John Murphy

Office Phone (940) 565-4344

John Murphy, an ethnomusicologist and saxophonist, joined the UNT Jazz Studies faculty in 2001. He has published articles on jazz improvisation, Brazilian traditional and popular music, Cuban music in New York, and college teaching. He spent the 2000-2001 academic year in Recife, Brazil on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, doing research for a book in progress on Brazilian popular music and globalization, studying the Northeast Brazilian button accordion style, and producing two video projects. He is also working on a textbook on Brazilian music that is part the Oxford University Press Global Music series. He presented the paper "The African Big Band Aesthetic of Sam Rivers" at the 2002 annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

He performs often on tenor and alto saxophone. He performed with the UNT Jazz Faculty small group on the Maria Schneider concert at UNT in March 2003, and at the North Texas Jazz Festival at Addison in April 2003. Also in April 2003 he performed two programs of original music: with Dave Zoller, Drew Phelps, Aaron Erwinsky, Greg Waits, and Mark Gully, at Dan's Silverleaf in Denton, and with Kevin Brunkhorst, Matt Wigton, and Stockton Helbing at the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival.

While a student at the University of North Texas, Murphy earned two degrees (B.M., jazz studies performance, 1984; M.M., music theory, 1986), played in the One O'Clock Lab Band (1984-85), and free-lanced in Dallas-Ft. Worth. He then earned two degrees at Columbia University (M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1994, ethnomusicology), played Latin music around New York, and held a Fulbright Fellowship in 1990-91 for research on Brazilian traditional music.

Murphy teaches jazz history, jazz styles & analysis, jazz research methods, and jazz aural fundamentals, and directs the UNT Jazz Repertory Orchestra. He collaborates with the ethnomusicology area, and taught at the UNT Small Group Jazz Workshop in 2001 and 2002. He served the Society for Ethnomusicology as web editor from 1997 to 2002, and taught previously at Western Illinois University (1992-2001).