John Howland completed his Ph.D. in musicology at Stanford University in 2002. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers-Newark in 2003, he taught at the University of California at Davis and Stanford University. He specializes in the study of various arranging traditions across popular music, big band jazz, and jazz-related orchestral idioms in dance bands, musical theater, and the media of film and radio. His research concerns the rich interconnections among the jazz tradition, popular culture, and American discourses on race, class-status, and culture. Additional research interests include music in American postwar culture of the 1950s and 1960s, the roles of music in American media across the twentieth century, and the growth and workings of the American popular music industry. His teaching ranges across subjects as diverse as American popular music from the 1890s to present, Hollywood film music, opera, the classical tradition, and musical traditions in American mass media. His book, “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (University of Michigan Press, February 2009), traces African-American contributions to the symphonic jazz vogue of the 1920s through 1940s. He is currently working on a second monograph, Luxe Pop and Glorified Entertainment, which explores a long-standing tradition of merging popular music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and other related markers of musical sophistication, musical spectacle, theatricality, and/or epic or “cinematic” qualities. This project offers a broad-based study of this “glorified” entertainment aesthetic across American and British popular culture and media from the 1920s to the present, and it further examines various issues of cultural difference in the cross-Atlantic stylistic migration and reception (particularly in terms of class hierarchy and race discourse issues) of these Western pop trends. The subjects of this book range from 1920s symphonic jazz dance bands, interwar radio orchestras, and jazz-styled production number arranging in stage musicals and films of the late 1920s and 1930s, to the orchestral jazz-pop of the “Great American Songbook” tradition (via Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald) and the mid-century jazz-with-strings vogue, to a wealth of postwar popular music subjects, including the lush arrangements of Phil Spector and Motown productions, 1970s soul, disco, and Blaxploitation film scores, the orchestral-pop legacy of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, the chamber pop singer-songwriter tradition (from Nick Drake forward), various heavy-metal-meets-symphony events, and recent hip hop adoptions of live string sections, among other trends.
 
John Howland’s articles and reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in American Music, The Musical Quarterly, Annual Review of Jazz Studies, The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and other scholarly journals, as well as three essay collections. He is also the Editor-in-Chief (and co-founder along with Lewis Porter) of Jazz Perspectives, an interdisciplinary jazz studies journal published by Routledge Press. Jazz Perspectives won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal 2007. He has given research papers and invited lectures in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland. He has been a Faculty Research Fellow at the University of California at Davis (2002), and is a recipient of both an American Musicological Society publication subvention award (2008) and a Margaret H. Whiting Dissertation Fellowship Award (1999).
 
 
LINKS:
 
 Jazz Perspectives web-page at Routledge Press
 
Rutgers University Newark Visual and Performing Arts Department