Shortly after our first meeting in Cape Town in February 2025, South African and Khoisan interdisciplinary artist, musician, and activist Garth Erasmus described my multi-sited dissertation project as “following the jazz.” In many ways, he was right, however, this was only after I (re)calibrated a series of decisions during multi-sited fieldwork between 2023 to 2025. As to be expected, nearly a year of research in Poland redirected my project. When my theories began to crystallize and a series of archival woes ensued, I found myself scrambling to reorient two months of fieldwork in South Africa supported by a grant. In order to keep a coherent project alive, I relied greatly upon my established musical networks of improvisers from Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area to make such research possible. This paper examines my method of ethnographic triangulation between improvised music scenes in Poland, the United States, and South Africa in order to demonstrate how multi-sited ethnographic research, especially non-comparative projects, require acts of improvisation (Svašek 2023; Humphreys et al. 2003). Illustrating how my fieldwork in Cape Town reflected the transnational careers and networks of the musicians who guided my research, I found myself improvising alongside them. This paper contributes to existing frameworks for understanding the mobilities of Black avant-garde musical performance practices, specifically those promoted by members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the South African ensemble The Blue Notes, by placing them in current day narratives of transnational musical encounters.

By 2026, Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) dance parties have become a major force in electronic-music nightlife across North American cities. These events offer participants vital spaces to gather amid a hostile racial climate in domestic public culture as US-produced bombs rain down on Gaza City, Tehran, and elsewhere in the region. Within these nightlife spaces, community members negotiate their multiply situated diasporic orientations to heritage, sexuality, coalition politics, and more. More than social gatherings, they function as cultural laboratories where diasporic communities cultivate inclusive forms of belonging through musical experimentation. DJ sets at these parties draw together contemporary regional styles (e.g., mahraganat, electro shaabi, and dabke), intertextual references to older Arabic and Persian pop (often reframed through camp sensibilities), and global electronic genres (e.g., house, techno, baile funk, and dubstep). Such performances index both transnational circulation and the localized club cultures of the North American cities where SWANA DJs work. This paper examines my multi-sited fieldwork with Laylit, one of the most influential party collectives, whose events move between New York, Washington DC, Montreal, Ottawa, Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco. Through participant observation and interviews with organizers and performers, I trace how these parties, and others like them, constitute a networked scene in which participants, repertoires, and discourses move fluidly across cities, presenting both challenges and opportunities for emergent models for theorizing the diasporic subjectivities that the SWANA acronym attempts to hold together.

This paper considers the limitations of diaspora as a framework for representing the flows of peoples and musical cultures between the United States and the Philippines. Contemporary diasporic discourse has been problematized for its ever-expanding nature (Brubaker 2005), and the use of diaspora as a descriptor for Filipinos in the United States has likewise become a recent point of contention amongst some scholars (Aguilar 2015; Teaiwa 2006). Following ethnomusicological studies on the transpacific (Fellezs 2019) and translocal (Balance 2016) that have productively reoriented and remapped colonial geographies in Asia and the United States, I attend to how Filipino musicians move beyond binary framings of homeland/diaspora, instead reimagining possibilities for Filipino lifeworlds both within and beyond the designated nation-state. Drawing from my fieldwork that placed me alongside Filipino jazz musicians in Manila and San Francisco, I analyze the discursive and performative use of “Filipino jazz” in both sites as an expressive mode that circumvents a bidirectional framing of Filipino musicking and cultural belonging. While “Filipino” remains the ontological nexus of personal and communal expression, multi-sited research affords a co-constitutive—rather than comparative—alternative to the static, place-based analysis of culture informed by notions of continentalism and national hegemony (Roberts & Stephens 2017). Moving away from affirming qualities and characteristics of cultural designation mapped onto land-based positionality, this multi-sited analysis explores how musicians use “Filipino jazz” as an organizing principle to connect seemingly disparate islands of thought and cultural production; soundworlds that become archipelagically interlinked through relational configurations of different styles and sonic aesthetics.

This paper treats scale, affect, and infrastructure as intersecting problematics for a multi-situated economic ethnomusicology. Multi-situatedness (Rajan 2021) is a research sensibility that synthesizes the logistical-conceptual problematics of multi-locale fieldwork with the ethical-political imperatives of writing non-objectifying scholarship within the metropolitan university. In the context of economic ethnomusicology, multi-situatedness implicates scale (Tsing 2015), affect (Berlant 2022), and infrastructure (Larkin 2013) as conceptual tools for the analysis of musical-sonic circulations in capitalist lifeworlds, and as real-world preoccupations, central to capitalist practices, that shape global political economies of musical labor and sensorial engineering. Drawing from my research with migrant seafaring musicians in the cruise ship tourism sector, I demonstrate the affordances of a multi-situated approach to political economies of music in the global leisure industries. I argue that live music on cruise ships—from the transnational sites of its brokerage, to the social dynamics it engenders between western vacationers and global Southern hospitality workers—is animated by a durable colonial matrix (Mignolo & Walsh 2018) of epistemological, aesthetic, cultural, legal, and financial power that transcends terrestrial borders and calls for multi-scalar ethnographic storytelling. In my analysis, musical labor thus presents as an “affective infrastructure,” both a sensory architecture for the circulation of leisure (Sterne 1997) and an oceanic lifeworld of racial capitalism and post-plantational relations (Guilbault & Rommen 2019). Scale transforms my telling of cruising’s affective infrastructures, telescoping ethnography across the macro levels of labor migration, the local levels of musical conviviality, and the granular levels of intersubjective musical performance and psychic life.