David Ake is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Nevada, Reno. He holds a PhD in musicology and an MA in ethnomusicology from UCLA, as well as degrees in jazz performance from the University of Miami and the California Institute of the Arts. His articles on jazz have appeared in American Music, Echo and Encyclopaedia Britannica , and his book, Jazz Cultures , was published by the University of California Press in 2002. As a pianist, he has played alongside Ravi Coltrane, Charlie Haden, James Newton and Bud Shank, and on recordings by Phil Farris, David Borgo and The Collective. He has also formed his own award-winning bands in New York, Los Angeles and Germany. The David Ake Groups first CD for the Posi-tone label, Sound and Time , was released in 1998.
Darius Brubeck is a pianist, composer and Director of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music and Professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Natal, Durban. Named after Darius Milhaud, his father Daves postgraduate composition teacher, Darius grew up in an intensely musical environment where he learned more by osmosis than through study. He later majored in ethnomusicology and history of religion at Wesleyan University, and during the 1970s he and his brothers, Chris and Dan, toured internationally with Dave Brubeck as Two Generations of Brubeck or The New Brubeck Quartet. At Natal University in 1983, Darius started the first Jazz Studies course to be offered by an African university. In recent years, he has toured extensively, mainly with his own bands from South Africa, visiting England, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey, Thailand, Peru and the US. He has performed regularly with his family and the London Symphony Orchestra, most recently in 2000 when his composition, Four Score in Seven, was premiered, and in 19992000 he was a Visiting Fellow in Music at the University of Nottingham.
Mervyn Cooke is Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music and at Kings College, Cambridge, and was for six years Research Fellow and Director of Music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is the author of Jazz (World of Art) and The Chronicle of Jazz , both published by Thames & Hudson; he has contributed chapters on jazz to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music and The Cambridge Companion to the Flute . His other books include studies of Brittens Billy Budd and War Requiem (Cambridge University Press), a monograph, Britten and the Far East (The Boydell Press), and The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten . He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera and writing a history of film music for Cambridge University Press. He is also active as a pianist and composer, his compositions having been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio France and performed at Londons South Bank and St Johns, Smith Square.
Robert P. Crease is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His books include Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance (Indiana University Press, 1993), and a forthcoming study of vernacular dance. He also writes a column, Critical Point, for Physics World . He is a co-founder of the New York Swing Dance Society, and a former dancer in the Big Apple Lindy Hoppers.
Krin Gabbard has published extensively on literature, theatre, film studies and psychoanalysis. His first book, Psychiatry and the Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1987), has recently been published in a second edition. He was one of the creators of a new jazz studies when he published The Quoter and His Culture in 1991 (in Jazz in Mind , ed. R. Buckner and S. Weiland, Wayne State University Press). He later brought the insights of critical theory to jazz study with two anthologies, Jazz Among the Discourses and Representing Jazz (both published by Duke University Press, 1995). In 1996 he published Jammin at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (University of Chicago Press), the first extended study of the interactions between jazz and film. He is currently writing a book on the representations of masculinity in recent American cinema.