Mark Tucker (1954-2000) 

By Travis A. Jackson 

Mark Tucker was one of those rare individuals who excelled in all the 
areas one might invoke in assessing a musical scholar's importance. His 
two books and numerous essays on Duke Ellington and his public presen­
tations on Thelonious Monk have all contributed to our recognition of 
him as a first-rate musicologist and jazz scholar, one whose work is beauti­
fully written and brimming with insight. His research on Ellington's early 
years has enhanced our understanding of how one of America's most 
celebrated composers developed his craft. By situating Ellington in the 
complex worlds of Washington, D.C. and Harlem up to the 1930s, Mark 
helped open the door to a more nuanced investigation of jazz, going 
beyond hagiography or decontextualized musical analysis to render a 
complex portrait worthy of his subject. His unfinished monograph on 
Thelonious Monk promised to go in the same direction. A presentation 
for Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies lecture series in 2000 showed Mark 
succeeding at disentangling Monk the myth from Monk the musician, and 
in the process bringing many who thought they understood Monk to a 
new level of awareness. 

Mark's skills went far beyond those of a good writer and researcher. 
Although the opportunities didn't come enough, those moments when he 
sat down at the piano to concertize or demonstrate musical concepts were 
an instructive treat for anyone within earshot. Indeed, one of the most 
vivid memories I have comes from a farewell party thrown for Mark and 
his wife Carol in 1997, as they prepared to leave New York for Williams­
burg, Virginia. Mark and his onetime roommate, jazz pianist Bruce Barth, 
improvised a series of deliciously swinging four-hand versions of jazz stan­
dards and blues at the piano. These sides of Mark-the thoughtful and 
elegant writer, the consummate musician-are ones that nearly everyone 
had the opportunity to see. 

Being one of his students during his time at Columbia gave me the op­
portunity to see a side of Mark whose importance might be easy to under­
estimate, if only because it was a less public aspect of his day-to-day work 
as a faculty member. Nearly anyone with an advanced degree has probably 
had the experience of handing in a term project for which they received 
little to no feedback beyond a grade and a "good job" (or, worse, "this 

Current Musicology. nos. 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002) 
© 2002 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 



10 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

reads like a first draft ... "). With Mark, the experience of getting a paper 
back was something I eagerly awaited, for what he returned was marked 
up nearly beyond recognition. Along with copious marginal comments 
and queries, I received pinpoint copy-editing whose purpose was to make 
my writing more clear, more direct, and more powerful. Some pages 
would be filled with balloons around groups of words, each designated 
with a circled number, that indicated the best possible way to rearrange 
those elements. I typically describe that experience to my own students as 
a process of really learning how to write-mastering the skill of saying 
twice as much in half the space. I would come to understand that his 
way of responding to student work was a gift extended to his students as it 
had been extended to him by his mentor at the University of Michigan, 
Richard Crawford. Likewise, Mark's classroom demeanor, whether in a 
lecture or a seminar, was cut from the same cloth: he was less an imparter 
than a sharer of knowledge, asking questions and opening up issues for 
further exploration. His main concern was equipping students with the 
means to generate and answer important questions. 

Nearly every day, he showed me the value of having an expansive, open, 
and giving spirit. A mentor, after all, does more than attend to a mentee's 



TRAVIS A. JACKSON 11 

intellectual development. Mark did that through introducing me to senior 
scholars, carting me with him and others to the monthly roundtables at 
the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, and, perhaps most importantly, giv­
ing me opportunities to publish and present my work. But beyond that, he 
shared his love for music and his dry and incisive wit. The time we spent 
listening to music and recommending recordings to one another was en­
riching. I remember, for example, a warm spring afternoon when we both 
sat transfixed in his living room luxuriating in Robin Holcomb's singing 
on "One of These Days" from Bill Frisell's Nashville (his pick) and his e­
mailed comment that McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments (my pick) was in­
deed, as many musicians had told me, "a blessed recording." 

But one of the most legendary exchanges we had, throughout the 
spring of 1994, concerned the children's television icon Barney, with 
whom Mark's son Wynn was fascinated. Our exchange started innocently, 
but quickly took on a surreal tone-with stories about "the Big Guy" 
perishing in the La Brea tarpits and being Satan in disguise being traded 
eagerly. Perhaps the funniest salvo came from Mark after my oral exam on 
John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Following others, I had speculated that 
Archie Shepp was the "mystery saxophonist" at the end of the recording. 
Mark expressed a different view in an e-mail message: "I was really disap­
pointed that the Big Guy's name didn't surface once in your presentation 
today. Otherwise you did a great job. Some people believe, you know, that 
it really is Archie Shepp inside that purple costume." 

In many ways, it's difficult to summarize the enormous impact Mark 
has had on me. I learned, right up to the end, so much about what it 
means to be a responsible and inquisitive scholar and a caring human be­
ing from his example. In November 2000, shortly after the "mega-meet­
ing" of music societies in Toronto, I called him to see how he was doing. 
Through labored breaths, he informed me that he was still working on the 
Monk book, that he was getting new ideas and really enjoying the process 
of writing. In the midst of all that was happening, I marveled, he was still 
at it-working, writing, persevering. When I got the news nearly a month 
later that he had passed, all I could do was cry: for what his family had lost, 
for what musicology had lost, and for what I had lost. 

I miss him.