Symposium Participants
Charlie Apicella
Moderator, opening convocation
Autophysiopsychic Millenium
Featured ensemble, Saturday evening concert
Blair Big Band
Friday Recital performers
Composed entirely of undergraduate musicians, and with a style and swagger all its own, Vanderbilt University's Blair Big Band has become one of the premiere collegiate jazz ensembles in the country. With a diverse repertoire that includes classic big band standards, modern jazz compositions, and original works by its member, the group's powerful and dynamic sound continues to generate critical acclaim and industry accolades.
The Big Band has flourished under the direction of Ryan Middagh, Director of Jazz Studies at the Blair School. Middagh is an innovative educator, composer, arranger, saxophonist, band leader, and clinician, who has traveled the globe sharing his unique blend of talents and musical influences with audiences and music students. His leadership has helped to foster a culture of excellence and musical innovation within the band, inspiring its members to push the boundaries of jazz and explore new creative directions.
Molly Barth
Friday Recital performer
Molly Barth is constantly in motion. This Grammy Award-winning flutist, professor and clinician moves effortlessly from concert hall to teaching studio to rehearsal room to orchestral section. Molly needs fuel for this fire. Molly is Associate Flute Professor at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, and Molly guides her students to become comprehensive flutists: skilled, flexible, bold musicians, able to think critically and speak to audiences. Molly took her inspiration primarily from her stellar teachers at Oberlin, the Cincinnati Conservatory, and Northwestern.
Jeff Coffin
Friday Recital Performer, Masterclass Clinician
Jeff Coffin is a saxophonist and composer who has earned international acclaim for his work with Dave Matthews Band and Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, as well as his 23+ solo projects. Coffin’s approach to the saxophone is marked by a fearless sense of exploration, fusing elements of jazz, funk, world music, and rock into a style that is uniquely his own.
A 3x Grammy Award winner, Coffin has toured the world, captivating audiences with his powerful, emotive playing. In addition to his work as a performer, Coffin is deeply committed to music education, teaching at Vanderbilt University and presenting well over 300 workshops and clinics around the globe. He is also the founder of the independent record label Ear Up Records and co-founder of AfricaNashville - which promotes cross cultural relationships between celebrated African and American artists in Nashville, TN. Coffin’s passion for sharing knowledge has made him a respected mentor to aspiring musicians everywhere.
On October 19, 2024, Dave Matthews Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - Jeff is one of a handful musicians to attain this incredible musical honor!
Jeff is a Yamaha Performing Artist & Clinician, a Boston Sax Shop Ambassador, & a JodyJazz Artist.
Angel Bat Dawid
APPM, Masterclass Clinician
Angel Bat Dawid is a Black American composer, clarinetist, pianist, bandleader, educator, DJ, recording artist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. Dawid’s acclaimed debut album The Oracle (2019) offers a profound exploration of contemporary Black life and earned accolades from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. She has composed significant works including Requiem for Jazz and Peace: A Suite for Yoko Ono’s Sky Landing Installation. As an educator, Dawid teaches her “Great Black Music” course at Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center through Old Town School of Folk. Dawid has performed at prestigious venues such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, and Carnegie Hall, as well as in festivals across Europe and Japan. She served as the 2024 Artist in Residence at Northwestern University’s Black Arts Consortium.
Maxine Gordon
Oral interview series/Ralph Jones interview
Maxine Gordon is an arts advocate, jazz historian, archivist, scholar, manager and producer. She played a pivotal role in managing the career of her husband, saxophonist Dexter Gordon, including producing his albums and contributing to his acclaimed performance in Round Midnight. Following his death, Gordon focused on historical preservation, culminating in her award-winning biography Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon. A tireless advocate for jazz and its cultural significance, she has produced concerts at major venues, contributed to archives including the Library of Congress, and lectured internationally. Her current research project, "Quartette: Stories from the Lives of Four Women Jazz Musicians", continues her commitment to uncovering underrepresented voices in jazz.
Dr. Marc Hannaford
Presenter, scholarly paper
Dr. Marc Hannaford is a music theorist whose interests lie at the intersection of jazz and improvisation, identity (especially race, gender, and disability), performance, and embodiment. Described by Jason Moran as a pianist who has “taken full control of the music histories that interest him: from Messiaen to Earl Hines…with a new sound that only comes from within him.” Hannaford has established himself in the New York jazz and improvised music scene since his arrival from Australia in 2013. He has performed and recorded with improvised music luminaries such as Tim Berne, Tom Rainey, Mark Helias, Tony Malaby, Jen Shyu, and Ellery Eskelin. His most recent release was Can You See with Two Sets of Eyes? with bassist Simon Jermyn and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi.
Jared Hauser
Friday Recital Performer
Jared Hauser is an acclaimed oboist, recording artist, and educator. A faculty member at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music since 2008, he performs with the Blair Woodwind Quintet, the Montrose Duo, and serves as principal oboe with the Nashville Opera and Music City Baroque. His career includes previous posts with the Orlando Philharmonic and Palm Beach Opera, and performances with symphony orchestras of Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, and Nashville. Hauser has released over a dozen solo and chamber recordings on labels including Naxos and BGR, with broadcasts on NPR, BBC, and CBC. Equally dedicated to historical performance and contemporary music, he regularly premieres new works and explores electronic media and improvisation, extending the oboe’s role into jazz and world music.
Ra Kalam Bob Moses
Friday Recital Performer
Drummer, composer, artist, poet, dancer, visionary, nature mystic: Ra Kalam Bob Moses’ life has been a continuous quest for vision, spirit, compassion, growth, and mastery in a multiplicity of art forms. He has composed, arranged and produced countless albums for himself and others, many of which have been hailed by critics worldwide. Ra Kalam Bob Moses has presented workshops around the globe and is a former professor at New England Conservatory in Boston, MA.
Alhena Katsof
Breakout Session Chair
Alhena Katsof is a curator, educator, and writer whose practice encompasses forms of performance, visual art, and transdisciplinary scholarship. Her projects have been presented at institutions including MoMA PS1, White Columns, and PARTICIPANT INC. Among the exhibitions and performances that Katsof has curated is Towards the Unknown, a traveling exhibition of drawings, scores, and graphic notations by Yusef Lateef. A former participant of De Appel's Curatorial Programme, Katsof teaches at Eugene Lang College, The New School and holds degrees from Hampshire College, Glasgow School of Art, and New York University where she is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies.
Ayesha Lateef
Panelist, opening convocation
As a proud beneficiary of New York City public school education, P.S. 55 through Queens College, Ayesha equally stands with dignity having been an entrepreneur, licensed registered nurse in two states, fine arts/quality crafts gallery owner, and clothing and textile maker. She has used poetry as a healing mechanism and prose as statements of critique and creativity.
Her thesis, No Rain No Rainbows - Making Change in the Lives of Those Affected by Autism reflects her highest academic achievement and simultaneously addresses generational neuro-diversity in her family. Ayesha lived in Massachusetts with her husband Yusef Lateef until his passing. She was pivotal in Vanderbilt University’s acquisition of the Yusef Lateef Collection and remains devoted to furthering his gifted presence as a polymath who spanned many decades, locales and hearts.
Dr. Mark Lomanno
Presenter, Scholarly Paper
Dr. Mark Lomanno is an ethnomusicologist, jazz historian, and pianist who integrates performance, scholarship, and community education, all focused on improvisation, intercultural collaboration, and environmental and social justice. Lomanno has published widely, co-edited The Improviser’s Classroom (Temple University Press, 2024), and has a forthcoming monograph on global jazz. He has been awarded several fellowships and grants for his ongoing archival, ethnographic, and performance work in the Canary Islands. Lomanno currently serves on the editorial board of Jazz Perspectives, writes for Jazz Times and his own website The Rhythm of Study, and teaches at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music.
LuFuki
APPM, Breakout session chair, masterclass clinician
LuFuki Ismaeel Dhul-Qarnayn is a composer, organizer, guitarist, historian, and cultural curator in Detroit who views music as a spiritual practice that brings about healing and unity and whose art practice centers around Black ancestral legacy. He formed the collective, LuFuki and Divine Providence and has released four albums since: Inner Horizons, Elephants and Mountains, First Light, and Love&Light. LuFuki is currently working on several projects including Autophysiopsychic Millennium, a creative research-music collective to explore and experiment with the philosophy and music methodology of the great Dr. Yusef Lateef, which was featured at Carnegie Hall and Cranbrook, and Detroit Red, a sonic interpretation of the odyssey of Malcolm X through his love for Jazz. He is a published author, translator, and researcher on various aspects of Islamic thought.
Alex Marcelo
Panelist, opening convocation
Alexis Marcelo is a New York City-based pianist and composer known for his genre-defying approach rooted in deep listening and improvisation. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he studied composition and improvisation under Dr. Yusef Lateef, whose autophysiopsychic concept profoundly shapes Marcelo’s music. He has performed across the U.S. and Europe with artists such as James Brandon Lewis, Craig Harris, David Murray, GZA, Abiodun Oyewole, and Malcolm Mooney. His recent projects include the 2024 release Nananom Xu (with JD Parran and Daniel Carter), the hip-hop/improv duo Lexiglass, and an upcoming solo album on Intakt Records.
Mike Monford
APPM
Mike Monford is a dynamic jazz musician, saxophonist, composer, jazz historian, and executive producer based in Detroit, Michigan dedicated to practicing, performing, and experimenting with the universal language of music. Trained under legends Jackie McLean and Teddy Harris Jr., Monford honed his craft in both Detroit and New York, performing with artists such as Marc Cary, Bill Lee, and Rayse Biggs. A former DJ with roots in hip-hop, he brings a dynamic, genre-fluid sensibility to his music. His 2012 debut album Perseverance marked his emergence as a bandleader, followed by international tours and collaborations with Les Nubians and the Harlem Sessions. In 2022, he performed at Carnegie Hall with the Autophysiopsychic Millennium. Monford continues to perform, teach, and compose, with his latest album The Cloth I’m Cut From reflecting three decades of musical evolution.
Dr. Ingrid Monson
Presenter, scholarly paper
Dr. Ingrid Monson is a renowned music scholar, former Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard University, and past Chair of its Department of Music. A specialist in jazz, African diasporic music, and improvisation, she is the author of several award-winning books, including Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa and Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Her scholarly work spans musicology, ethnomusicology, and critical theory, with articles in leading journals such as Critical Inquiry and Ethnomusicology. A Guggenheim and Radcliffe Institute Fellow, Monson is currently writing Kenedougou Visions, a book on Malian balafonist Neba Solo. She began her musical career as a trumpeter and also plays piano and Senufo balafon.
Dr. Anthony Reed
Breakout Session Chair
Anthony Reed is Professor of English and The Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. He has published widely on poetry, poetics, and experimental aesthetics in the African diaspora. Among his works are the monographs Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), which won the 2014 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture, and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2021). He recently edited Langston Hughes in Context with Vera Kutzinski (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently working on two research projects: one on Black lyric theory and a related project that looks to literature, film, and popular music to develop an account of diaspora from below amid the waning influence of Pan-Africanism and Communism in and beyond the former Third World.
Sonny Rollins
Panelist, opening convocation
Sonny Rollins, born Theodore Walter Rollins in 1930, is an iconic American jazz saxophonist widely regarded as one of the most influential tenor saxophonists in the history of the genre. Emerging in the 1950s alongside legends like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach, Rollins quickly gained acclaim for his powerful tone, inventive improvisation, and rhythmic ingenuity. His landmark albums—including Saxophone Colossus (1956), Tenor Madness (with John Coltrane), and The Bridge (1962)—demonstrate his technical brilliance and deep engagement with both bebop and hard bop. Known for his artistic discipline, Rollins famously took sabbaticals from public performance to refine his craft, including practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City. In 2010, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Brian Utley
Friday Recital performer
Dr. Brian Utley is Principal Senior Lecturer in Saxophone and Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. He is a regular recitalist at regional and national conferences of the North American Saxophone Alliance, and has performed at multiple World Saxophone Congresses, U.S. Navy Band International Saxophone Symposia, and new music festivals. As an advocate of new music, he has commissioned and premiered works by noted composers including David Froom, Leonard Mark Lewis, Stephen Lias, Lidiuno Pitombeira, and William Price. Utley is also a regular guest artist and clinician at universities and secondary schools throughout the country, serves frequently as an adjudicator for local, state, and regional competitions, and served as a faculty member of the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts for five years.