The Labor of Preservation: Detroit Jazz Musicians Performing Place
Ingrid Racine

independent researcher and artist
Ann Arbor, MI

Abstract
Jazz musicians perform myriad forms of labor behind the scenes, from daily practice routines to composing music, booking gigs, managing bands, and creating social media content. In Detroit, many jazz musicians assume an additional responsibility—a labor of love—of recovering, preserving, and building upon the lineage of the city’s Black musical innovation. Drawing on participant observation at concerts across Detroit and interviews with local culture bearers, I argue that the work of preservation through performance serves to establish spatial entitlements (Johnson 2013) in a city that is rapidly changing due to corporate reinvestment and gentrification. I will demonstrate how musicians construct place and claim space on multiple levels—material, discursive, affective, and sonic—by breathing new life into the compositions of their mentors, curating festivals and concert series, calling forth ancestors, and creating new works that draw on Detroit’s rich musical legacies. This paper focuses on the work of three such Detroit culture bearers: a drummer who curates a neighborhood festival, a trombonist who organizes the monthly “Detroit Jazz Preservation” concert series, and a young trumpet player whose recent record invites listeners to reflect on Detroit’s historical black communities. As struggles for just and equitable futures in Detroit are being waged as “battles over places” (Lipsitz 1994), musicians in Detroit are on the front lines, creating crucial sites for community building and collective remembering, while signaling to newcomers that Detroit is no “blank slate.”

Biography
Ingrid Racine is a musician, cultural organizer, and music researcher based in Ann Arbor, MI. As a professional trumpet player, she has performed at jazz clubs and major music festivals across the globe, while also maintaining the glamorous lifestyle of a working musician at home in Michigan—playing hundreds of brunch gigs and weddings, and teaching trumpet lessons to tweens who refuse to practice. Ingrid is currently a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan, where she is also pursuing a certificate in community action and research. Her current research interests include sense of place and belonging in local jazz communities, jazz mentorship, jam sessions, the politics of place and space in Detroit music, and the use of applied research methods in ethnomusicology.
 

Living from America’s Music: Jazz Values under Racial Capitalism in St. Louis
Esther Viola Kurtz

Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology 
Washington University, St. Louis

Abstract
On one hand, jazz is celebrated as America’s greatest music. Black Americans created a form whose egalitarian values are considered an ideal model for democracy, and today jazz organizations find support from arts councils and wealthy patrons. On the other hand, this support fails to provide most jazz musicians with a living wage. Jazz is valued, but musicians’ lives are not. This paper explores this contradiction through an ethnographic study of jazz musicians in St. Louis, a significant but overlooked crossroads of jazz history and broader legacies of racial violence in North America. The lens of racial capitalism reveals that capitalism determines whose lives matter more or not at all. But why do musicians tolerate these conditions and work such long, unpaid hours? Observing the St. Louis jazz community since 2018, I have seen that musicians draw on knowledge cultivated in Black expressive traditions to sustain an alternative value system I call “jazz values.” Holding open jam sessions and honoring previous generations, they nurture one another and their communities, while also caring for the music and the tradition. I argue, therefore, that jazz musicians’ musicking is reproductive labor—that is, the often-unpaid work that sustains communities spiritually, intellectually, and materially. This research thus brings new meaning to the idea that jazz is “America’s music,” for the jazz economy so neatly encapsulates the inhumanity of America’s socioeconomic order. Yet by intentionally countering the compulsory forces of capital, musicians show that other ways of caring for humanity are possible.

Biography
Esther Viola Kurtz is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology in the department of music and faculty affiliate with the department of African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research explores African diasporic music and dance practices as sites where practitioners cultivate knowledge for contesting injustice and transforming their worlds. Her book, A Beautiful Fight: The Racial Politics of Capoeira in Backland Bahia (University of Michigan Press, 2025), is an ethnographic study that examines Black and white practitioners’ understandings of capoeira’s spirituality and politics and complicates notions that participation fosters cross-racial solidarity. Her new project explores how jazz musicians in St. Louis resist racial capitalism and define alternative value systems. Esther has published in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Journal of the Society for American Music, Women & Music, and Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies.

The Making of a Musical Precariat: The Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the Stratification of Community Outreach
Natalie Farrell

Ph.D. candidate
University of Chicago

Abstract
In 2011, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma launched the Citizen Musician initiative. Although Citizen Musician was more an ideology than a materially-defined project, as record-setting donations poured in, the CSO ramped up its infrastructure to meet the demand for Yo-Yo Ma-endorsed programming. In 2013, a new fellowship shifted Citizen Musician operations to a small cohort of players pulled from the CSO’s “training program,” the Civic Orchestra, allowing the CSO brand to continue high-profile community engagement efforts that were otherwise not in the budget with its flagship orchestra. Each subsequent season, 10–15 Civic Fellows have received addition training in the “artistic planning, music education, social justice, and project management” skillsets now expected of aspiring classical musicians.

This paper seeks to articulate the labor politics that shape how the Citizen Musician initiative engages with Chicago’s shift to what Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello call a “project-oriented city.” Drawing on Guy Standing’s theorization of the “precariat,” I trace the Civic’s always already unsteady relationship with the American orchestral institution’s ideas of citizenry as I argue that the Citizen Musician initiative creates not citizen, but denizen musicians. The Civic began as a nationalistic project at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century but has since become a symphonic bootcamp for a growing group of young musicians who occupy a nebulous space between student and full-fledged professional. As such, the siloing of outreach work within programs like the Civic indicates a larger class-based shift in the classical music labor force: the making of a musical precariat.

Biography
Natalie Farrell is a Ph.D. candidate in music history/theory at the University of Chicago. She has been published in Music and Letters, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Sound and Music in Games, The Palgrave Handbook of Scoring Peak TV: Music and Sound in Television’s New “Golden Age”, and The Flutist Quarterly. Her research on neoliberal philanthropy and musicians’s unions in Chicago has been funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Eastman School of Music's Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research. She is particularly passionate about trauma-informed pedagogy and has served as a senior teaching fellow at the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning. In her free time, she likes to knit and spend time with her dog (who is named after Leonard Bernstein).

Austin Music EcoSystem
Patrick Buchta

Political Advocate
CEO, Austin Texas Musicians
 

Abstract
Austin's music ecosystem has long driven a robust tourism industry and resulting corporate economy, but musicians are more challenged than ever to live and work in the "Live Music Capital of the World." Austin Texas Musicians advocacy nonprofit CEO Patrick Buchta discusses these issues and solutions, while also underlining Austin's unique position to grow as a major player in the music industry.

Biography
Patrick Buchta is an experienced political advocate, cause marketing professional, and creative leader dedicated to advancing Austin’s music, policy, and nonprofit sectors. As CEO of Austin Texas Musicians, he has built one of Central Texas’ most influential advocacy networks, uniting over 6,000 musicians to drive policy reform, strengthen economic opportunities, and preserve the cultural heartbeat of the Live Music Capital of the World.

With a decade at KVUE Media Group leading community partnerships and philanthropic initiatives—including the award-winning Texas Strong: Harvey Can’t Mess with Texas benefit concert—Patrick brings deep expertise in strategic communications, public policy, and entertainment-driven cause marketing.

A liver transplant recipient, composer, and performer, Patrick’s work embodies resilience and service. He currently serves on the City of Austin Downtown Commission (District 6) and the Texas Music Museum Board of Directors, continuing his lifelong mission to amplify creative voices and champion meaningful civic engagement."
 

Slash, Burn, Broadcast: Radiophonic Echoes of Labor, Loss, and Carrying On
Adriane Pontecorvo

Ph.D. candidate
University of Indiana

Abstract
In 2025, the U.S. federal government voted to rescind funds already allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a major source of funding for many non-commercial radio and television stations. In particular, this dealt a devastating blow to many community stations running on minimal budgets even with federal support. Many operations had little recourse but to make cuts to their small cohorts of paid staff. One such station, Bloomington, Indiana-based WFHB, lost a quarter of its budget in the CPB cuts, forcing the subsequent elimination of a quarter of its paid staff positions and raising questions of sustainability that many at the station thought were issues of the past. WFHB is staffed in large part by volunteers, often with no prior experience. This low-barrier model is crucial in maintaining open conversation with the local listening public a station serves and helps the community radio sphere to remain distinct in sonic and social character from other stations in the listening area. At the same time, recruiting and educating volunteers requires disproportionate amounts of labor on behalf of paid staff. 

In this paper, I draw on my fieldwork and practice at WFHB to examine the impact of structural disruptions in labor distribution on the station’s sonic practices. I listen in detail to its post-CPB soundscape from a point of view informed by on site ethnographic research and participation as a programmer. In doing so, I hear evidence of setbacks, resistance, victories, and difficult possible futures.
 

Biography 
Adriane Pontecorvo is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University studying and practicing community radio. Her research examines the interconnectedness of sound, space, and sociality in the U.S. community radio model and the possibilities for alternate imaginaries of local identity that emerge from within them.

All Work and No Play?: Digital Labor and Musical Assetization on YouTube
David VanderHammm

Associate Professor of Humanities
Johnson County Community College 

Research Associate with the Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place 
Memorial University Newfoundland
 

Abstract
Streaming music on YouTube is deeply paradoxical on both sides of the encounter. For viewers, it is a leisurely escape from daily life that is simultaneously a form of digital labor; they receive entertainment and even amazement while also providing attention that serves as the primary economic driver of the platform. For musicians, their uploaded content exists ambiguously between commodity and advertisement, always connected to a market but rarely simply “for sale”. This paper combines first-person phenomenology and critical voices from music and media studies to explore how creators and listeners alike experience and realize multiple forms
of value on YouTube. Although viewers position themselves as witnesses to these videos—realizing their potential and affirming their importance through their own presence—the videos (and the platforms that host them) also seek to divert attention beyond themselves. As with capital, attention must be circulated to produce value, and processes of assetization direct attention through vast networks of online media. Whereas one purchases and disposes of a commodity as one sees fit, digital creators now provide access to assets that they leverage without fully releasing ownership of them. This assetization is further accompanied by what we
might call advertification: the asset constantly promotes itself, its creators, and related assets. Streaming media is thus characterized less by the consumption of a long string of musical commodities than by the diffusion of viewers’ attention through vast networks of assets and advertisements.
 

Biography
David VanderHamm is associate professor of humanities at Johnson County Community College and research associate with the Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University Newfoundland. His research on the phenomenon of virtuosity and its many iterations in American music and media from the 20th century to the present has appeared in numerous outlets including The Public Historian and the Journal of the Society for American Music. His books include The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (2024) and Virtuosity in the Age of Electronic Media (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan).

Navigating Capitalism and Patronage: Institutions and Non-Profits in the Field of Contemporary Classical Music Production
Alec Norkey

Ph.D. candidate 
University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract 
The complexity of freelancing in Los Angeles is multifold: professional opportunities arise from a variety of classical music scenes and cultural businesses, yet are also entangled with considerations of musical tradition, ethnic diversity, economic precarity, and gendered dynamics. What dominates the allocation and distribution of opportunities and capital, however, overwhelmingly takes the form of institutions and, especially, non-profits. Therefore, understanding the landscape of contemporary classical music in Los Angeles necessitates more theoretical engagement with music production at an organizational level. Previous research on music-related institutions highlights trends of corporate sponsorship (Jones 2007) and patronage (Moore 2016); non-profits under capitalism (Sanders 2015) and the development of market-oriented brand identities (Pippen 2022); and the role and importance of board members (Harrison and Murray 2012; Ihm and Shumate 2018). Based on case studies and informed by frameworks developed by Bourdieu (1993), Riley (2020), and Wacquant (2023), I argue that music non-profits serve as mediators between capital (actual capital and forms of capital) and the multicultural landscape specific to the Los Angeles contemporary classical music field. By exploring music production at an organizational level, this research contributes to the broader understanding of how freelance musicians engage with and strategize within large, multicultural metropolitan areas.
 

Biography
Alec Norkey is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of ethnomusicology at UCLA. His current research interrogates how multicultural neoliberalism manifests in the working lives of contemporary classical composers based in Los Angeles. Themes and topics include Western art music in contemporary America, free-lance work in metropolitan music scenes, feminist anthropology, hermeneutics and aesthetics, and cultural production. Previous research interests have included issues of postcolonialism, queer theory, vocality, Japanese popular music, Japanese area studies, virtual spaces, online media, and identity. Alec received his master’s from Bowling Green State University (OH) and his bachelor’s from Hope College (MI).

Hoisted by their own petard? How Some Nonprofit Performing Arts Organizations are Rethinking their Value 
Francie Ostrower

Professor of Public Affairs and Professor of Fine Arts
The University of Texas at Austin

Abstract
This presentation explores the idea that traditional conceptions of value associated with large nonprofit arts organizations in the United States have become a double-edged sword. It draws on pertinent literature by the author and others and presents findings from the author’s recent research about how one group of arts leaders are rethinking the adequacy of traditional rationales for sustaining their organizations. This discussion is offered in the spirit of raising questions and helping to advance discussion. Data are drawn from the author’s larger study of audience-building efforts among 25 performing arts organizations who participated in The Wallace Foundations Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative. The study was supported by a grant from The Wallace Foundation. The presentation is based on Ostrower’s essays “Hoisted by their own petard? Dynamics of inclusivity and exclusivity among large nonprofit arts organizations and governance reconsidered.” (In R. Rentschler, W. Reid and C. C.  Donelli.(editors), The Routledge Companion to Governance in the Arts World. Abingdon, UK; New York, USA: Routledge 2025 and  Why Is It Important that We Continue? Some Nonprofit Arts Organizations Rethink their Value in Challenging Times. A Building Audiences for Sustainability: Research and Evaluation study brief.  

Biography
Francie Ostrower is a professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the College of Fine Arts, at The University of Texas at Austin where she is director of the Portfolio Program Arts. She is director of the Portfolio Program in Arts and Cultural Management and Entrepreneurship jointly sponsored by the College of Fine Arts and the LBJ School, and a senior fellow in the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service. She is principal investigator of the Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative: Research and Evaluation, a six-year study of audience-building activities by performing arts organizations commissioned and funded by The Wallace Foundation through grants totaling $4.3 million.

Title Forthcoming
Aleysia Whitmore

Abstract
Public policy impact studies often focus on local music programs as tools to achieve tangibles like economic growth or poverty reduction. This approach reinforces short-term instrumentalist rationales for arts funding; overlooks more lasting impacts of projects; and focuses attention on the arts as a tool for tangibles that other public investments may more effectively address (there may be better evidence for economic growth through other means, hence undermining arguments for arts investments). Instrumentalist arguments also give governing bodies space to use arts projects as an alibi of sorts—a visible/audible marker of public investment in an issue that likely requires more consideration. Yet, understanding the arts as part of our social and political worlds is important.

Drawing on US and French case studies, I aim to examine the value of community music programs as part of civil society by analyzing how programs integrate musical engagement with social/civic awareness. In so doing, I hope to reframe these programs as part of civil society and a form of civic engagement, rather than a tool for such engagement—a move that may offer productive arguments for public investments in the arts but could also help reinforce governing bodies’ vales and norms.

Biography
Aleysia is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and director of educational programming for The Spirituals Project at the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver. Her research focuses on cultural policy,  community music making, and global music industries. Her book, World Music and the Black Atlantic (Oxford University Press 2020), analyzes how musicians, industry actors, and audiences create, promote, and consume West African and Cuban musics in the world music industry. Her current book project, Sounds of a Porte Ouverte, examines how cultural policies engage with cultural diversity in southeastern France. She also conducts research on The Spirituals Project, community music making, and social justice in Denver. She holds a B.Mus. from the University of Toronto and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in ethnomusicology from Brown University.
 

We Can Fix It, Yes We Can: Neo-Philanthropy in the Knight Foundation’s “Magic of Music Initiative"
Eric Whitmer

Ph.D. candidate
University of Michigan

Abstract
Between 1994 and 2006, the John S. and James. L Knight Foundation sought to “transform” the orchestra into a “relevant” organization for individual communities. The foundation’s Magic of Music Initiative preliminarily encouraged orchestras to provide opportunities for community formation through revolutionary orchestral concerts. Yet, the initiative's final report starkly contrasts this perspective, casting the community as consumers and insisting that an orchestra must acquiesce to market demands in order to truly benefit its community. By tracking the Magic of Music Initiative’s evolving deployments of neoliberal analytics, this paper argues that the Knight Foundation’s recasting of the orchestra as a “social benefit” to its communities set the stage for orchestral management’s mass adoption of a form of Wendy Brown’s “neoliberal rationality” that I call “neo-philanthropy.”
 

While scholars such as Patricia Nickel, Megan Tompkins-Stange, and Robert Reich have identified how democratically controlled public policy can be subverted by philanthropic organizations, such theorization has yet to be applied towards music institutions. Using this scholarship, I argue musical institutions’ focus on neoliberal rationality interrupts and distracts from the duty of tax-exempt organizations to serve their community. Consequently this perpetuates the orchestra’s tendency to be a charitable solution in search of a community problem. Under neoliberal rationality the orchestra becomes a profit-seeking entity, even as it maintains its charitable tax status. Representing a chronic tension in the orchestral world about what it means to be beneficial to a community, the Magic of Music Initiative represents an unsuccessful search for benefits and an ultimate acquiescence of benefit to market logics.
 

Biography
Eric Whitmer is a third-year Ph.D. student in musicology at the University of Michigan. Their research draws from the fields of disability studies and digital studies, and seeks to understand how and why people utilize music to make the world "better" (big scare quotes intended). Eric's most recent published work appears in the Journal of Music Pedagogy on access in the music history classroom. Besides thinking and talking about music, Eric also plays music as a percussionist and carillonist and is the resident carillonist at Grosse Pointe Memorial Church.
 

The Future of Music: An Exploration of Dalcroze Eurhythmics Music and Movement for Senior Well-Being in Toronto
Di Zhang

Postdoctoral Fellow 
University of Ottawa

Abstract
As the global population ages, creative and embodied approaches to health have become increasingly vital. While pharmacological treatments offer limited relief, music-based interventions open new pathways for enhancing cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being. This study explores how a Dalcroze Eurhythmics Music and Movement program supports senior well-being in Toronto through rhythm, improvisation, and embodied interaction.

Drawing on mixed methods—including questionnaires, field observations, and interviews with participants over 65 years old who attended ten weekly sessions at NYSC Toronto (including individuals living with dementia)—the research investigates how musical movement enhances mental, mood, and motor coordination. By integrating quantitative outcomes with qualitative insights, the study bridges neuroscience and community practice, drawing on recent literature in auditory–motor synchronization and neural entrainment to explain how rhythmic engagement supports the aging brain. The paper introduces the concept of musical labor of community care, recognizing the emotional and social contributions of musicians and facilitators as essential to community well-being. Ultimately, it reimagines the future of music as a practice of collective healing, creativity, and intergenerational connection—demonstrating how the arts can play a crucial role in health and community. Keywords: music and movement, Dalcroze Eurhythmics, aging, neuroscience, community health, well-being

Biography 
Di Zhang, postdoctoral fellow, University of Ottawa; Ph.D. in music, York University; ethnomusicologist; performer; improvisation & Music Pedagogy;  Music and Health Di; is a Canadian artist-scholar whose work bridges performance, pedagogy, improvisation and music and health research. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in music from York University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Music and Health Research Institute. Her interdisciplinary research explores improvisation, embodiment, and the role of rhythmic music and movement in supporting well-being among older adults. As a performer, she is an active musician with Ontario Concerts in Care, bringing live music to long-term care homes and senior communities. She has also performed at major venues including the Toronto Music Garden, Wilfrid Laurier University, and the University of Toronto, and has toured internationally across China, Macau, the United States, and Portugal. As the Director of the Bayin Ensemble, she integrates traditional East Asian instruments with contemporary improvisation, creating innovative cross-cultural performances. Through her work, Di promotes creative pedagogy and highlights the transformative power of music in connecting the mind, body, and soul.

What Musicking Means: Reviewing and Speculating on 30 Years of Interdisciplinary Literature
Tristan Zaba

York University

Abstract
Since Christopher Small’s introduction of musicking in 1987, and its gaining greater traction in 1998 with the publication of Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening, researchers have implemented musicking as a concept across disciplines as wide-ranging as philosophy, sociology, religious studies, and cognitive science. As this has occurred, musicking has come to mean a number of different things to different authors, and often in ways conflicting with Small’s theoretical content. At the same time, others have legitimately sought to enrich musicking as it was originally theorized, such as David Borgo with his 2007 introduction of subcategories which crucially clarified Small’s confusing use of similar verbiage to describe multiple phenomena and incorporate further-flung networks of engagement.

Through a detailed review of the vast interdisciplinary literature pertaining to musicking in existence today, I highlight a number of important trends relating to the term’s divergent meanings, reaffirm the conceptual core of Small’s theory, and summarize several important and legitimate developments to musicking which have occurred since 1998. Furthermore, I finish by outlining what my theoretical findings may imply about the vastness of the creative enterprise; the rationale of working outside, between, or within numerous different disciplines and subjects; and the unity which may be found between hugely variable artistic practices.  
 

Biography 
Tristan Zaba is a musicologist, composer, performer, and production worker in the Ph.D. programme at York University. He holds degrees in composition from the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba. Tristan’s work has been published in The Lovecraft Annual and his compositions have been heard throughout North America and Europe.

Centering Compassion and Social Health in Campus-Community Partnerships
Stefan Fiol

University of Cincinnati

Abstract
As community engagement and service learning have become buzzwords in neoliberal universities, and music is integrated into expanding campus-community partnerships, there is a risk that musical labor supports primarily transactional, temporary, and self-serving goals rather than sustainable, equitable, and growth-oriented ones. Drawing from experiences leading two programs at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, this presentation asks how we might center compassion and social health in campus-community partnerships. In the Dementia and the Arts program, student musicians are matched with medical students and individuals experiencing neurodegenerative diseases for weekly small-group sessions; as facilitators, the students confront ableist privilege while decentering presentational performance in favor of active listening, adaptation, and co-creation. In the Listening to Gentrification program, student musicians mentor youth and offer an after-school music program while being mentored by community ambassadors in a historically Black neighborhood experiencing multiple crises in public education, housing, health, and livelihood. This work requires musicians to become aware of their habituated ways of listening and to tune into the systemic harms and healing-centered engagement. Rather than seeking to ‘fix’ or ‘help’ our community partners, students examine their own embodied conditioning with a goal of expanding their own capacity for adaptation, compassion and accountability. The goal for both music students and community participants is to co-create learning rooted in healing-centered engagement and care, and to consider sound and silence as generating multiple and often competing ethical claims on bodies and spaces.

Biography 
Stefan Fiol is professor of ethnomusicology and affiliated faculty in anthropology and Asian studies at the University of Cincinnati. His monograph Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media and Social Mobility (University of Illinois Press, 2017) examined the role of music, dance, ritual practice, media and the histories of commercial and folkloric cultural representation in the Uttarakhand Himalayas and North India. His co-edited volume Music Making Community (University of Illinois, 2024), explores the unique and tangible ways in which musical practice actively contributes to the making (and sometimes the unmaking) of community. Professor Fiol directs two service learning courses for students at the College-Conservatory of Music: Listening to Gentrification, in which student musicians mentor youth while being mentored by community ambassadors in a historically Black neighborhood experiencing multiple crises in public education, housing, health, and livelihood; and Dementia and the Arts, which pairs music and medical students with individuals experiencing neurodegeneration in order to explore the role of music and mindfulness in stimulating memory, cognitive function, and experiences of awe and flow.

Jamming At the Hall: Black Musicking Community in Toronto from 1940-1960
Keisha Bell 

Ph.D. candidate
York University

Abstract 
Established in 1921, the Toronto chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was a community hub for Black West Indian migrants. After a decade of saving, the organization purchased a building in the city’s Kensington Market neighbourhood in 1928. Music was a central part of community life. Dances, church services, recitals, and the UNIA choir practices and performances were part of the weekly programming. During the 1930s and 40s Black youth had limited opportunities to enjoy music and social dancing. Racial discrimination prohibited them from restaurants and clubs, so the UNIA became an important site for people to enjoy secular music. As Ontario liquor laws began loosening and the city’s first cocktail bar opened in 1947, the demand for musicians increased, and opportunities for Black musicians expanded. In the early 1950s, faced with declining UNIA membership, some of the organization’s leaders began hosting racially integrated monthly jazz jam sessions. Using archival records, photographs, oral histories, and textual analysis, this paper will argue that the hidden labour of the Black musicking community at the UNIA during these decades was a linchpin in the emergent jazz scene in Toronto. 

Biography
Keisha Bell (she/her) is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in York University’s School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She is a jazz pianist and composer whose research interests range from BAM to Jamaican popular music. She has published work in MUSICultures and York University’s graduate student-run IYARIC journals.

’Knowing the Work You Want Your Work To Do:’ Why Music Matters Now
George Lipstiz

Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract
This paper explore the dangers, obligations, and opportunities attendant to making and studying music at this moment in history. In a world suffused with hate, hurt, fear, calculated cruelty, and organized injustice, music making may seem like a personal indulgence and a luxury that aggrieved communities cannot afford. I argue, however, that music can promote skills and dispositions vital for the self-defense, self-definition, and self-determination of aggrieved individuals and groups. Community based music making (and music based community making) deepen individual and collective capacities for accompaniment, attentiveness, readiness, and willingness, for perceiving possibilities and for bringing new worlds into being. 

Biography
George Lipsitz is Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  His books addressing music topics include Time Passages, Dangerous Crossroads, Footsteps in the Dark, Midnight at the Barrelhouse, The Fierce Urgency of Now (with Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble), and Insubordinate Spaces (with Barbara Tomlinson). He has two books scheduled for publication in 2026: Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads and Puentes Sonoros: Three Moments of Mexican Music in Los Angeles. Lipsitz edits the Insubordinate Spaces book series at Temple University Press and co-edits the American Crossroads series at the University of California Press. He was awarded the American Studies Association’s Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship and that organization’s Bode-Pearson Prize for career distinction.

About the Panel

Prosper XO is an Austin-based, artist-first ethical technology company and cultural policy initiative focused on building sustainable infrastructure for musicians and creative workers. Drawing on lived artist experience, community organizing, and research on musical labor, Prosper XO explores how culture functions as both labor and public good, and how artists’ contributions to communities, cities, and economies can be more equitably recognized, measured, and supported. This session brings together scholars, musicians, and organizers to connect academic research on musical labor with applied, artist-led approaches to data ownership, community participation, and cultural sustainability.

Moderator 
Lauren Bruno
Founder & CEO, Prosper XO
Bruno is a Lifelong artist, organizer, and CEO & founder of Prosper XO, working at the intersection of music, advocacy, and ethical technology to build sustainable systems for artists.

Panelists
Terrany Johnson
Grammy-nominated Artist & Producer
Johnson is an Austin-based artist, cultural worker, and community leader whose work centers community building, creative labor, and the lived realities of musicians navigating the gig economy. His perspective bridges artistic practice and grassroots cultural leadership.

Kyle Evans
Co-Founder, Dadalab 
Lecturer, The University of Texas at Austin
Evans is a musician, educator, and co-founder of Dadalab, a long-running Austin-based artist collective and experimental music venue. His work explores experimental music, community-based art practices, and alternative cultural economies.

Kay Cote
Founder, Amplify EDM
Cote is an artist advocate and organizer working at the intersection of electronic music, education, and equity, her work focuses on amplifying underrepresented voices in dance music and building more inclusive, sustainable pathways for artists and cultural workers.

Nagavalli Medicharla (she/her) 
Singer, Composer, & Promoter
Chair of the Austin Music Commission Mayor’s Appointee to the Arts Commission  
Board Chair, EQ Austin 
Nagavalli brings a strong background in technology management from her work at Dell and Visa. Her work bridges music, civic leadership, and technology, with a focus on equitable cultural policy, artist advocacy, and sustainable creative ecosystems.

Gabriel Phoenix
Chief Product & Technology Officer, Prosper XO 
Phoenix is a product and systems leader working at the intersection of technology, creativity, and social impact. As CPO/CTO of Prosper XO, he helps architect artist-first, ethical technology infrastructure rooted in transparency, care, and long-term sustainability. He is also a co-founder & CTO of Combat Counselors, bringing deep experience in scalable systems, mission-driven product design, and technology for public good.

About the Roundtable

Collin-Monks
Lauren & Ryan Gould-Jazz jams
Laura Camacho
Eileen Bristol-Sahara Lounge w/ Sylla
Paul Klemperer
Harold Wilson

Live music is vital to the city of Austin: the creative sector drives the local economy, draws visitors far and wide, and contributes to a civic character in which music, and music makers themselves, continue to be indelible to city life. Key to this unique arts ecosystem are local producers—independent venue owners, innovators, and arts advocates who labor to make meaningful public engagement with live music a reality in Austin. In this roundtable, we will hear directly from local producers themselves to learn what are the stakes, day-to-day hurdles, and possibilities of community musicking in Austin. 

Robin Moore & Charles Carson

Robin Moore Charles Carson provide an overview of the Support Austin Musicians project and the concerns of local artists, in dialogue with Lauren Bruno, Pat Buchta, and others. Briggs Jackson will add to the conversation with discussion of music revitalization efforts discussed at a recent Music Cities conference.