Jazz Cultures in Motion, Volume 1

Marc T. Gaspard Bolin is a performer-scholar with a nearly three-decade career as a professional musician, arranger, and educator. He teaches jazz and ethnomusicology in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Jazz and the Political Imagination in the Department of African American Studies; and world music, ethnomusicology, and tuba/euphonium at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has collaborated with leading jazz artists such as Kamasi Washington and Kenny Burrell and genre-crossing performers including Big Sean, Evanescence, John Legend, and Kanye West. His realization of Duke Ellington's unfinished opera Queenie Pie was originally commissioned by the Oakland Opera Theater and has since been staged by opera companies in Austin, Long Beach, and Chicago. His community-based work, which includes festival archiving, youth ensemble leadership, and collaborative ethnographic film, underscores a sustained commitment to cultural memory, public engagement, and intergenerational storytelling. His current research centers on overlooked continuities in New Orleans jazz traditions.

Ray Briggs is Professor of Music and Assistant Director of Jazz Studies for the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches courses in jazz history and ethnomusicology. With research interests in the regional study of jazz and the role of place in Black musical expression, Ray is completing a monograph on the history of jazz in Memphis. He remains active as a saxophonist and has performed with the Clayton/Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, Benny Green, Stefon Harris, and Roy Hargrove. He served as Director of the Quincy Jones Jazz Camp for several years, mentoring young musicians through immersive performance-based education. He is also co-founder of FEED (Focus on Education, Equity, and Diversity), a forum dedicated to social justice, community engagement, and inclusion in music education. In both scholarship and practice, Ray bridges performance, pedagogy, and cultural history to uplift community-rooted jazz traditions.

Kira Dralle is a jazz and popular music scholar whose work bridges academic and public musicology. She serves as Co-Editor in Chief of Jazz Perspectives and was recently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has held positions at Indexical, an experimental music venue in Santa Cruz, and was a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz, where she worked in the jazz archives of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn. Dralle has also curated and written for public-facing events, including the Steirischer Herbst Festival, the Black Sound Symposium, and the Northern California Performance Platform. Her research, at the intersection of historical ethnomusicology, visual culture, and political philosophy, examines archival silence around Black jazz musicians in the Third Reich and Vichy France and its effects on transatlantic jazz historiography. She also reconsiders the legacy of Joséphine Baker alongside unnamed Black jazz instrumentalists in European and Caribbean archives. Her writing appears in Jazz & Culture, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, Jazz Research News, Notes, and the Journal of Jazz Research.