"Jazz and Place: Cities, Soundscapes, Venues": Matt Sakakeeny and Kimberly Hannon Teal

From "Jazz and Place: Cities, Soundscapes, Venues" Symposium, November 14, 2025, Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University

Matt Sakakeeny, Tulane University
“New Orleans and the Place of the Vernacular in Jazz Studies”:
Amiri Baraka’s concept of the “changing same” identified a core set of “African impulses”: musical concepts and techniques that were “un-self-conscious,” “the deepest expression of memory.” By contrasting what he termed “The New Black Music” with vernacular styles “from straight back out of traditional Black spirit feeling,” Baraka mapped a future/past orientation on to a North/South latitudinal binary. For Baraka and many others in jazz studies, the jazz tradition begins when Louis Armstrong grows beyond his communal origins in New Orleans by moving North and establishing a self-conscious “voice” as a soloist. In this presentation I ask where this paradigmatic formulation leaves New Orleans and the place of the vernacular in jazz studies. The belief that vernacular traditions proceed un-self-consciously and remain the “same” is particularly pronounced in New Orleans, understood as “the most African city in the United States” and forever equated with pastness and rootedness. Musicologists and historians have zeroed in on the continuous presence of African rhythms, planted like a seed in West and Central Africa, taking root in the New World through the ring shout dances at Congo Square, and branching out into the contemporary styles of jazz, funk, and hip-hop. This presentation shifts focus from African retentions to Black reinvention in the vernacular realm, tracing the ever-changing mutation of these rhythms by innovative musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, Tuba Fats, and Mannie Fresh. The sonic archive indicates that African rhythms and other vernacularisms did not remain the same or evolve passively but were actively and dynamically shaped through creative labor. By tracing the twists and turns, ruptures and absences of African rhythms, I present New Orleans not only as a wellspring of Black vernacular culture but as fertile ground for experimentation.

Kimberly Hannon Teal, University of North Texas
"Jazz Festivals and/as 'Urban Renewal'":
Jazz is inextricably linked to the history of race in America, and that history of race is largely defined by places and the ways in which people move through or are restricted by them. As George Lipsitz writes, “race is produced by space…it takes places for racism to take place.” Jazz’s unique blend of African, European, and indigenous elements was forged through cross-cultural interactions characterized by the deeply unequal power relations of colonization and slavery and their legacies. While the middle decades of the twentieth century saw the music thrive in urban club scenes, jazz festivals now offer some of the most common and consistent spaces for jazz performance and listening. In part because of their foregrounding of place in the context of African American culture, jazz festivals offer opportunities to reconsider the nature of and stories told around race and place. As sites of temporary integration in urban areas that remain largely segregated more than half a century after the Civil Rights Movement, they can play a role in confronting, illuminating, obscuring, or exacerbating racial inequalities. In this talk, I will detail two opposing strategies for presenting jazz festivals in majority-Black urban places. I argue that the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival aims for a Robin Hood-like model that maximizes income from wealthy tourists to bring money into an impoverished local economy while the Detroit Jazz Festival targets a local audience through free performances bankrolled by philanthropic support. In one scenario, local residents may benefit from a trickle-down of cash, and in the other they are offered jazz as a gift alongside a smaller influx of money to the hospitality industry. In both, whiteness is a significant thread in the tangled knots connecting, music, money, people, and places.