Conference Agenda

\n\n\nUmbria Jazz Feast is a documentary film completed in 2026 about multisensorial and multicultural intersections during the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, the largest jazz festival in Europe, held annually in a Medieval town in central Italy. Departing from previous histories and documentary films about this festival, which focus on stage performances in enclosed venues for seated, paying audiences, this film presents an alternative narrative, as it foregrounds the street dimension of the festival. It focuses both on the musicians (including street musicians) and the people attending the events while standing, walking, or dancing, showing a more participatory and inclusive mode of sharing music, closer to Afro-centric traditions. While shooting the film, we have mostly used handheld cameras and microphone placed in the middle of the crowds to capture the listening point of the audience and the noises and voices of the people, inviting a form of music analysis that includes the visual impact of the venue and the reactions of the people attending the event, rather than isolating the music from its environment. We have included not only official events taking place in the public and free open spaces of the city, but also the participation of buskers and musicians, both local and global, including griots from Mali (Africa), playing in restaurants and in the streets. Edited according to the astronomical cycle of light—from night to sunrise and back to night—the film reflects the festival’s near-continuous twenty-hour daily rhythm. Within this temporal and spatial framework, the street emerges as a site where the jazz festival evokes the spirit of Carnival, rooted in Medieval Umbrian traditions of public festivity and social inversion. The film also documents the cross-fertilization of global African-rooted American music and Italian identity and culture as experienced by people of different backgrounds and from different countries, inviting a reflection on the trans-cultural processes of global cross-fertilization defined by Fabienne Darling-Wolf as \'glocamalgamation\'.\n\n\n

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that the sea island peoples of Georgia and South Carolina are \"touched and moulded less by the world about them\" (251). Indeed, the Gullah-Geechee are exceptional because of their linguistic and musical retentions. Some scholars have argued that the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina are the largest regional source of African American spirituals. Though originating in a remote, impoverished area, this heritage has had an enormous influence on American culture. From 1867-1940, scholars routinely visited Gullah Geechee islands to examine and record the strong West African retentions in this American folk music, producing five major studies with transcriptions including a major section of Slave Songs of the United States (Allen, Ware & McKim 1867), Saint Helena Island Spirituals (Ballanta-Taylor 1925), Thirty-Six South Carolina Spirituals (Carl Diton 1928), 104 Songs of the Carolina Low Country (Society for the Preservation of Stories and Songs Papers 1922-1931) and 344 Gullah Songs (John Bennett, 1907). Encompassing over 600 transcriptions of stories and songs, these collections reveal the melodic, rhythmic, and linguistic approaches enslaved Africans used as they forged what we now know as Gullah Geechee spirituals and shout songs. Despite the important contributions of the Gullah Geechee people to American and global musical practices, awareness of and engagement with these significant contributions remains limited.\nThis concert, organized by Aaron Carter-Ényì, will demonstrate the rich culture of the region through performances of Gullah Geechee spirituals and shout songs by the Gullah Geeche Ring Shouters, the Voices of Gullah Singers, the McIntosh County Shouters, and the Morehouse College Glee Club.