Department of Music

Fumi Okiji's colloquium entitled "Rethinking the Jazz Standard" will take place Friday, November 8 at 3:30pm in Old Cabell 107. This event is free and open to the public.

There is a tendency within certain strains of jazz scholarship and commentary, to cordon off the standard as a barely tolerated anachronistic feature. The standard is not always disowned outright, and indeed is often appreciated as having been a necessary adjuvant for musicians of an earlier stage, yet it is often judged as, ultimately, inessential—particularly to free and experimental approaches. Okiji’s talk will challenge this position. It will offer an alternative understanding of the standard, beyond Tin Pan Alley boilerplate towards a deeper appreciation of the standard as a crucial socio-aesthetic facet of jazz, an aspect that continues to have a central role, even in work that eschews playing changes—show-tune or original.

Fumi Okiji is an assistant professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies whose work crosses music and critical theory, black feminist thought, and performance studies. Her research and teaching looks to black music for ways to understand modern and contemporary life, exploring the potential such representation holds for social criticism. Okiji’s book Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited was recently published by Stanford University Press.

Old Cabell Hall is located on the south end of UVA's historic lawn, directly opposite the Rotunda. Parking is available in the Central Grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Road, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner. 

Please call the Music Department at 434.924.3052 for more information. 

To all the speakers in the colloquium series visit http://music.virginia.edu/colloquia

All programs are subject to change.