Hope College music faculty member Rob Hodson's book is receiving a slightly different academic reception. The Hope College Jazz Studies Area is celebrating with a book release party on Thursday, April 12, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Butch's Dry Dock.

  Hope College music faculty member Rob Hodson's book is receiving a slightly different academic reception. The Hope College Jazz Studies Area is celebrating with a book release party on Thursday, April 12, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Butch's Dry Dock.

Hodson's book, "Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz" was recently published by Routledge Press.

The release party will feature a jazz jam session featuring both Hope College faculty and students. Light appetizers will be provided as well.

Hodson is an associate professor of music and serves as coordinator of the music theory and composition area at Hope, where he has taught since 2002.

His research interests include jazz improvisation, improvisational process, metric and rhythmic complexity, and music theory pedagogy. "Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz" draws upon semiotics, linguistics, and phenomenology--as well as more traditional music-theoretic models--to explore the interactive processes that occur between simultaneously-improvising jazz musicians and the effects that the interactions have on the individual musician's improvisations.

An active scholar, Hodson has presented research at many regional, national, and international conferences, including those of the International Association for Jazz Education, the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, the College Music Society, and many others. He serves as a Councilor-at-Large for the Council for Undergraduate Research, and also serves as a Resource Team Member for the International Association for Jazz Education.

He holds a doctorate in music theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has also earned Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in piano performance from Hope, from which he graduated in 1989, and Michigan State University, respectively. Prior to joining the Hope faculty, he held positions at the State University of New York at Binghamton and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The release party is also supported by Butch's Dry Dock, which is located at 44 E. Eighth St. in downtown Holland.