Ring Shout: Practice, Resilience, and Transmission in Place

A Symposium

Friday, April 3rd, 2026  10am

Buell Hall, East Gallery

515 West 116th Street at Broadway

New York, NY 10027

Free and open to everyone, but registration is required. Please CLICK HERE to register

This one-day symposium approaches ring shout as living practice and as method, a way of thinking through tradition, mediation, and meaning in Black music without separating sound from the social worlds that sustain it. The day is built to move, not just to speak, beginning with questions that are both conceptual and practical, tuned to spirituality, dance, and the social work of embodied tradition: How does a form travel across generations without being flattened into shorthand? What holds, and what changes, when it passes through places, microphones, and memories? The day culminates in a live workshop and demonstration by led by members of the McIntosh County Shouters. Throughout, the symposium returns to cultural resilience and transmission, and to ring shout’s capacity to carry place with it—audible even at a distance. Participants include Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Rutgers University Camden; Whitney Slaten, Bard College; Eric Crawford, Morehouse College; yaTande Whitney V. Hunter, Temple University; Candace Miller, The Wallace Foundation; and members of the McIntosh County Shouters. The symposium will come to a close at 6 pm. Attendees are encouraged to continue their evening at a formal concert by the McIntosh County Shouters at Miller Theatre at 7:30 pm.

Important: Campus Access Requirements

Columbia’s campus is currently open only to Columbia-affiliated guests (with a valid CUID).
If you do not have a Columbia ID, you will need a QR code to enter campus.

To receive a QR code:

• You must register for this event at least 48 hours in advance
• We will submit your name and email to Public Safety
• You will receive an email from caladminnoreply@columbia.edu with your unique QR code on the day of the event.

Please check your spam/junk folder if you don’t see the email and bring a valid photo ID with you to present at the campus entry points.

Dead Air: Jazz, Breath and Ghosts

In this collaborative talk, we consider the improvisatory practice of emplaced disembodiment known as “haunting.” What does it mean to haunt, and be haunted by, the charismatic lofts and jazz clubs of the past? How is the resolute “nowness”

of musicking complicated by the unknowable histories it draws upon and the phantasmic futures it projects? What literal and figurative atmospheres blow through this music? Join us for a conversation with Ben Ratliff and J. Martin Daughtry.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026   6pm

Casa Hispanica

612 West 116th Street, New York, NY 10027

Free and open to everyone but registration is recommended. To register for the conference CLICK HERE.

For more information about the Center for Jazz Studies and to support our activities,

please visit jazz.columbia.edu or call 212-851-9270.