Jazz Influence and Synthesis in the Music of John Adams

Abstract

This article examines the influence of jazz in John Adams's oeuvre. Adams's interest in jazz has shaped his compositional output, developing in tandem with the minimalist traits apparent throughout his works. Part 1 chronicles Adams's early encounters with touring jazz bands during his formative years. Following his formal studies, Adams turned to the music of Duke Ellington as inspiration for "Sentimentals" (1973), a work that precedes his initial experimentation with minimalism. His interest in jazz has en dured throughout his compositional career, as evidenced by jazz references found in work titles, program notes, and anecdotal accounts from his interviews. Part 2 reframes the vocabulary of Adams's harmonic structures, particularly those subsequent to Nixon in China (1987), using a jazz-oriented approach. Timothy A. Johnson's theoretical model designed for the examination of Adams's harmony provides a means of comparison between a classical approach and a jazz perspective. I explore Adams's in corporation of jazz harmonic idioms, which emerge prominently soon after Nixon. I then consider how works from the 1990s onward exhibit a synthesis between jazz and post minimalism that characterizes his mature compositional style. In conclusion, I present a jazz "chord-scale" model analysis using an excerpt from Adams's City Noir (2009) to highlight the interaction between melody and harmony.