Writing Musical Lives -- John Szwed

Writing Musical Lives
John Szwed
The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall, April 13, 5:30 pm
 
This talk will focus on some of the virtues and problems of writing about the lives of musicians.  It will include a quick survey of the types and uses of life narratives by ethnomusicologists, folklorists, social scientists, and popular writers, with a short discussion of some recent innovative biographical works.  Examples will be drawn from a variety of biographies, including my books on Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, and Alan Lomax
 
John Szwed is Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, and Editor-in-Chief of the web site JazzStudiesOnline.org.  He is John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies at Yale University. His PhD is from Ohio State University, and he has done field research in Newfoundland, the Georgia Sea Islands, and Trinidad. He has taught at Swarthmore College, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania (where he was Director of the Center for Urban Ethnography and Chair of the Program in Folklore), and in 2003-04 and 2005-2007 he was Louis Armstrong Professor of Jazz Studies at Columbia University.  Szwed has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz, a book included with Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax; Some of his books include Afro-American Anthropology; After Africa, Folk Songs and Their Makers; Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography; Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra; Jazz 101; So What: The Life of Miles Davis;  Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture; Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul; and Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.  As a journalist Szwed has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Village Voice, Wire, and other publications.