Lindsay France/University Photography

Steven Pond, associate professor of music and author of "Head Hunters," in his classroom in Lincoln Hall May 14.

Cornell associate professor of music Steven Pond's recent book, "Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album," has garnered a Woody Guthrie Book Award from the U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music for its distinguished examination of the crossroads between music and culture. The book addresses the phenomenon of Herbie Hancock's landmark "Head Hunters" album (1973) and its relationship to the development of jazz.

The book had its genesis as Pond's doctoral dissertation. As a student, he was delighted to discover that he could apply his research to an album that had influenced him and dealt with a branch of jazz that had been overlooked by most scholars. Pond's own scholarly work is focused, among things, on jazz historiography and the politics of genre classification.

"Starting at the University of California-Berkeley, I thought that being an ethnomusicologist meant that I had to go into the field someplace and study music from some other culture," says Pond. "When it became clear what studying music through culture really meant, it became also clear that I could study music that I'm literally involved in.

"I was a young man coming out of the '60s, and as a drummer, it became boring just playing the same rock groove all day long, and fusion became something interesting for me to pursue. I wasn't especially a jazz guy at that time. 'Headhunters' and a few other albums really represented a musical explosion for me," Pond adds.

Pond's book examines the circumstances that came together to put the album in the right position to make an impact. "I love the album. To me it's terrific, and yet the point of the book isn't to extol its wonderfulness, it's to look at how it worked. In the book, I'm trying to work out what forces -- historical, personal, cultural, industrial and social -- came together to create this."