Jazz is perhaps the most cerebral and most unpredictable of musical forms. Miles Davis transforms the simplest tune and structure into wildly imaginative improvisations. Thelonious Monk made dissonance glorious. And as Duke Ellington said, "Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part."

In Landing On The Wrong Note, Ajay Heble provides a groundbreaking analysis of jazz in its cultural context and a lucid exploration of the music itself: its dissonant riffs and resistance to formalist interpretations are emblematic of the social struggles surrounding the jazz scene and the people who created it. Drawing on personal anecdote, observation, conversations with jazz artists, and cultural theory, Heble demonstrates that although jazz may be free-form, its rich and varied history makes it an important point of entry into some of the most hotly contested issues of our era - power, identity, representation, history, ethics, and social change.

AJAY HEBLE is Associate Professor in the School of Literatures and Performances in English at the University of Guelph in Canana. He is the author of The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence and the co-editor of New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. He is Artistic Director and Founder of The Guelph Jazz Festival.

"This exciting and adventurous work exemplifies the trenchancy of the new directions in jazz scholarship. Combining contemporary critical discourses with insights from his personal experience as an innovative arts presenter, Ajay Heble challenges scholars, musicians, and audiences to move beyond the comfortable narratives so often presented as 'jazz history' to examine the role of the hybrid, mutable, unstable, noisy, boundary-shattering improvised music of our day as both agent and subject of social, cultural, and political change." - GEORGE E. LEWIS, Dept of Music, University of California, San Diego

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