Anthony R. Green and Gabriel Solis: A Conversation

This colloquium is initiated and supported by Professor Nicol Hammond in partnership with Kira Dralle on behalf of Indexical and the Black Sound Symposium.

Click the link or more information about Indexical’s Black Sound Symposium running between 4/20-4/23/2023

Composer, performer, and social justice artist, Anthony R. Green engages with ethnomusicologist and music historian Gabriel Solis in a conversation about music past and present. The dialogue will touch on Green’s Zoom In performance project about the Black experience in the United States and abroad, and Solis’ jazz scholarship, particularly relating to his Black Sound Symposium Keynote Lecture, Against Erasure: Jazz, Blackness, and the Global Imagination. In this talk, Solis addresses recent trends in jazz scholarship which seek to define local and nationalist jazz aesthetics, as a departure from Black aesthetics, and specifically African American arts communities. Both Solis and Green will discuss the paths and projects they have undertaken in and outside of the academy to address erasures of Blackness in their respective musical traditions.

The creative output of Anthony R. Green (b. 1984; composer, performer, social justice artist) includes musical and visual creations, interpretations of original works or works in the repertoire, collaborations, educational outreach, and more. Behind all of his artistic endeavors are the ideals of equality and freedom, which manifest themselves in diverse ways in a composition, a performance, a collaboration, or social justice work. Green’s compositions have been presented in over 25 countries across six continents by internationally acclaimed soloists and ensembles. He has received commissions from pianists Jason Hardink and Stephen Drury, the McCormick Percussion Group, the Fromm Foundation, Celebrity Series Boston, Chamber Music Tulsa, Access Contemporary Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, NOISE-BRIDGE, and other soloists, ensembles, festivals, and organizations. As a performer, Green has presented projects in 11 countries across 4 continents. He is also co-founder of Castle of our Skins: celebrating Black artistry through music. www.anthonyrgreen.com

About Anthony R. Green’s Zoom In:

The "Zoom In" performance project is first and foremost about the Black experience in the United States in all of its various iterations. It developed organically through performances of original works, works by other composers, improvisation, and finding the commonality between the art created from these approaches. Additionally, it is a project that is constantly changing as the Black experience in the US also changes not only because of the passing of contemporary time but also because of the information from the past that is constantly being unearthed and revisited, thus creating a stronger context of past Blackness in dialogue with the present. "Zoom In" has been presented in multiple variations at the University of Maine Farmington, studio:ilka theurich in Hannover (Germany), the Tampa Museum of Art, Podium Vocale Den Haag (The Netherlands), the Omaha Under the Radar festival, and for the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik - Bern (Switzerland), as well as for projects in Atlanta, GA, Istanbul (Turkey), and Oslo (Norway). 

Gabriel Solis is an ethnomusicologist and music historian whose work focuses on music, memory, and racialization in the 20th and 21st centuries. He came to the University of Washington in 2022 from the University of Illinois, where he had been a professor of music for 20 years, with affiliate appointments in African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and Anthropology. In previous administrative appointments he has striven to develop research capacity in the arts with a focus on intersections between scholarship and practice, and with a core commitment to building more equitable and inclusive approaches to the arts in higher education.

Solis’s research in jazz, popular music, and contemporary Indigenous music in Australia and Melanesia has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and Mellon Foundation.

About Gabriel Solis’ Black Sound Symposium keynote lecture: Against Erasure: Jazz, Blackness, and the Global Imagination:

The music we often call Jazz is a remarkable creation. Exceptionally dense and rich, its journey from a local way of playing popular songs to a genre with global reach was almost instant. The feedback loop between local and global networks has continued to define the music to the present. Jazz scholarship has struggled to make sense of this dynamic. A persistent thread of mostly white jazz studies has particularly taken Jazz’s global breadth as a reason to perform a kind of erasure of its deep relationship to Black aesthetics, and more specifically to African American arts communities. This talk offers a polemic, against erasure, but also a historiography, aiming to see the music’s global life not as something in a paradoxical relationship to the particularity of musical blackness, but rather as in a congruent relationship with it.

The Black Sound Symposium is a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aims to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.