Examining practices of breathing, listening, and improvisation as modes of radical kinship in critical times, Lomanno asks us – What scales can a musician run if they’re running out of breath? Running for their life? Drawing on Abbey Lincoln’s music and a vast array of Black Feminist writings in music, literature, and sound, Lomanno leads a guided listening of Black American pianists Mulgrew Miller and Bud Powell, as he asks us – when listening to music, what have we missed by listening only to the notes themselves? What else will we hear if we listen for the musicians’—and all our—bodies? Suggesting that these jazz pianists have shared essential insight for manifesting the “Wholly Earth” Lincoln imagines, Lomanno makes a case for Black sound practices as incubators of more sustainable communities.

This event will culminate with a collective improvisation by Indexical's Artist in Residence, Kumi Maxson.

Dr. Mark Lomanno (they/he) is an ethnomusicologist and jazz pianist currently serving as director of applied music and assistant professor at Albright College, in Reading, Pennsylvania. A former Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow, Lomanno is co-founder of the Jazz Studies Collaborative, the current media editor for the journal Jazz Perspectives, and a former chair of the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Improvisation Section. His ethnographic, performance, and scholarly work is based in the Afro-Atlantic world, most especially on the Canary Islands. In addition to a forthcoming monograph on intercultural collaborations in global jazz, Lomanno is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking (Temple University Press).

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.