“Jazz” in the Present Tense

KWAMI T. COLEMAN is an assistant professor of music at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. His research is focused on improvised and experimental music, aesthetics, and identity in postwar American music history. His forthcoming book is titled Change: Modern Jazz and the “New Thing.” Coleman is a pianist, composer, and electronic musician; his first recording as an ensemble leader, Local Music, was released in 2017.

KIMBERLY HANNON TEAL is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Arkansas. Her research addresses contemporary jazz, and she is interested in how live performance contexts contribute to musical experiences and meaning. Her 2021 book Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History is available from the University of California Press, and her writing can also be found in American Music, Jazz Perspectives, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Jazz Research Journal.

FUMI OKIJI is a researcher who looks to Black expression for alternative ways to understand the inadequacies of modern and contemporary life. Okiji explores how Black and Africana music, sound cultures, and expression, more broadly, provide the basis of a critical theory. Okiji’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, drawing from Black radical thought and expression, critical theory, sound studies, and musicology. She is the author of Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford University Press, 2018) and is currently working on a second book project, tentatively entitled Billie’s Bent Elbow: The Standard as Revolutionary Intoxication.

NATE SLOAN is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music; the coauthor, with Charlie Harding, of Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters, published by Oxford University Press; and recipient of the 2021 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Music and the Performing Arts. Nate has authored articles on George Gershwin, Cab Calloway, Harold Arlen, and Taylor Swift and an op-ed piece on the resurgence of funk for the New York Times.