World Music Series

Preconcert Speaker

Jason Stanyekis Assistant Professor of Music at New York University and will be visiting Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University during the 2007-2008 academic year. Among his most recent publications are “Hip Hop and Black Public Spheres in Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil” (in Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean; co-authored with Sujatha Fernandes) and “Transmissions of an Interculture: Pan-African Jazz and Intercultural Improvisation” (in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue). He has also published on the global capoeira academy, intercultural free improvisation, the world music industry and contemporary electronic music. He is currently writing a book on popular music in the Brazilian diaspora, entitled Around the World Goes Around: Performing Brazilian Music and Dance in the United States and is co-editing a book on mobile media and new modalities of sonic consumption. As a teacher he gives graduate seminars and undergraduate courses on new media, music technology, sonic culture, critical theory, global hip hop, musics of the African diaspora, world music, and ethnographic method. Also active as a producer, composer, guitarist and cavaquinho player, he has a number of recordings and film soundtracks to his credit.

Dr. Stanyek is a research collaborator on the project “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice”, supported by a Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Ajay Heble of the University of Guelph School of English and Theatre Studies will lead the project. Heble:

“Improvisation is arguably the most widespread musical practice in the world and the least understood … Such forms of improvisation demand shared responsibility for participation, an ability to negotiate differences and a willingness to accept challenges of risk and contingency.

Music also plays a tremendously important role in society. By modeling forms of social organization, it can literally help us to hear the sound of change. As part of the project, researchers will investigate the ways in which improvised music in particular plays a role in shaping notions of community and new forms of social organization.

By exploring how musical improvisation opens up consideration of such vital issues as human rights, alternative community formation and transcultural understanding, we're getting at issues that are central to the challenges of diversity and social cooperation in Canada.”