David Ake

Now that Wynton Marsalis no longer draws the level of admiration—or ire—from the world’s jazz participants that he once did, it is worth reassessing the role Marsalis and other so-called neo-traditionalists played in shaping how jazz has been defined, created, taught, and valued in recent decades. Toward that end, this talk focuses on matters of historiography, cultural hierarchy, gender, and ethnic and national identity as they affect and are affected by understandings of jazz. By highlighting the neo-traditionalists’ take on these key areas we can gain a better perspective on which of their formerly dominant jazz narratives are most likely to persist and which will likely change or vanish as we head further into what we might now call the post neo-traditional era.
David Ake, Professor and Chair in the Department of Musicology at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, is an award-winning scholar and educator in the fields of jazz and popular music. His publications include the books Jazz Cultures; Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop; and the collection Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries (co-edited with Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Daniel Goldmark), all for the University of California Press. Also active as a jazz pianist and composer, his most recent recordings as a leader are Bridges, which appeared on multiple Best-of-2013 lists, and Lake Effect (2015), both for the Posi-Tone label.