Sasha Berliner
Described a “young mallet master” by JazzTimes, Sasha Berliner is an award-winning vibraphonist and composer based in both the NYC and Los Angeles areas. The Downbeat Critics Poll #1 Rising Star Vibraphonist and the Jazz Journalists’ Association runner up for Vibraphonist of the Year, she has shared the stage in recent projects with notable jazz musicians Christian McBride, Tyshawn Sorey, Marcus Gilmore, and Cecile Mclorin Salvant, as well as leading her own quintet on international tours. She is a recent faculty member at the University of California Irvine and a frequent guest lecturer at CalArts, for both jazz ensemble and composition courses. She recently released her award-winning sophomore album Onyx (2022) through JMI Recordings, a “vigorous, unabashedly avant garde sophomore recording [which finds] the budding, San Francisco-born vibraphonist and composer in a fiery, dense and genre-bending posture.” Glide Magazine urges listeners to “add Berliner to the new vanguard of contemporary artists that are reshaping jazz with unconventional compositional approaches.”
Quotes from jazz critics: “Berliner is already a very mature instrumentalist […] maybe she’s the best vibraphone player to emerge in decades.” – Arnaldo DeSouteiro, Brazilian record producer (Verve, CTI, JSR, Milestone, Sony), music historian, and journalist. “Naturally percussive, with an ever-expanding grasp of harmony and counterpoint […] vibraphonist Sasha Berliner is one of the most exciting voices in jazz today.” – Andrew Bradbury, Stetson Stories. “Berliner plays, composes and leads her band with maturity and artistic presence rarely attained. […] Berliner is in the firmament of the here and now in modern jazz, and appears likely to occupy that upper stratosphere for some time to come.” – Paul Rauch, All About Jazz.
Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia.
This season sees two world premieres: Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center, and a new orchestral piece for the Jacksonville Symphony.
Other recent works include her piano concerto House of Pianos, which Bryan premiered last season with the LA Phil New Music Group (chamber ensemble version) and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (full orchestra version); and Gathering Song (libretto by Tazewell Thompson), composed for bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green and the New York Philharmonic.
Bryan’s compositions have been performed by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020-2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018–2020), London Sinfonietta, LA Phil, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Chicago Sinfonietta in a wide range of renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Blue Note Jazz Club.
Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University.
Terri Lyne Carrington
Terri Lyne Carrington is an NEA Jazz Master, Doris Duke Artist, and multiple Grammy award winning drummer, composer, and educator. She has performed with numerous luminaries such as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Al Jarreau, Cassandra Wilson, and esperanza spalding, among others. Her extensive recording career includes several albums she released as a band leader such as The Mosaic Project (2011), and Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue (2013), for which she received Grammy Awards. Currently, she serving as Founder/Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.
Angela Davis
Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom is a Constant Struggle.
Rebeca Muñoz García
Dr. Rebeca Muñoz García is an Assistant Professor, General Faculty, in the Social Analysis Department of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Spain. She obtained her Ph.D. in Humanities in 2023 (Social Analysis Department) at the same University, honored with international and cum laude recognitions. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Kansas and the University of Virginia, in 2019 and 2024, respectively. Before starting her Ph.D., Rebeca Muñoz García worked as a researcher and gender consultant in the public policies field. She also holds a Professional Music Studies in Trombone degree. She authored publications in prominent journals, books, and conferences, including The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender, Jazz Research Journal and the Feminist Theory and Music Conference, among others. Additionally, she has actively contributed to the development of Spanish and European projects. Since 2018, she has taught university courses to B.Soc.Sc. degrees, in addition to teaching in specialized courses and master seminars.
Tammy L. Kernodle
Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle is an internationally recognized musician and scholar whose research focuses on African American music, gender studies in music, and race in American popular culture. She is the author of the biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, which chronicles the six-decade career of jazz pianist/arranger and educator Mary Lou Williams. She served as Associate Editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of African American Music and on the Editorial Board for the revision of the New Grove Encyclopedia of American Music. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has appeared in numerous award-winning documentaries including Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, Girls in the Band, and Miles Davis: The Birth of Cool.
Dr. Kernodle has written for and consulted with The American Jazz Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Walker Art Center, NPR, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, BBC, and Carnegie Hall.
She currently serves as Curator of the I Dream a World Festival, multi-year initiative with New World Symphony that celebrates the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and seeks to amplify the voices of Black composers in the 21st century concert hall. Kernodle is Past President of the Society for American Music and currently holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor of Music at Miami University in Oxford, OH.
Kelsey Klotz
Kelsey Klotz is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her recent book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2023), is the first critical, book-length study of the role of whiteness in shaping jazz history. Her previous articles have been published in Dædalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Studies, the Journal of Jazz Studies and Jazz Perspectives, and her work as a public musicologist has been featured in essays, concert talks and adult education classes sponsored by NBC, the Common Reader, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music and JazzArts Charlotte. She received her PhD in Musicology from Washington University in St. Louis.
Sumi Tonooka
Sumi Tonooka has been called a “fierce and fascinating composer and pianist” (Jazz Times), “provocative and compelling” (New York Times), and “continually inventive, original, surprising, and a total delight,” (Cuadranos de Jazz, Madrid).
During a career spanning more than 30 years that has taken her from bases in Philadelphia and Boston, to New York and Seattle, Tonooka has been developing a body of work that surprises and delights audiences – quietly piling up accolades from jazz writers and fellow musicians.
Her recent activity as a composer includes receiving the Music Alive: New Partnerships residency with The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra through New Music USA to take place in November 2015. The residency will culminate with a premier of her symphonic work Full Circle and a new work for woodwind quintet.
Tonooka is also a recent recipient of the 2105 Artist Trust award and received the Carl & Jini Dellaccio GAP title to compose a new jazz chamber work Driftwood.
In 2013, the American Composers Orchestra and The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, in cooperation with EarShot, the National Orchestra Composition Discover Network, presented Tonooka’s first work for symphony ochestra as part of the second Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (JCOI) Readings.
In her most recent solo recording, NOW, “Tonooka covers a lot of stylistic territory in a perfectly sequenced show, and plays with a rare spirituality and musical sagacity. A superb solo piano outing” (All About Jazz). Her 2009 recording, Initiation (2009 ARC Records, with tenor saxophonist Erica Lindsay), garnered an “Honorable Mention” in the 2010 Village Voice Jazz Critic’s Poll. Recording often in trio or quartet with such noted jazz stalwarts as bassist Rufus Reid and drummers Akira Tana and Lewis Nash, Tonooka characteristically blends her own compositions with highly personal readings of jazz standards.
In addition to her symphonic and chamber works, jazz recordings and performances, Tonooka has composed over a dozen film scores, including the Academy Award-nominated Family Gathering by Lise Yasui and Daring To Resist by Martha Lubell, aired on PBS. She is also featured in A Note of Hope, released in 2011, a full-length documentary from Citygate Films on the youngest victims of HIV/AIDS in Africa. She toured West Africa as part of a sextet featuring her musical compadre of two decades, jazz violinist John Blake, Jr. Their recorded output includes A New Beginning: Live at The Village Gate, Kindred Spirits (as a duo), and the Traveler featuring Boris Koslov on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums. As a member of the Rufus Reid Quintent, Tonooka appears on the CD and DVD The Rufus Reid Quintent: Live at the Kennedy Center (Motema). The group appeared at Dizzy’s Club Cocoa Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York in 2007 for the release performance.
Tonooka’s career has been chronicled on several highly regarded jazz books, including Living the Jazz Life by Royal Stokes, ln The Moment by Francis Davis, and Madame Jazz by Leslie Gourse (all published by Oxford University Press). As a professional response to an inherent void within the music industry, Tonooka, along with alto saxophonist Chris Burnett and tenor saxophonist Erica Lindsay, co-founded the Artists Recording Collective (ARC), an internationally recognized brand and professional recording label. She now divides her time between her responsibilities as the Chief Public Relations Officer for ARC, composing and performing for an increasingly widespread audience of jazz aficionados. In his liner notes to pianist, composer and educator Sumi Tonooka’s fifth CD, Long Ago Today, journalist Russ Musto restated his praise from thirty years ago: “it has been a pleasure to hear her blossom into one of the most talented musicians of her generation.”
Sherrie Tucker
Sherrie Tucker is a professor of American Studies at University of Kansas. She is the author of Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke, 2014), Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000) and co-editor, with Nichole T. Rustin, of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke, 2008). Most recently, she is a member of the editorial collective and contributing co-author for a new collaborative Open Access book entitled Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) (University of Michigan Press, Music and Social Justice Series, 2024). She was a member of the Jazz Study Group and a Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center of Jazz Studies at Columbia in 2014-2015, and a member of research initiatives: Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) and International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI). She has served as the co-editor the journal American Studies since 2004, and for the past decade has co-edited the Music and Culture Series at Wesleyan University Press. She enjoys jamming and performing on the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) with her bandmates in the Pre-Pandemic Ensemble (PPE) based in Lawrence, Kansas.
Christi Jay Wells
Christi Jay Wells (she/her, they/them) is an associate professor of musicology in Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute School of Music, Dance, and Theatre and a Race, Arts, and Democracy Fellow with ASU’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research traverses the fields of jazz history; popular-music studies; dance studies; music, race, and gender; and arts and cultural policy. In 2019 they received the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music for an article exploring raced and gendered microaggressions in Ella Fitzgerald’s early career critical reception. A social jazz and blues dancer for the past twenty years, her first book, Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance (2021, Oxford University Press), explores the complex intersections among jazz music, social and popular dance, race, power, and discourse from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. They are currently working on a second book, a study of the Smithsonian Institution’s substantial history of jazz programming and patronage in the context of the broader jazz community of Washington, DC.
Sasha Doster (moderator)
Sasha Doster is a researcher, writer, and curator who is currently a Ph.D. student in historical musicology at Columbia University in New York City. Her research focuses on music as a cultural product, expressions of Blackness in classical music during the early 20th century, historiography, and Black experimentalism. She incorporates these into public history spaces and museum curation. Much of her work focuses on the composer H. Lawrence Freeman and his operatic world during the New Negro Movement. She holds a B.A. in Music and Anthropology from Furman University.
Lauren Bernard (moderator)
Lauren Bernard is a sixth-year PhD student in historical musicology at Columbia University. She holds degrees in music from The University of North Texas (2015) and Brandeis University (2018). Lauren has presented her work at many institutions including Brandeis University, MIT, Temple University, the Smithsonian Institute, and Universite Paris 8. Her current research interests include the perception of race in timbre and sound, musical constructions of alterity and identity, and Afrofuturism. Lauren’s dissertation examines Afrofuturist music of the 20th century, interrogating the ways in which white supremacy, stemming from the colonial encounter and beyond, influences the ways that Afrofuturists construct sonic identities. In her spare time, Lauren is an avid reader, an aspiring amateur chef, and she enjoys spending as much time as she can with her two sisters.
Shirley Chikukwa (moderator)
Shirley Chikukwa is a fifth-year ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate in Columbia’s Music Department. Currently working on her dissertation project entitled, Sounding Africa, Being African, Shirley’s research focuses on the sonic representations of African musics and histories in historical, ethnomusicological, and anthropological literature and the circulations of this discourse within specific Afro-diasporic communities here in the United States. Set against the rise of Afrobeats and Amapiano as global music genres, Shirley’s work is centered in communities—musical, cultural and lifestyle-oriented, and business—which center African music in their representations of what it means to be African. She is a current recipient of the GSAS International Travel Fellowship which supports her dissertation work.
Kevin Fellezs (director, Center for Jazz Studies)
Kevin Fellezs is an Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University. His recent book, Listen But Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific, is a transnational study of the ways in which Hawaiian belonging is articulated by Kanaka Maoli and non-Hawaiian guitarists in Hawai‘i, California, and Japan. The book was awarded a 2021 Honorable Mention for the Best Subsequent Book award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. His first book, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion, is a study of fusion music of the 1970s, and was awarded the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award. He has published articles on topics ranging from jazz to Hawaiian slack key guitar, heavy metal, and enka in Jazz Perspectives, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of the Society for American Music, among others, as well as in numerous anthologies. He served as a Senior Editor for the Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition and currently serves on the editorial boards of 33 1/3 Japan, the American Music journal, and the Journal of Metal Music Studies. He was a featured interviewee for Long Yellow Road, a 2024 documentary on pianist and composer Toshiko Akiyoshi for the NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai/Japan Broadcasting Corporation).