2023 has been quite a year for me professionally and 2024 promises to hold more opportunities and experiences. Here’s what I’m reflecting on:
In early May of 2023, I successfully defended my dissertation prospectus at the University of Colorado Boulder. The document was defended the working title: A Modern Creole Serenade: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives of Creole Identity in Jazz. I received incredibly helpful suggestions from all of the committee members, including chair Jay Keister, Carlo Caballero, Reiland Rabaka, Ben Teitelbaum, and Keith Waters. I’m excited to distill my research and thinking on this subject into a document that will contribute to the scholarly discourse around Creole influences with Black American Music, and Creole identity more generally.
In June 2023, my promotion to the rank of Associate Professor of Academic Jazz by the Board of Trustees at the University of Northern Colorado. I ‘d like to thank my colleagues and administration in the School of Music and College of Performing and Visual Arts at UNC for the opportunities that enabled me to achieve this professional milestone. I look forward to serving the University of Northern Colorado for many years to come, and this promotion was a recognition of my being valued by UNC and all of my colleagues here.
Summer of 2023 was full of exciting and transformational experiences. Shortly after submitting grades for Spring 2023 I left Colorado for the last of my funded trips to New Orleans, where I completed my planned oral histories and ethnographic research funded in part by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at UNC. I was able to spend time interview both John Boutté and Wendell Brunious, as well as spend time with the Brunious family and attend a good deal of live music in the city. After being home in Colorado for 36 hours, I travelled with the UNC Compass Jazz Orchestra and several other UNC faculty for a week-long stay in the Dominican Republic, where the group played multiple times most days, including a concert at the Teatro Nacional in Santo Domingo as part of that venue’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. Home again for another 36 hours and I travelled to Ann Arbor, MI for the 2023 International Society of Bassists conference, where I presented research on oral histories of early New Orleans jazz bassists.
Back to teaching in the Fall of 2023, I resumed my regular load of teaching Undergraduate Jazz History, a graduate seminar I designed called “Post Bop Practices”, based on Keith Waters’s work in that field, Jazz Pedagogy for graduate students while also directing both the Birdland combo and the Bop Shop tune learning experience. During this semester I also had the opportunity to present my research at the College Music Society national conference in Miami on “The First Decades of Jazz”, based on a graduate seminar I designed and teach by the same name. I also served as a mentor for Bailey Hinkley Grogan’s research on African American women in jazz history, which she presented at the conference as well as on a roundtable panel on Radically Responsive Music Schools.
Capping off the year and starting the new year at the Jazz Education Network conference is always a welcome and meaningful way to transition into the new semester, but this conference was extremely special for many reasons. Arguably the most significant way, for me at least, this conference was distinguished from others is the recognition bestowed upon me as the recipient of the 2024 JEN President’s Service Award. Coincidentally, the night that award was presented to me on the main stage of the conference also included UNC’s Compass Jazz Orchestra performing just one hour after I was honored with the award by all attending past presidents of JEN. As an added surprise, I received a last minute call to play bass with the opening group on that program, my new friends from Highline Vocal Jazz. While hard to top that experience with so many of my colleagues and students present, the next day of the conference I co-presented a clinic entitled “The Bop Shop: Teaching Jazz Repertory and Performance Through Aural Models for All Levels” with my colleague and friend Drew Zaremba. At JEN I also was able to present my own original research called “Three of a Kind – Interviews with New Orleans Creole Jazz Musicians Wendell Brunious, Don Vappie, and John Boutté”, preside for Brad Goode’s valuable session “Jazz is NOT a language” and perform in the rhythm section with my friend drummer Steve Barnes in the Vocal Jazz Reading Session.
2023 (and the beginning of 2024) was eventful, exciting, and highly rewarding for me. In 2024 I look forward to continuing my work with the fabulous students and faculty at UNC, completing a good portion of my dissertation, preparing and presenting more research for conferences, and spending some quality time with my wife Kelley, our pets Etta and Teddy and our extended families.
