John Bass, director of the Rhodes Jazz Ensemble and teacher of applied guitar, appears regularly as a jazz guitarist in venues around Memphis, where he has played in concert with Kirk Whalum and Pat Bergeson, among others. Also a continuo performer on theorbo, lute, and Baroque guitar, he performs regularly with local early music groups such at the Memphis Consortium for Early Music and Ensemble Seicento, whose 2004 album Spirit of Florence he appears on.

Dr. Bass received his Ph.D. from the University of Memphis in 2008, where his dissertation “Rhetoric and Musical Ornamentography: Tradition in Sixteenth-Century Improvisation” won the Graduate Document Award from the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music. He has presented scholarly papers at national and international conferences, including the Medieval and Renaissance Conference, the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory, the Renaissance Society of America, and regional meetings of the American Musicological Society, where he won the Rey M. Longyear Student Paper Award. His first article appeared in Early Music in 2008, and he has served as a bibliographic researcher for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

In addition to Renaissance and Baroque studies, Dr. Bass’s research interests also include ethnomusicology (particularly the music of Africa), African-American musical styles, and rhetoric. He holds two degrees in jazz performance.