The HONK! Street Band Movement and its family of festivals – participatory, grassroots, and non-commercial festivals featuring activist or community-based brass and percussion ensembles – have since 2006 used sound and music as a means for inviting people to assemble in public, in-person festivals in ways understood by participants as contesting hegemonic power, reclaiming public space, and facilitating collective solidarity via joyful brass and percussion performances. Yet even as HONK! musicians view their acoustic, mobile, and collective music-making as something which might reclaim public space for more inclusive and democratic uses, an increasing emergence of HONK! bands composed entirely of women, non-binary, and transgender musicians reveals that the inclusive space that HONK! festivals and bands conceive of and seek to produce may be organized in ways that hinder gender-marginalized musicians from feeling like they can participate. In this paper, I argue that gender-marginalized HONK! musicians practice a mode of listening in their bands that “listens out” (Lacey 2013) for diverse voices and perspectives in a radically open, anticipatory, and intersubjective way. Through practices of listening out and with careful attention for one another, gender-marginalized HONK! bands produce spaces that facilitate learning and build confidence among musicians working to find their musical and political voices. I argue that listening out reveals forms of exclusion present and reconfigures relations of attention such that diverse voices might more easily resonate within the broader HONK! movement. In turn, the HONK! movement’s reclamations of public space might be more informed by the lived experiences of its participants.

The soundscape of the Times Square-42nd St subway station is a confluence of social experiences disguised within the everyday cacophony. An active contributor to this environment is a community of Latin American street vendors (vendedores ambulantes). I attempt to elucidate their sonic contribution to the subway’s soundscape by examining the dynamic between their lives and labor. The sounding of their labor consists of monotone repetitions of the commodity—such as “mango, mango, mango, mango”—where semantic meaning elides and sound foregrounds to engage with transitory passengers. The banal everydayness of laborers in the subway tends to obfuscate the structural orientation that coerces certain vendedores ambulantes, particularly unpermitted Latin American women, to work in this environment. The vendors’ sonic contribution emerges through their positionality, an instance localized in this paper as a patch in the network of racial capitalism. Using the methodology of patchwork ethnography, I document the entanglement that my interlocutors experience between their lives and livelihood, using short but frequent visits to weave a thread that elucidates their contribution to the sonic fabric of the subway. This paper analyzes the “sounding” of subway street vending and the “hearing” of colliding modes of production, including the hegemonic mode of capitalism. In discussion with my interlocutors, vending sounds a history beyond the sound that is heard: the transition from criminalizing labor to criminalizing the identity of the laborer. Los vendedores ambulantes vocalize their work within and against the conditions perpetuated by the NYC municipality, and exacerbated by the Trump administration.

How do urban shared-care sites sound? How do sacrality and secularity blur to emerge as spaces for traumatized communities through sound during public life-and-death political crises? Using site-specific ecumenical gatherings led by faith-based leaders in response specifically to the incarceration and release of the Iman Ayman Soliman in greater Cincinnati, OH and generally in support of local immigrants during 2024 and 2025, I ask how immigration rights gatherings transformed public and private digital, geographic, and physical sites to shared-care spaces (Gelsthorpe, Mody, and Sloan 2023). Synthesizing Soliman’s public addresses, participant interlocutors’ stories, advocacy-informed ethnographic experiences, an open letter, social media posts, and journalistic reporting source the ways that religious and secular organizations’ boundaries blurred as individual and collective culture, identity, and values merged dress, geography, images, and sound. From a positionality of advocacy, I bear witness to acoustemologic and emotional entanglements of sacrality and secularity permeating shared care-based gatherings, memorials, and protests at sites of resistance framed by Soliman’s detention and release (Balkenhol, van den Hemel, and Stengs 2020). I explore free-Ayman and anti-ICE soundscapes on a city sidewalk, detention center lawn and parking lot, within a church sanctuary, and reverberations of “A Tale of Two Protests” merging a “No Kings” resistance and “Good Trouble” vigil on a bridge connecting US states Kentucky and Ohio. I show how gatherings in these locales blur sacred-secular binaries and boundaries and reframe these experiences as praxelogic, shared-care sites promoting belonging within the broader US immigration rights community.

New York’s jazz scene is a male-dominated geography. Nonetheless, male jazz musicians and their masculinities are rarely discussed as such. Although gender and sexuality are now important analytics in jazz scholarship, masculinities remain elusive and undertheorized. In my fieldwork in jazz’s predominantly homosocial spaces in NYC, I often find that cishet men struggle to articulate their feelings about masculinity and patriarchy in their community. For bell hooks (2004), “most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained…and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences.” Consequently, hegemonic masculinities—as categories of power within patriarchy—may hide in plain sight (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005). This presents a methodological challenge: how to have our interlocutors remark on the unmarked?

Masculinities are relational; their definitions are typically reactive to material and discursive shifts experienced by subordinated groups (Kimmel 1987). Today, masculinities in jazz are undergoing change, partly in response to gender-justice initiatives at major jazz institutions designed to support women and gender-expansive performers. These projects ask us to imagine ‘jazz without patriarchy,’ but what does it mean when this structure of domination isn’t recognized by most men? Moreover, as ethnographers we’re trained to construct analyses from our interlocutors’ statements, but what happens when our research questions are embedded in what is taken for granted and omitted? Based on data from my dissertation research, this paper reflects on this ethnographic quandary by analyzing the messy, indirect, and intersectional ways musicians interpret masculinities in jazz’s contemporary gender landscape.