About
My academic and creative interests focus on improvisation and self-ordering —or “self organization”—within the realm of music. I'm equally dedicated to strengthening the artistic and intellectual understanding of improvisation, improvisers, and improvised works among practitioners in other musical traditions and métiers. This relates to my aesthetic concerns inasmuch as works that form the canon for a significant subset of improvisers are misunderstood, underappreciated, and even dismissed by an alarming number of musicians and critics as being "not music" made by people who are "not musicians."
That so many of these canonical works have been created by Black musicians working within and indeed through the musical framework commonly understood as "Jazz" (a word many innovators in that music have seen as analogous to a racist slur) strongly suggests not only residual, legacy, or "casual" racism, but that there is a tacitly racist ethos advanced by many gatekeepers and guardians of musical-institutional and economic power, whether strictly in capital terms, or in the realization of active aesthetic and passive social agendas.
Currently, I am pursuing my MA in Aesthetics and Politics in the school of Critical Studies at CalArts where I am developing language, context and theory with which to address this racist and regressive way of understanding and critiquing music. The hope is to put contemporary political thought and aesthetic theory to use, filling in, agitating, and enhancing unforeseen gaps in the cultural record.
My current research addresses the archives of musician and educator Bill Dixon. I believe that Dixon’s archives offer a rich and compelling diatribe on improvisational practices, carefully enmeshed within the American race-relations context in which the music has been produced. Simultaneously, I hope to add significant new scholarship to the study of, and theorization of, musical improvisation —as much as I hope to assure Dixon remains firmly planted in the soil he turned.
Projects in the works include public events animating the October Revolution in Jazz in 2024, and a Bill Dixon Centennial celebration in 2025. Stay tuned for more info and content.