The Jazz, Blues and Beyond Research Group, is comprised of scholars involved in the ever-growing body of research on the music of the African diaspora (jazz, rock and roll, the blues, reggae, cumbia, salsa, bossa nova, samba, tango, hip hop, etc.), as well as literature, improvisation, art, dance, film, politics, history, and spirituality as they relate to black music. A major concern that unites our scholarship is that of the context of the music. Scholars as varied as Albert Murray, Edouard Glissant, Stanley Crouch, Paul Gilroy, and Henry Louis Gates have pointed to jazz and the blues as having emerged from the sharing of cultures throughout the Black Atlantic. As a research group, we will address the following question: What is it in black music that enables it to serve as the unifying thread in such diverse phenomena as spirituality, cultural and political shifts in Latin America, European modernisms, and the Black Lives Matters movement?
We plan on meeting once a month as a group to discuss texts by writers like Fred Moten, Stephen Nachmanovitch, Paul Berliner, Edouard Glissant, and Marcel Cobussen in order to begin to address this question. We hope to invite noted scholars in the field to come speak and interact with us as researchers.
Faculty interested in joining this group should contact Greg Stallings (Spanish & Portuguese).