Click here to reserve tickets! The WEB Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies has the extraordinary opportunity to continue the work of legacy faculty like Max Roach, Reggie Workman, Yusef Lateef and Archie Shepp with the Spring 2021 inaugural season of the Black Music Project. Throughout his time on faculty in the Department, Max Roach engaged in scholarship that addressed major issues of race and power in Black music with a focus on jazz. We follow in his footsteps with the online event series Fire Fridays: The Cats Talk Back, that presents mini-concerts and panel discussions to put Black music culture-bearers in conversation with hot topics in jazz. This series was conceived by Maya Cunningham, who is an ethnomusicologist, a cultural activist, and a jazz vocalist.
To present this exciting series, the Du Bois Department’s Black Music Project has partnered with the We Insist! Collective and the We Up Re Up Online Jazz Festival, led by renowned jazz musicians JD Allen, Nasheet Waits (Drummer, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon), and Eric Revis (Bassist, Branford Marsalis), in collaboration with celebrated jazz trumpeter, Antoine Drye. This series facilitates intergenerational dialogues with the elder, bridge and young lion generations of jazz culture bearers, who are at the creative vanguard of the music, and culture bearers in other Black forms, and to center their voices in controversial topics in jazz scholarship, including cultural appropriation, institutionalization, and contested ownership.
To present this exciting series, the Du Bois Department’s Black Music Project has partnered with the We Insist! Collective and the We Up Re Up Online Jazz Festival, led by renowned jazz musicians JD Allen, Nasheet Waits (Drummer, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon), and Eric Revis (Bassist, Branford Marsalis), in collaboration with celebrated jazz trumpeter, Antoine Drye. This series facilitates intergenerational dialogues with the elder, bridge and young lion generations of jazz culture bearers, who are at the creative vanguard of the music, and culture bearers in other Black forms, and to center their voices in controversial topics in jazz scholarship, including cultural appropriation, institutionalization, and contested ownership.
Maya Cunningham curated the 2021 Smithsonian Folkways Black History Month playlist. It presents a provocative sound collage of the African American experience that captures the groups earliest history on the African continent into the Black Power period of the 1970s. This collection features three cultural streams that document the progression of Black American history – music, poetry, and the words of Black Freedom Fighters, through six chronological time periods. Click here to enjoy the Playlist and an accompanying essay also written by Maya Cunningham. Find the playlist here.
Maya Cunningham In Conversation with Wynton Marsalis
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 15, 2020
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 15, 2020
