Notes from the Field

Christopher Kirkley is an archivist, artist, curator, and occasional DJ who runs the project Sahel Sounds.

For the past three months, I’ve been in Delhi undertaking a research project on live Indian music. While some research – notably that of Peter Kvetko and Peter Manuel – has discussed the formally distributed Indipop, and other research has occurred on Sufi rock and the music of Bollywood, the live scene has remained relatively academically undisturbed.

To celebrate the release of Volume 18, Ethnomusicology Review is teaming up with the International Association for the Study of Popular Music for a co-edited series on the broad topic of Ethnomusicology and Popular Music.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Ethnomusicology Review Volume 18, we're teaming up with the International Association for the Study of Popular Music for a series on Ethnomusicology and Popular Music.

In this installment of Space is the Place, trombonist and composer Brian Allen, who grew up in Texas and now lives in Mexico City, reflects on why he has chosen the Mexican capital as his artistic home base, and how the city has changed his outlook on life and music-making.

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It’s approaching 2 AM on a Wednesday night in late July, and for the first time in an hour several of the members of the TBC Brass Band are seated. The band continues to play as members move into seats or climb atop tables towards the exit of Celebration Hall, with audience members dancing along behind them.

During the 2013 spring quarter at UCLA, I decided to conduct field research on the “stepping” tradition amongst the historically black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) for my final project in a field and laboratory methods course.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from a longer essay on improvised music spaces in Egypt that will be published in October as part of the Sounding Board's forthcoming collaboration with IASPM-US.

“There's trombone playing in all parts of the world, but the heart of all that is here at Trombonanza.” –trombonist Paul Compton

Jazz manouche, also known as Gypsy jazz, is a genre rooted in the 1930s-40s recordings of guitarist Django Reinhardt and typically features guitar-centric swing tunes.  Over the past
 three decades, jazz manouche has become a distinctive cultural practice within certain communities of French Manouches (a subgroup of Romani, or “Gypsy” people), especially in Alsace.