This paper builds on fieldwork with acousticians, sound designers, and musicians in some of the most prestigious jazz performance venues in the world, including the Montreux Jazz Festival and Jazz at Lincoln Center, arguing that the unique methods of objectifying sound and space at these sites are entangled with raced and gendered epistemologies of scientific knowledge production. Using state-of-the-art audio measurement technology, my interlocutors assertively invoke the “objective” authority of scientific rationality in calibrating “neutral,” “pure and clean” sonic environments. Engaging with sound studies and feminist antiracist science studies, this paper demonstrates how pretenses of accessing sound and space as “properly ontological” materialities transcending identity and culture (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007), align the sound of jazz with epistemological regimes of whiteness, masculinity, and “the human as Man” (Wynter 2001). I further analyze how the rationalization of sonic space reveals underlying entanglements with what George Lipsitz calls a “white spatial imaginary,” an ostensibly neutral environment conducive to discriminatory systems of capital accumulation. Such spaces complicate the oppositional, counter-hegemonic potential of jazz and other forms of Black sounding, prompting musicians to imagine new ways of using musical performance as a mode of resistance and affirmative space-making (Sakakeeny 2010; Williams 2021). This paper thus explores how an ethnographically performed social phenomenology of race, space, and technology may contribute to an ethnomusicology that more sensitively attends to the technological in the sonic, the sonic in the racial, and the racial in the spatial.

In 1981, a quartet consisting of guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, saxophonist David Murray, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and bassist Amin Ali, released their debut album. Calling themselves the Music Revelation Ensemble, the group drew upon diverse and eclectic influences, including punk, funk, and free jazz, while the album’s title directly referenced a central element of the nascent Downtown art scene in New York: No Wave. As a stylistic category, the term “no wave” is traced to Brian Eno’s 1978 compilation No New York, which featured experimental musicians such as James Chance, Arto Lindsay, and Lydia Lunch, white artists who would come to be regarded as pioneers of the style. Yet histories of no wave often situate it primarily as an outgrowth of punk, a precursor to “noise rock,” or an avant-garde counterpart to the popular new wave style; direct links to jazz are, by contrast, often fleeting and tangential. Little mention is made of Ulmer and his associates, nor other artists of color whose work was sonically resonant with no wave. I argue that the conventional understandings of no wave, like its punk forerunner, overlook direct and meaningful connections to key developments by Black artists such as Ornette Coleman, whose group Prime Time (whose members included Ulmer) was a key predecessor to the style. An examination of the Music Revelation Ensemble’s work reveals significant stylistic overlaps with the no wave style, while the album’s title calls for a more inclusive view of experimental music related to the Downtown art scene.

In modern music scholarship, contemporary New Orleans jazz is a genre that remains relatively untouched by rigorous debate and investigation concerning its cultural and stylistic underpinnings. This research seeks to remedy this oversight by delving into the vibrant world of modern New Orleans jazz through ethnographic research conducted with prominent musicians currently shaping the music scene. The primary aim of this research is to trace the evolution of contemporary New Orleans jazz from its roots in the late 19th century to its present status as a globally recognized jazz sub-genre. By drawing on historical references, interviews with notable contemporary New Orleans jazz musicians, and analysis of contemporary New Orleans jazz recordings, this paper aims to unpack the cultural and stylistic influences that make New Orleans jazz unique amidst the broader jazz landscape. Through conversations with New Orleans musicians and musical analyses, I shed light on the eclectic mix of influences—from traditional jazz and brass band music to blues, funk, and beyond—that contribute to the richness of contemporary New Orleans jazz. By doing so, I aim to offer a deeper understanding of what sets this jazz sub-genre apart while celebrating the ongoing vibrancy of the New Orleans jazz tradition in the 21st century.

Jazz is a historically contested terrain in the United States public narrative and in jazz historiography. Using Dave Brubeck’s Downbeat Magazine published origination theory of the music’s “mixed parentage of primitive African and highly developed European cultures” (1951), scholarly and journalistic attention has focused on claiming the music’s supposed hybridity as a Euro-American and African-American created form. Conversely, Langston Hughes claims the music as African American culture and heritage, saying that it is “one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America” (1921). The transnational connection between Black South Africa and African-America expressed in the shared jazz tradition between the two groups offers a response to these contested origins. Jazz has been indigenized by Black South African musicians since the music’s early development in the 1920s, as a form that, from their perspective, was created by Africans in America via the Trans-Atlantic Feedback Cycle (Ballentine, 1991/Collins, 1989). Building on the work of Ballentine (1991), Nketia (2005), Maultsby (2015), and Kubik (2017), I will analyze my ethnographic field research with Black South African jazz musicians in Johannesburg to explore the African aesthetics they hear in jazz with what I call their ‘bi-musical ear’ - a bi-musicality in indigenous South African forms and jazz. This paper explores the African-derived musicological elements (melodies, harmonies, rhythms, scales and other cultural/musical functions) that older and younger generation Johannesburg-based jazz musicians hear in jazz, and the implications of their bi-musical ear on the cultural identity, the African origins, of African-American jazz.