A discussion of the roles women have played in constituting radical counterpublic cultures within cities-—from Ellen Stewart’s La Mama theater to Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse project in the 70s to the contemporary explosion of “girls rock camp” programs throughout the world—and how the participants’ own feminist musicking and educational activism work is continuing, broadening, and redefining the terms of that legacy.
With: Lauren Onkey, LaRonda Davis, Karla Schickele, Maureen Mahon
Moderator: Daphne Carr
This gathering will examine the economics, aesthetics and ethnicities of improvisational music culture in present-day NYC, with special emphasis on how older definitions of jazz have been provoked, transformed and morphed by contemporary urban artists and audiences. The role of digital technologies and social media will be in the mix too, as well as race, class and gender issues and the impact of gentrification.
With: Marika Hughes, Vijay Iyer, José James, Butch Morris, and Mazz Swift.
Moderator: Greg Tate
The explosion of international sounds in the pop sphere—associated with Pitbull, Black Eyed Peas, Shakira and M.I.A, among others-—has been paralleled and driven by a mirror-underground usually simply called global bass, ghetto bass, or tropical bass. This roundtable explores the power dynamics of cultural appropriation, tastemaking and music discovery within this digital space, looking at rap, Bollywood, kwaito, Baltimore club, dancehall, baile funk, bhangra, cumbia villera, etc., where they merge into this new melting pot/marketplace.
With: Rekha Malhotra aka DJ Rekha, Wayne Marshall, Venus X Iceberg
Moderator: Edwin STATS Houghton
The migration of sounds and ideas across time and place encourages synthesis; giving rise to avant garde, radical, and futurist voices. What (other) worlds open up and what (outer) spaces are formed? How do regional sites remix global flows? What factors/forces enable or prohibit certain voices from finding an audience in the national, global, or cyber scene? How do we reconcile organicism of sound, as musicians produce out of particular worlds, with the reckless and restless ways music circulates?
With: Kyle Dargan, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture), and the work of Barry Jenkins
Moderators: Jayna Brown, Daphne Brooks and Tavia Nyong’o
In 2015, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will open on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This roundtable panel will discuss how regional variation and the impact of urbanization and migration on the history of African American music should be addressed in the museum’s exhibitions.
With: Chuck D., Dwan Reece, Kevin Strait, and Timothy Anne Burnside
Moderator: Dwan Reece
This roundtable highlights Alice Bag’s new memoir. Violence Girl
seizes the opportunity to explore within the Hollywood punk scene the
relationship between women and the city and the relevance of Alice’s East L.A. community in her music making. With Alice accompanied by her guitar, the roundtable considers the 1970s Hollywood punk scene as a vehicle for entering, if temporarily, segregated social spaces, and as a space that nurtured a feminist-inspired humor as social critique.
With: Alice “Bag” Velasquez, Michelle Habell-Pallán
and Sean Carrillo
Moderator: Bibbe Hansen
On October 10, the Knight Foundation and the NEA announced the winners of the first Community Arts Journalism Challenge, projects based in Charlotte, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia, and San Jose. That same day, the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program announced its 2011 Fellows and Engine29.org “Pop-up” Lab in Los Angeles. Both initiatives are evidence of new institutional recognition that arts journalism contributes to community building. This roundtable will ask what the individual projects awarded can tell us about future roles for arts journalists and critics as engaged participants in music scenes nationwide.
With: Douglas McLennan, Tatiana Hernandez, and Bill O’Brien
Moderator: Lara Pellegrinelli
This roundtable convenes two fields of scholarly inquiry—critical race studies and feminist theory/queer studies—to explore the following interrelated questions: How does sound construct racialized and gendered meaning and/or prompt processes of racial subjection? How might various hermeneutics of sound enrich and/or expand current ethnic and gender studies approaches to the study of racial formation? And how might we collectively forge a feminist, queer analytic for the study of racialized sound and sonic processes of racialization?
With: Kirstie Dorr, Roshanak Kheshti, and Deborah Vargas
Moderator: Kevin Fellezs
The 2007 arrest of DJ Drama for copyright infringement signaled to that the era of rap mixtapes as both in the street and online had unalterably changed. We propose to examine what has been lost—or gained—from the disappearance of physical mixtape culture, both from its attendant spaces in the city and from the popular conversation. Where does
“authority” now lie in “making” and “breaking” such artists and how has this changed how they themselves make music and how it’s consumed?
With: Zach Baron, Tom Breihan, Ryan Dombal, Sean Fennessey,
Nick Sylvester, and Jamin Warren
Moderator: Sean Fennessey
This roundtable features accomplished scholar-practitioners of hip-hop, some of whom approach this work as hip hop artists turned academics; some as academics who became artists in the process of researching hip hop; and some who experience hip-hop as part of the ongoing negotiation of their everyday lives. Discussants are asked to reflect on the virtues and potential pitfalls involved in this cultural collision of research, performance, advocacy and personal expression. In what ways do these experiences reflect the condition of urbanity itself, which gave rise to hip-hop in the first place?
With: Sujatha Fernandes, Ali Colleen Neff, Joe Schloss, and Oliver Wang
Moderator: Anthony Kwame Harrison
The fruitful relationship of jazz and “The Big Apple” stands as one of the foremost examples of a musical style benefiting from, and in turn helping to define, a supportive home. The first half of this event is a multimedia survey by Ashley Kahn of representative New York City jazz venues, from the 1920s through the 2000s; the second half is a panel discussion asking what is it about New York City and jazz that accounts for their lasting relationship, with a more contemporary focus on forums of free-flowing musical exchange and financial support for the music’s creators.
With: Legendary jazz impresario George Wein; veteran Jazz at Lincoln Center producer Billy Bank; and Jazz Standard creative director Seth Abramson
Moderator: Ashley Kahn
Whether a homesite for protest and resistance or, as Alain Locke suggests, an escape from the ‘medieval’ south, the city serves as both a muse and haven for black American cultural expression. Although cityscapes are heavily represented in African American music and popular culture, more discussion is needed about how the city is often a hegemonic space of black cultural expression. In other words, how does an urban setting dictate power and blackness in the (African) American community?
With: Regina Bradley, Fredara Hadley, Matthew Morrison, and Liana Silva
Moderator: Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey
A select group of sounds familiar only to a small group of folks within a few square miles in the Bronx of the mid-1970s became the rhythmic foundation of global pop music for the next two decades. How and why did this convergence of urban geography and music history happen? And what were the consequences?
With: Kool DJ Red Alert, Nick deKreshewo, Bill Stephney, and Brian Coleman
Moderator: Dan Charnas
How can editors balance the demands for revenue-generating pageviews and the idea of serving their local communities? Should musicians go the shock-tactic route and try to become memes in an effort to transcend their geographic standing? Is the Internet becoming its own “local scene”? The panelists heading up this roundtable are journalists from markets large and small who have had weary showdowns with Google Analytics, but we encourage all those interested in the current state of local scenes to enter the fray.
With: Reed Fischer, David Malitz, Andrea Swensson, Christopher Weingarten, and Ryan White
Moderator: Maura Johnston
