This paper asks how a contemporary African American jazz improviser-composer—who embraced Islam and Sufi devotional practices in the early 2000s—mobilizes improvisation as a practice of healing. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, correspondence, and audiovisual analysis of public performances, I show how a Sufi-informed discipline of attention and Yusef Lateef’s concept of autophysiopsychic self-cultivation—articulated in mid-twentieth-century Black Muslim musical thought—shape the artist’s listening habits, rehearsal routines, and improvisational decisions. While scholarship on Islam in jazz has largely framed conversion as public political critique within civil rights–era struggles, I argue that healing functions here as a practical method for inner repair and spiritual endurance amid intensified Muslim legibility—marked by heightened public visibility and racialized scrutiny—in the post-9/11 United States. Through close listening, I identify audible features—especially breath-centered phrasing and calibrated silence—that render this disciplined attention audible in performance, even as the artist negotiates “jazz” as a contested category. By treating healing as method rather than metaphor, the paper connects religious practice to sonic technique and positions spiritual transmission as a form of musical knowledge, contributing to ethnomusicological debates on embodiment, ethics, and religion in performance.

Though best known for his role in the 1960s US Black Arts Movement as a Black Nationalist critic, poet and dramatist, Amiri Baraka was an unusually varied artist who exploded traditional boundaries of nations, politics, and art forms. I mobilize the microcosm of a 1977 Berliner Jazztage performance by Baraka's lesser-known funk ensemble “The Advanced Workers”—a performance panned by prominent West German critics Ulrich Ohlshausen and "Jazz Pope" Joachim-Ernst Berendt—to expand onto shifting, macrocosmic “constellations” (Benjamin) of actors, histories and discourses. The most local story is a quarrel between the festival’s founder, Berendt, and his successor, Swiss pianist/composer George Gruntz. Increasingly suspicious of politics in jazz, especially Black Nationalism—and ignorant of Baraka’s recent shift to Third World Marxism in 1976—Berendt turned from jazz to a depoliticized, universally humanist concept of Weltmusik, whereas Gruntz championed Baraka’s poetry and politics. Broader contextualization tells a more global story. West Germany reeled in the immediate wake of Deutscher Herbst, while Baraka's poetry spoke to multiple transnationalisms: not just transeuropean, transatlantic jazz festival circuits, but also, networks of solidarity with the Third World. In dialogue with contemporary Black Studies (Moten, Da Silva, Okiji) and transnational Jazz Studies (J. Wipplinger, B. Barson), I summon Baraka’s “Changing Same”—from his 1966 essay on “R&B and New Black Music” and taken up again in 1978 by N. Mackey in his analysis of Baraka—to argue that Baraka’s “Black Soundwork” (A. Reed) disrupts critical mishearings and refuses to submit to ongoing hegemonic categorizations and fixed understandings of Black Music.

In this paper, I draw on Dorinne Kondo's notion of world-making (2018) in combination with Jayna Brown's theorization of Black Utopias (2021) to argue for a more capacious understanding of Black musical world-buidling through an examination of the musical practices of composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist Patrice Rushen (b. 1954). Within, I employ comparative musical analysis of three performances and compositions of Rushen's, "Shortie's Portion" (1974) "Superstar" (1984), and "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory" (2004) to demonstrate how her musical identity, one emergent from and devleoped within Black musical history, is maintained and developed across these different modalities. A relatively understudied figure in academic music studies, Rushen's work is not only exemplary of the ways Black musicians challenge simple generic delimitation, but also one whose popularity amongst Black listeners calls for closer attention.

Guiding my analysis throughout are the musical, historical, and theoretical insights gained from my personal interviews with Rushen alongside those published in public venues. To parse the often intersecting and overlapping ways that Rushen's study and knowledge of Black musical history can be heard across genres and time periods, I employ Michael Silverstein's notions "indexical order" and "ethno-metapragmatics" (2003). Silverstein's work offers an analytical framework for recognizing and addressing the ways the multiple layers of semiosis, and indexicality in particular, inform and shape one another in social life.Though unique in the ways she deploys her knowledge and study of Black musical history, the methodology presented within s intended for wider application across Black music studies.

This paper unpacks tensions and weighs ethics among concepts of musical creativity and globalization through the music and career of Cyro Baptista (b. 1950), a New York-based Brazilian percussionist, composer, collaborator, and bandleader. Specifically, the analysis will focus on cultural anthropophagy (cultural cannibalism of Brazilian modernism, with which Baptista self-identifies) in relation to appropriation, exoticism, and experimentalism. To interpret Baptista’s work through these charged terms foregrounds the ethics of creative appropriation of globally eclectic musical experimentations; yet the paper will avoid passing excessive judgement. Especially in his own projects, Baptista’s ensembles comingle culturally iconic instruments (berimbau, cuíca, oud, gimbri, kora), myriad percussion, vocal sounds, grooves, and melodic characteristics from Brazil, North Africa, and jazz as well as nature-inspired soundscapes. Since the 1980s, Baptista developed his works collaboratively in and around New York City. He participated in overlapping circles of eclectic experimentalists: fellow Brazilians Hermeto Pascoal and Naná Vasconcelos (his closest mentors), Woodstock’s Creative Music Studio, and New York City’s downtown music scene. As a first-call percussionist, he toured and recorded with John Zorn, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, Osvaldo Golijov, Trey Anastasio, and others. The paper draws on original ethnographic research and analysis of his recordings, online videos, and critical reception, and is informed by musicological studies of anthropophagy (Harvey, Averbach, Della Torre), appropriation (Born and Hesmondhalgh, Feld, Young), the Brazilian musical diaspora (Stanyek, Goldschmitt, Perrone and Dunn), Latin American experimentalism (Alonso-Minutti, Herrera, and Madrid), and New York’s experimental jazz and downtown scenes (Gazit, Heller, Lewis, Barzel).