The Music and Migration Symposium is a workshop-style meeting of scholars who focus on the intersecting scholarly fields of jazz studies and migration studies. We will engage with issues of cultural networks, displacement, race, gender, diaspora, and related issues. How have networks and the flow of people impacted the music from the pre-jazz era to the present? How has human mobility facilitated regional, national, and global points of cultural synthesis, conflict, and appropriation? How have diasporas been constructed and how have they interacted through these networks and processes? How has jazz been transformed by these migrations and encounters? How have the dynamics of race and gender framed the outcomes?

Title: Music is Autonomy: The Oral Transmission of African Music in the United States, 17th-20th Centuries through a Review of the Evidence in Pre-Jazz Mobilities

Abstract: Over the past four years, Bradley has mapped out the ancestral origins of every significant Black jazz musician born before 1950 (over 1,500 individuals) and he has cataloged over 7,500 migratory movements that led to the emergence of jazz in its various forms across the United States. He has also recorded over 500 oral history interviews focusing on today’s jazz elders. Bradley proffers a thesis that considers these thousands of lineages of Black musicality as the roots of much of American musical culture that reached a groundswell after emancipation that uproots existing jazz history narratives focused so heavily on New Orleans. He looks at previously unexplored, vital sites where these lineages concentrate and where certain measures of autonomy were established: Black-indigenous maroon communities set at the fringes of plantation power in North Carolinian swamps and mountains, the growth of communities north of the porous and contested Ohio River borderland between slave and free states before emancipation, the sonic landscape of field shouts in the western Alabama-eastern Mississippi Black Belt, and the first post-emancipation Black frontier of Kansas and Oklahoma, among many others, to understand the complexities of Black musical transmission and inheritance over the past four centuries.

Bio: Cisco Bradley is the author of four books, including I Hear Freedom (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2025), The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press, 2023), and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021). His current research examines the relationship between American cultural production and Black social networks and mobility in all manifestations–fugitivity, industrial migration, ghettoization, solidarity and power movements, refuge and autonomy movements, and utopian community formation.

Ben Barson

Assistant Professor of Music, Bucknell University

Title: Tracing Musical Marronage in Antebellum New Orleans

Abstract: This article explores the historical and theoretical intersections between marronage and jazz through a critical analysis of archival records, musical practices, and Black ecological practice. Situating this discussion within the framework of Black geographies, the article draws on the works of Nathaniel Mackey, Édouard Glissant, Sidney Bechet, and Fred Moten to illuminate how fugitive musicianship in antebellum New Orleans shaped the social and cultural contours of Black music throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth century. Through antebellum police records that depict unauthorized musical gatherings of runaways and free people of color, this article highlights the role of music in constructing maroon ecologies and horizontal social relations practiced by Louisianan Black communities through Reconstruction and beyond. Employing a methodology that blends music “history from below” with what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, the study examines the intertwined spatial, ecological, and sonic dimensions of marronage. The framework of “maroon resonance” helps contextualize the aurality of antebellum fugitivity and offers a renewed lens to understand jazz as a site of radical transformation and liberation.

Bio: Benjamin Barson is a composer, historian, and musicologist. His book Grassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) thinks through jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form deeply tied to the counter-plantation legacies of the Haitian Revolution and their echoes in Radical Reconstruction. He received his Ph.D. in Music from the University of Pittsburgh and recently completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University and a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico. Barson’s research rethinks migration, agency, and cultural resistance, and has published on topics ranging from the musical cultures of Chinese indentures in the late nineteenth-century United States South (The Cargo Rebellion, PM Press, 2023) to the legacy of Haitian migrants in early Louisianan blues (in The Routledge Handbook to Jazz and Gender, 2022).

Rashida K. Braggs

Chair & Professor of Africana Studies, Williams College

Title: Move Jazz, Black Woman Move

Abstract: How do you make jazz scholarship move? You depart and return to the diverse homes of Black African diasporic women . . . you groove in the word-sound-mood tones of the jazz they perform . . . you move readers to resonate with Black women’s experiences beyond the pages of academic prose . . . . In this presentation, Braggs discusses her book chapter-in-progress, wherein she weaves personal ethnographic interviews, archival research, and field observations with her own embodied performance. Braggs retraces and imagines the journeys of Malagasy-Senegalese singer MFA Kera and Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo as they first migrate to Paris in 1969 and 1983 respectively. Braggs attempts to move her body and words between time, space, and genre to center and layer Black women’s jazz journeys (including her own) in relation to each other. She visits their homelands, stacks her contemporary time onto theirs, and offers her body as a moving vessel in which to empathize with their experiences and sensorially express why these Black women moved to Paris, how they survived-thrived, what role jazz played in their coming-goings, and how they helped fuel the Paris jazz scene.

Bio: Rashida K. Bragg’s book Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris (University of California Press, 2016) investigates the migratory experiences of African American jazz musicians in 1946-1963 Paris. In her current book & performance project, “Paris Jazz Grooves as Black Women Move,” she explores the experiences of multiple Black jazz women performers of African descent as they migrated to and settled in Paris, France from 1968 to the present day. Her work has also been published in such journals as The Journal of Popular Music, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. Braggs is a scholar-performer who acts, dances, sings, composes music, and performs spoken word. Her performances have been supported by Jacob's Pillow, the United Solo Theatre Festival, and other venues.

Celeste Day-Moore

Associate Professor of History, Hamilton College

Title: Voice of America: Race, Jazz, and Sound Migrations

Abstract: In my paper, I will be exploring the movement of jazz through the Voice of America radio network. Looking at a range of producers and deejays—including Willis Conover and Georges Collinet—the paper considers how different radio voices interpreted jazz while also considering how jazz in turn reinterpreted these same voices and the racial and gender identities they came to signify. Drawing on work in sound studies, including Nina Eidsheim and Jennifer Stoever, I consider a range of questions: how was the “sonic color line” reinforced and subverted through VOA programming? To what extent was jazz a medium for perpetuating power and to what extent did it offer mechanisms of resistance? And how do we consider the “acousmatic question” within the transnational realm of radio, which created new opportunities to imagine and respond to queries of identity, race, and gender?

Bio: Celeste Day Moore is an associate professor of history at Hamilton College and a historian of sound, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021) was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Woody Guthrie First Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. 

Josh Kun

Professor & Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication, Vice Provost of the Arts, University of Southern California

Title: Mexican Special

Abstract: Borrowing its title from the Rebirth Brass Band’s 1989 song “Mexican Special,” my contribution will focus on the history of Mexican musical migrations to New Orleans and their impact on the evolution of “jazz.” My focus is on the arrival of the 8th Cavalry Mexican Military Band for the 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. A massive 76-member operation, they played regular concerts to enraptured audiences in Audubon Park. The music of “The Mexican Band,” as they became known, seeped into the local repertoires of New Orleans and the catalogs of local sheet music publishers like Junius Hart. They were joined by other Mexican ensembles like La Orquesta Tipica Mexicana, which included the Mexican musician and composer Juventino Rosas, author of “Sobre las Olas,” or “Over the Waves,” which became a staple of New Orleans brass bands. Some of the Mexican musicians never left the city and later re-emerged as local music teachers. Many claim that it was one of the Mexican Band’s members, Florencio Ramos, who introduced the saxophone to New Orleans. I will put this history in the wider context of the cross-border musical influences between Mexico and New Orleans (everything from Jelly Roll Morton’s time in Tijuana to the many compositions by Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew that were covered throughout the 1950s and 60s– often in Spanish–  by Mexican and Mexican-American bands, including Los Apson, Manolo Muñoz, Los Teen Tops, and Little Joe and the Latinaires). My discussion of the Mexican Band’s influence and legacy will also include my 2021 artistic commission for Prospect.5 based on The Mexican Band and the upcoming exhibition I am co-curating for this year’s Mexico-themed pavilion at the landmark New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Bio: Josh Kun is a Grammy-nominated cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He is a Professor at the USC Annenberg School and is USC’s inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts. His books include Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America; Songs in the Key of Los Angeles; The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles; Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez, and several others. As a curator, his projects and exhibitions have appeared at the Getty, Los Angeles Public Library, LACMA, California African American Museum, and more. As an artist his work has appeared with SFMOMA, Prospect New Orleans, and Steve Turner Gallery.

Mark Lomanno

Assistant Professor of Music, University of Miami

Title: Scions, Seeds, and Songs of the Soil: Cultivating Sustainable Jazz Ecosystems

Abstract: In the documentary Arrows into Infinity (2014), drummer Jack DeJohnette described his collaborations and international travels with saxophonist Charles Lloyd in the 1960s as “planting seeds in the Earth and the environment. Not just in the space that we’re playing in, but…everywhere.” With this comment, DeJohnette alludes metaphorically to a worldwide ecosystem for jazz cultivated by Black American musicians. Invoking vocalist Abbey Lincoln’s Wholly Earth(1998) and James Brandon Lewis's Jesup Wagon (2021), in this presentation I treat DeJohnette’s proposition literally, exploring the relationship between jazz music, the environment, and the music’s potential for fostering sustainable communities through kinship, exchange, and holistic worldviews that intertwine the arts, sciences, and spirituality. Beyond imagining these global jazz communities as harvests and graftings of Black American “seed-planting,” I will discuss the Afrodiasporic histories and epistemologies from which these expressive practices derive; racialized binary oppositions of built/urban and natural/pastoral environments; and artists who invoke ecological lifeways through their performances, philosophies, and activist work. Along with Lewis's, Lincoln’s, Lloyd’s, and DeJohnette’s music, additional examples will include Masahiko Togashi’s Song of Soil (1979) and Wadada Leo Smith’s America’s National Parks (2016). Foregrounding the movement and networks through which these exchanges occur, I contextualize these musicians' travels and projects through references to Herman Gray's road/street metaphor for jazz tradition and innovation (2005), and James Clifford's roots/routes paradigm for identity formation (1997). I conclude by returning to “global jazz ecologies,” suggesting that these holistic Afrodiasporic performance practices go far beyond metaphorical language used for artistic expression, offering urgently needed alternatives for building sustainable relationships with the natural environment and all its inhabitants amid ongoing global climate crises.

Title: From Accra to London and Beyond: Music, Migration, and Activism in the Life of Nii Noi Nortey

Abstract: In Western academic jazz scholarship and Black music studies, Africa is characterized by a severe interplay of exclusion and exoticization. That is, African peoples’ ongoing relationships with jazz and Black musics across the diaspora are largely occluded while the pervasive idea and imagination that Africa is the primitive, original, and static source of the Black diaspora persists with no signs of abating. Within such a framework, Africa exists merely as the premodern antecedent of the Black diaspora, thereby affirming the Euro-American colonial perspective that African people are without history and outside of modernity itself. In this paper, I offer an alternate view of African modernity by examining the activities and encounters of African artists in musical, cultural, and political networks across Africa and the diaspora. Particularly, this paper focuses on the life and art of Ghanaian Pan-African activist and free jazz musician Nii Noi Nortey. In the early 1970s, Nii Noi Nortey traveled from Accra to London to study economics. Along the way, he was deeply influenced by African music, jazz, and Black experimental musics, and he would later participate in various transnational anti-colonial cultural collectives alongside diverse artists from the diaspora. This paper maps the sonic geographies of African modernity and anti-colonial resistance by focusing on the intersections of music, migration, and Afrodiasporic solidarities in Nortey’s career. I argue that African encounters and political activism through the movement of Black musics across the diaspora are indicative of the continuous agency of African people in the world today.

Bio: Samuel Boateng is a Career Development Research Fellow in Music at St John’s College, Oxford. An award-winning jazz pianist and composer, he is also an ethnomusicologist with a PhD in music from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in ethnomusicology from Kent State University. Boateng’s research examines the performances, migrations, and collaborations by Ghanaian jazz musicians across Africa, the UK, and the USA to rethink Africa’s place in jazz history and development. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Joseph Walsh Endowed Scholarship in Music, and the Andrew Mellon Humanities Engage Project. Boateng’s compositions have been performed by the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Kent State Orchestra, Adepa Ensemble, and Afro Yaqui Music Collective. He is also a playwright, receiving the Heinz Endowment for the Arts award in 2021 for his original jazz musical, Sunsum is Spirit.