The Rhythm of Study

Outing…TRoS…

“The Rhythm of Study” (rhythmofstudy.com) celebrates the passion, creativity, and improvisation of jazz music in the arts, academia, and advocacy. Recognizing the potential for inspired work, constructive dialogue, mindful living, and positive social change in the extraordinary and the everyday—the marvelous and the mundane—TRoS promotes jazz as musical and cultural force applied in many ways within and among diverse communities and explores how the similarities and productive differences among all of these are enriched by the unique particularities of each. TRoS invites audiences to experience jazz from a myriad of perspectives, and to listen, read, play, act, live, and collaborate across each and every one.

The blog features writing, reviews, interviews, and collaborative projects associated with my lifelong passion for jazz—in performance, education, and research. As someone who has spent his whole career around the music—at the pianist’s bench, in the teacher’s classroom, the club manager’s office, and the academic’s desk—I am working to dissolve the boundaries separating all of these…to make space for collaborative performances that acknowledge the singularities and diversities of the jazz world.

Outing…Mark Lomanno…

After undergraduate studies at the University of Richmond, Mark completed a Master’s degree in Jazz History at Rutgers University-Newark (2007) and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin (2012). His Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Improvising Difference: Constructing Canarian Jazz Cultures,” explores improvisation as a musical and cultural process among Afro/Canarian jazz musicians. He taught previously at both Rutgers Newark and UT-Austin, has given clinics and guest lectures throughout the United States, and presented his research at conferences on comparative literature, ethnomusicology, island studies, and popular music, among others. Mark teaches courses on the African Diaspora, jazz (history, improvisation, theory), U.S. popular music, and world music. In addition to trade publications, his writing has been published in academic journals, including African Music and Jazz Perspectives, the textbook Discover Jazz, and the Grove Dictionary of American Music (forthcoming).

Mark also maintains an active career as a jazz pianist. His most recent recording is Tales and Tongues (Harriton Carved Wax, 2011), with Le Monde Caché, a San Antonio-based jazz group that plays Brazilian, Afro-Latin and Jewish diasporic repertoire. Another album—a quartet recording of Mark’s arrangements and collaboration with Canarian saxophonist Kike Perdomo—is currently in post-production. He has performed widely throughout the New York City area, including performances at the 55 Bar and the Jazz Standard. Mark has premiered several compositions by the electro-acoustic composer Matthew McCabe, and his performances of works by Cuban composers Ignacio Cervantes and Manuel Saumell are featured on the 2007 documentary, Cuba: Rhythm in Motion.