Marcus Grant: A Journey Through America with Jazz

About the event

This lecture recital will use jazz, or Black American Music, as a vehicle to travel the United States moving through generations of cultural influence and social development. Since its beginning, jazz has been a tool to express the inner thoughts and feelings of its custodians. Accordingly, the greater part of our journey will illuminate the stories of Black musicians in the American South, particularly Texas and Louisiana. Following the routes of millions of Black folks during the Great Migration, we travel North by way of the Mississippi River through Kansas City and Chicago. We’ll then go east toward Philadelphia and New York City end our journey in Harlem. To accompany the lecture material, live musicians will perform songs along a timeline that itself evolves as presentation connects the lineage of jazz masters; essentially giving the listener a retaliative timeline of musical advancements.

By centering jazz and its powerful influence on culture, this presentation will shed light on the history and contributions of Black Americans and the musical traditions still alive today.

Personnel

Andrew Wilcox, piano 

Noah Campbell, sax

Brayden Beason, bass 

Marcus Grant, drums/lecturer

About the presenter

Marcus R. Grant is a professional drummer, percussionist, musicologist, and educator from West Chester, Pennsylvania. He is currently a Brown University PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology with a secondary certificate study in the Department of Africana Studies. Grant holds a BM in jazz performance from Temple University, an MM jazz performance, an MM in musicology from the University of Miami (FL), and an MA in musicology and ethnomusicology from Brown University. As a scholar, he focuses his research on 2020 Black Lives Matter protest music and hip-hop, and the intersections of musical protest and digital culture. As a musician, Grant has performed at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, NPR’s Tiny Desk, the Newport Jazz Festival, and Dizzy’s club at Jazz At Lincoln Center. He has been featured with Lalah Hathoway, Bilal, De La Soul, and is a member of the Robert Glasper Black Radio Orchestra and Derrick Hodge Color of Noize Orchestra.

This event will take place in Fleet Library.

In partnership with

PVD World Music

Cover Image: Francis Lee/Front Door of the Preservation Hall. Phier at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.