Benjamin Bierman

Benjamin Bierman is Associate Professor of Music at John Jay College, City University of New York. In his compositions, Bierman incorporates elements of jazz, blues, Latin music, and the Western art music tradition, and his music can be heard on his recent CD, Some Takes On the Blues (Plaza Street Music), and on Beyond Romance (New Focus Recordings). His primary area of scholarly interest is contemporary American music, including jazz, blues, R&B, pop, and concert music, while currently focusing on scholarship surrounding jazz composition. He is the author of Listening to Jazz, published by Oxford University Press, and has essays in the books The Routledge Companion to Jazz, The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom, and The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, as well as the journals Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Jazz Studies, and American Music Review. As a trumpet player, he has performed with such diverse artists as B.B. King, Archie Shepp, Johnny Pacheco, Johnny Copeland, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.