Each year, twice a year, musicians flock to the Catskill Mountain hamlet of East Durham, New York, transforming this otherwise sleepy town into a bustling site of music, dancing, and parties. East Durham is home to multiple Irish cultural festivals a year, but two stand out for their focus on Irish traditional music: the Catskills Irish Arts Week and the Northeast Tionól. These festivals, affectionately referred to collectively as “the Catskills,” are curious in their allure. Sprawled across a three-mile stretch of rural highway, most festival facilities are rundown and date to the heyday of the region in the first half of the twentieth century, when East Durham was an enclave of Irish American resort vacationers. Dotting the side of the road are more vacant and dilapidated buildings than there are in use. Yet, musicians attend each year with fervor, citing both the difficulties of the location and its pleasurable potentials as core to the “Catskills” experience. Drawing upon ethnographic observations and interviews, I examine this affective ambivalence and how it is structured by sensory qualities unique to the physical geography and infrastructure of the Catskill Mountains. Though these sensory experiences are characterized with a negative valence, they generate positive musical experiences, creative production, and deep sociality. I argue that this affective transformation occurs because the sensational features of the Catskills provoke reflexive encounters among musicians that resonate with and amplify values central to Irish traditional music making.

In 1905, the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor published his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, a set of character pieces that includes arrangements of sixteen African American spirituals for piano solo. Despite this music's lasting popularity, scholars have done little to contextualize Coleridge-Taylor's statement that he wished to create a Black parallel to Brahms's Hungarian Dances or Dvořák's Slavonic Dances; most see the pieces as reflecting the influence of Dvořák. Yet these character pieces diverge from both Dvořák's and Brahms's precedent by including source citations with both melodies and lyrics. Coleridge-Taylor's compositional approach and his use of citations is much closer to Grieg and Stanford—two other role models whom scholars have regularly overlooked. The citations also rebalance the interpretative framework of the character piece as a genre, and, like W. E. B. Du Bois's use of spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk, can support several explanations. On one hand, they provide hidden texts for these instrumental pieces and provide a first line of defense against intentional (and bigoted) misunderstandings of the music. On the other hand, they also act as reference points for readers who want to learn more about the African American spiritual. Coleridge-Taylor's concern with cultural authenticity undoubtedly resulted from his close interactions with American spiritual singers, such as Frederick J. Loudin and Harry T. Burleigh. In this sense, the Negro Melodies served as Coleridge-Taylor's intervention in ongoing debates among Black Americans about the value and legacy of the spiritual.

In 2018, Barbra Streisand released her 36th studio recording, Walls. The album's songs, a mixture of originals and covers, focus on the cruelty of President Donald Trump. In orchestrating and celebrating a particular set of positive feelings—love, hope, and longing—Walls, like much of Streisand's work, is deeply sentimental. Understanding our current political crises, Walls asserts, is more an act of sympathy than intellect; we must “feel the tears” that have been cried. Using Walls as the focus, this essay explores the ways Streisand's sentimentality has always been intertwined with her political activism. This fusion is not unique to Streisand, and my essay here is intended to show how deeply rooted the connection between sentimentality and politics has been in US American cultural history. From its development as an independent philosophical idea in the eighteenth century, through its nineteenth century popularization via women-authored novels, sentimentality has always had a political valence as well as a racialized character. I trace this sentimental–political aesthetic, what Jennifer Williamson, Jennifer Larson, and Ashley Reed call the “sentimental mode,” through two key recordings from the 1960s and 1970s: “People” and “Evergreen.” I then turn to Walls, which uses music to instruct listeners in the affective identification with the suffering of others. However, in its focus on racial others—such as immigrants from the global South—Walls also brings with it the problematic racial legacy of sentimental politics where genuine concern for the downtrodden was mixed with essentialist ideas of racial identity and hierarchy.

Leonard Feather (1914−1994) was one of the first (and only) prominent jazz critics to recognize gender discrimination within jazz and attempt to redress the issue. But even by the 1950s, Feather grew frustrated with his inability to effect meaningful change for women musicians. He could not understand why women like Beryl Booker, Melba Liston, Vi Redd, and others did not receive more attention, even after he arranged tours and produced record dates for them (Feather 1987). The privileged position he held within the music industry—a position he had cultivated and leveraged in support of other musicians he felt had been unfairly discriminated against—ultimately seemed to do little for many of the women he championed. Women jazz masters remain few and far between.

What does it mean to be a jazz master, and who determines modes of mastery? In this article, I examine some of the musicians for whom he advocated and how he advocated for them, including columns he authored, albums he produced, and Blindfold Tests he administered. To conclude, I follow Feather into the 1990s to examine how he dealt with who was to blame for jazz’s gender discrimination. In doing so, I reveal how jazz patriarchy maintained dominance over one of jazz’s most prominent decision-makers. I demonstrate how, despite his intentions, Feather’s embeddedness and investment in jazz patriarchy (in its ideological and commercial systems) resulted in a gender ignorant failure to critique the systems of mastery at the root of his connoisseurship.

Almost 100 years ago, Fats Waller recorded some of the most unique songs of his career: stride tunes on pipe organ. Operating out of Victor’s state-of-the-art Camden, New Jersey Studio—a former Baptist church—Waller recorded both solo and group recordings on the instrument, all of which were published in the company’s mainstream “popular” series. Such a designation was rare for Black musicians, who, in this era, were traditionally relegated to making “race records.” However, despite Waller’s inclusion in its popular series, Victor still intentionally limited his musical output, maintaining similar stylistic restrictions to those they placed on other Black performers within the race record designation.

Even though Waller had a well-known love of classical music, he was expressly not allowed to record these works. Instead, he was given the difficult task of adapting the quick-striking sound of stride to the pipe organ, an adjustment that posed multiple technical and logistical challenges. Building on the work of Paul S. Machlin, Brian Ward, and Allan Sutton, I argue that Waller’s pipe organ recordings not only provide further insight into the racial logic of the early recording industry, but that they also demonstrate how that logic restricted Black musicians’ ability to sonically and instrumentally experiment within the jazz idiom. Ultimately, Waller’s story encapsulates many of the larger discriminatory practices that Black musicians faced during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, while, at the same time, these records highlight a side of Black music making that is often overlooked in accounts of the era.

In the Afro-Brazilian music-movement form capoeira, call and response saturates all interactions in live performance events (rodas). In addition to call-and-response song structures, music calls bodies into movement, bodies call to one another, and movements invoke responses from instrumentalists. Yet call and response does more than organize the roda. Demonstrating how antiphony organizes group sociality, the article argues that the music and movement also summon members to assume a range of responsibilities within the group and their lives. These include showing up for trainings and rodas, maintaining instruments, preparing for annual events, and teaching capoeira to younger generations in Bahia's underserved communities. Practitioners frame their ethical commitments to capoeira as compromisso, a concept that implies broad, long-term dedication. Grounding the study in my ethnographic research conducted in Brazil, I bridge Black music scholarship with ethical Africana philosophy to argue that capoeira practitioners use knowledge generated in their music-movement practice to conceive an ethics of compromisso. While the literature on Black musics across the Americas widely acknowledges call and response as a foundational musical mechanism, few ethnographic studies have delved more deeply into the social, ethical, and political potentials of antiphony. The article thus contributes to understandings of how Black music-dance practices generate ethical knowledge and practice through their sounds and movements. As capoeira's antiphony transcends the roda's space-time, it calls practitioners to assume an unending compromisso, making commitments that span generations to continually leverage capoeira's lessons to improve lives in Black communities of backland Bahia.