The stories of prominent African American band leaders and their contributions to music have historically been underrepresented in scholarly writings and historical narratives of the development of music education in the United States. The purpose of this study is to provide a record of the professional career and accomplishments of Thomas E. Lyle, his influence on the culture and development of predominately African American band programs in the United States, and contribute to the growing body of research on pioneering African American band leaders at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Data was collected from primary and secondary sources, including newspaper articles, yearbooks, photographs, and memos from Alabama State University and Stillman College archives, scholarly publications, interviews, and archives from the Alabama Bandmasters Association and Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

This paper engages the 2024 centennial anniversary of jazz innovator Max Roach as an activist and Freedom Movement leader to explore how his music expressed his Black nationalist political ideologies that rose to prominence in African-America during the 1960s/1970s Black Power Movement. Roach is widely lauded as an innovator who created what the bebop cohort called ‘modern music’ in the 1940s, revolutionizing jazz hence forward, and as a Civil Rights Activist. While many of the 2024 centennial celebrations focused on Roach’s activist legacy, this paper will offer a deeper exploration of Max Roach’s Black nationalism that provoked his persecution by Euro-American music industry rulers who were aligned with the US colonial agenda for African-Americans. By placing Roach’s music in dialogue with ethnomusicological scholarship (Baraka, 1963, Ampene, 2012), Black political science (Dawson, 2001, Harris-Perry, 2004), and Africana Studies (Peniel, 2006, Bracey, 2014), I build on the work of Ingrid Monson (2007) to argue that Roach acted as an African-American Freedom Father who led the Black Freedom Movement using aesthetics that sounded a brand of cultural nationalism that focused on fostering kinship and pan-Africanist dialogue between African-Americans and Africans. Through extensive ethnographic interviews with Roach collaborators Charles Tolliver, Reggie Workman and others, oral history interviews and archival research in the Max Roach Papers and those of his musical partner Abbey Lincoln, I will elucidate how Roach used his musical aesthetics to express this liberation ideology and to usher in the popular era of Black nationalist thought that characterized the Black Power Movement.

Cesária Évora (1941-2011), a singer from Cabo Verde, West Africa with numerous award-winning albums and world tours, was a somewhat unlikely global superstar. When José da Silva became her manager in the late 1980s, she seemed past her prime and unmarketable. Nevertheless, Cesária became a beloved figure within the world music concert circuit and a musical ambassador for Cabo Verde. This presentation describes the communicative strengths, individual agency, and the emerging world music market that made Cesária into the iconic Barefoot Diva, but the primary focus here is her musical repertoire. How did Cesária and her management’s song choices shape the trajectory of her career? Which were favorites of international audiences and why? Cesária worked with several arrangers, composers, bandleaders, and band configurations over the years. How did those individual musicians and styles influence her sound and success? While distinctive to Cabo Verde, Cesária’s core repertoire of mornas and koladeiras utilize rhythms and musical structures common in many transatlantic and Iberian-based styles. Indeed, Fernando Arenas wrote of the cultural “indefiniteness” of Cesária’s sound as a marketing strength (2011:69). As Cesária’s career progressed, this ambiguousness allowed a smooth, successfully expansion to new international repertoire, collaborations, and band members, while remaining firmly Cabo Verdean. New songs like “Bésame Mucho” in Spanish became part of her regular set lists. Just back from new research in Cabo Verde, I discuss Cesária Évora’s successful career path through the lens of the songs she chose and the musicians that helped shape her sound and image.