This issue opens with Eirik Jacobsen and Anne Danielsen’s investigation of how jazz musicians intentionally use sonic features to shape the micro level of rhythm in their performances. The article presents excerpts from interviews with five expert contemporary Norwegian jazz musicians as well as analysis of two selected performances by these musicians, exploring the effects of interaction between sonic features, playing techniques, and timing in a musical context. Their study demonstrates the need to move related research beyond the temporal domain, and to cultivate a more holistic approach to what constitutes groove in jazz and related genres.

Lonnie Liston Smith and bassist and music educator Scott Gray Douglass spoke by telephone in September of 2021 for an oral history featured in this issue’s “The Bridge.” Smith’s history, recounting 80 years of American music history, from swing to sampling, doo-wop to hip hop, depicts how accomplished touring musicians moved in and out of educational contexts both formal and informal, speaking to art’s integrative capability.

Lawrence Davies offers a critical contextualization of the IJS's Victoria Spivey Collection, together with a supplementary bibliography of the singer's jazz criticism in the magazine Record Research and other jazz journals for the “From the Archives” section.

The issue concludes with Emma Beachy’s review of The Sonic Gaze: Jazz, Whiteness, and Racialized Listening by T. Storm Heter. A valuable addition to contemporary humanities scholarship that destabilizes fixed identity categories and considers how whiteness is shaped by shifting relationships to self and power, Beachy concludes that The Sonic Gaze is “a worthy contribution to scholarly literature in jazz studies and beyond, a must-read for anyone interested in cultural constructions of race and hybridity, musical or otherwise.”