Writing about jazz often emphasizes urbanity and focuses on a geographically bounded scene. This can obscure what people do with jazz to affirm community across distances, in the context of Black suburbanization. Likewise, the construction of jazz as an art music oriented around a canonical past does not allow a full understanding of what musicians do with commercial culture to construct community in the present. In this article, I present the notion of sonic suburbanization to foreground the ways Black people exert agency through musicking, claiming suburban space and affirming community across urban and suburban lines. This is live performance that is “both/and”: Both suburban and urban; both community and commercial. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cleveland, this research focuses on the ways live smooth jazz performers invoke multiple musical histories while congregating heterogeneous Black identities across boundaries. To demonstrate the crossovers of live smooth jazz, I begin by outlining the idea of sonic suburbanization. I then note the proximity of Black music genres in a context of racial segregation. Despite suburbanization's role in dislocating Black geographic cohesion, live musical performance continues to affirm a crossover Black community through interposing an array of sensibilities. Finally, I point to the conceptual schemas of musicians in the scene who foreground continuity with jazz, pop, and gospel. Live smooth jazz performers take pride in rhetorical effectiveness and genre versatility as part of connecting to the audience. Although some scholars attend to smooth jazz outside “real jazz,” musicians in the scene view smooth jazz as real jazz.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the intensification of IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, and People of Color) activism during this time have prompted many in the classical music industry to pause and reflect on the ways in which we perpetuate colonialism and racism in our leadership and governance structures, programming, casting practices, performance practices, and treatment of IBPOC artists. This article focuses on Messiah/Complex (2020) by Toronto's Against the Grain Theatre (AtG). All soloists were Indigenous or people of color. Based on conversations with several Indigenous artists involved in this project, this article argues that we need to move from thinking about how to include more Indigenous artists to thinking about how we can create space for Indigenous sovereignty. That is going to involve giving over decision-making power to Indigenous artists at all levels. Messiah/Complex could have made a more decisive move toward sovereignty if it had begun with conversations with IBPOC artists about what they want to say at this moment. The performers should have been able to decide not only what language to perform in but also whether they want to perform Handel's music at all, who they want to collaborate with, and how they want to work together.

Muhal Richard Abrams's ground-breaking work as a composer, improviser, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is far reaching and multifaceted. Russian composer, theorist, and polymath Joseph Schillinger appears repeatedly in discussions of Abrams and the AACM, suggesting that music theory played a generative role in Abrams's creative practice and pedagogy. This article focuses on Abrams's engagement with The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. It theorizes Abrams's incorporation of Schillinger's work into his broader creative pallette, analyzes Abrams's compositional application of Schillinger's theory, and suggests conceptual resonances between Abrams's creative practice and the text. Ultimately, this article suggests a larger network of African American theorists, which I conceptualize as “fugitive music theory.”

Joni Mitchell's life was completely transformed in 1965–67: She became pregnant, was abandoned by the child's father, gave birth to her daughter, placed her baby for adoption, married and subsequently divorced Chuck Mitchell, and moved between several cities in North America. In this article, I center this often overlooked period of Joni's life—which she herself has referred to as “this three-year period of childhood's end”—and move away from the usual focus on her studio albums. I contextualize this discussion within 1960s counterculture and examine how these turbulent changes are refracted through her music making, specifically through a selection of early recordings of her song “Urge for Going.” In so doing, I seek alternatives to the prevalent and influential theories of musical persona in popular music studies, arguing instead for the merits of an approach which strives for an intellectual disposition of care.