melodic and outtake snippets into a whimsical finale.

Visit the Breakout/West Nomination Site

Saxspectrum 1 & 2 Reviews – Fanfare Magazine, April 19, 2015

An Interview with Glen Gillis – Fanfare Magazine, February 7, 2015

Another streak of originality is the combination of sax and (believe it or not) the Australian aboriginal didgeridoo, with its low, whale-like singing and buzzy, seismic timbre. In collaboration with James Cunningham, an American enthusiast and pioneer in the modern didgeridoo (no longer a long cylinder, but compactly right-angled and whimsically dubbed the sewerphone), we get duets that simulate two Arctic wolves calling to each other across the dark winter tundra (Canis Lupus) and “hot rain” in Indonesia. These duets culminated for me in the wittily entertaining jazz riff Didgeriblu on the first album. A group known, irresistibly, as the Didgeri Dudes provides an eerie sonic background, a kind of electronic cave, that surrounds Gillis’s solo sax in two world-music pieces, Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis—they alone would make these CDs ear-opening.  Huntley Dent

From Whence Came 1950s Rock and Roll? (and where did it go?) –originally presented 4/9/15
(click above link to view a .pdf of the  powerpoint  presentation)

A Lifelong Learning Society Four-Part Lecture Series: From “Tin Pan Alley” to Rock and Roll: The Story of American Popular Music Through Sound and Film, presented by James E. Cunningham PhD, at the Lifelong Learning Center, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Winter-Spring 2015. 

“Birds of a Feather: The Blues and Country as “Kissing Cousins”
– originally presented 4/2/15
(click above link to view a .pdf of the  powerpoint  presentation)

A Lifelong Learning Society Four-Part Lecture Series: From “Tin Pan Alley” to Rock and Roll: The Story of American Popular Music Through Sound and Film, presented by James E. Cunningham PhD, at the Lifelong Learning Center, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Winter-Spring 2015. 

“America’s Music Comes to Life: The Blossoming of Jazz”
– originally presented 3/26/15
(click above link to view a .pdf of the  powerpoint  presentation)

A Lifelong Learning Society Four-Part Lecture Series: From “Tin Pan Alley” to Rock and Roll: The Story of American Popular Music Through Sound and Film, presented by James E. Cunningham PhD, at the Lifelong Learning Center, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Winter-Spring 2015. 

“The Advent of American Popular Music : Stephen Foster, Minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley, and the Great American Songbook” – originally presented 3/19/15
(click above link to view a .pdf of the  powerpoint  presentation)

A Lifelong Learning Society Four-Part Lecture Series: From “Tin Pan Alley” to Rock and Roll: The Story of American Popular Music Through Sound and Film, presented by James E. Cunningham PhD, at the Lifelong Learning Center, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Winter-Spring 2015. 

My latest gig, part of the University of Saskatchewan’s FARLS calendar.

“WHAT IS TRADITION? NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC AS EXPRESSIVE CULTURE”
(click above link to view powerpoint of presentation)

Abstract: From Jim Pepper’s seminal sixties jazz-rock fusion band Everything Is Everything, to groups like Robbie Robertson’s Red Road Ensemble in the nineties and contemporary performers like 2014 JUNO Award winner George Leach, there have been exponentially increasing numbers of Native North American (First Nations and Native American) artists participating in a wide variety of popular music genres. What distinguishes Native North American popular music artists from their non-indigenous contemporaries are the culturally unique cultural elements embedded in their music. This FARLS lecture will explore on two important aspects of Native North American indigenous popular music expression. An identification of the types and significance of indigenous elements found in contemporary popular music performed by a variety of Native North American artists, will be followed by a discussion of how those elements are combined in specific songs as coded expressions of identity and tradition that carry different levels of symbolic meaning and interpretation.

This is the “cultural menu” I prepared as the ethnomusicological advisor for the Club ZORA! event at the 26th Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, January 30, 2015.

Held at the elegant Maitland Civic Center, The Meet Me At Club ZORA! event recreated the spirit of a 1940s-1950s “jook” joint, and featured period jukebox music (by DJ yours truly), swing dancing, projected photographs of Southern juke-joint culture and live music provided by the six-member Bernie Lee Trio.