Jazz Speaker Series: Tammy Kernodle on Charlie Parker

Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle graduated with a BM in choral music education and piano from Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia. Dr. Kernodle received a MA and PhD in Music History from The Ohio State University. Her scholarship has focused mainly on various genres of African American music, American music jazz, and gender and popular music. She has served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri and has lectured extensively on the operas of William Grant Still, the life and religious compositions of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

Her work has appeared in Musical Quarterly, American Music Research Journal, and a new anthology addressing the contributions of women to music, entitled Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds. She is the author of the biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Northeastern University Press), which chronicles the life and music of Williams, whose career in jazz spans over six decades. She has also served as the associate editor of the three volume Encyclopedia of African American Music (ABC-CLIO, 2011), which is the first monograph to survey the history of African American Music from 1619 until 2010. She also served as Senior Editor for the revision of New Grove Dictionary of American Music.