Marcelo Boccato
Pianist, Scholar & Educator
Marcelo Boccato
Pianist, Scholar & Educator
Photo: Kelly Fleming
Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian is a pianist, scholar, and educator. He currently holds an appointment as Lecturer of Jazz Studies at Baylor University in Waco, TX.
Originally from Campinas, Brazil, he has earned a DMA in Jazz Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was also a 2018-19 Graduate Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute for his dissertation “Performing Samba: Aesthetics, Transnational Modernisms, and Race”.
His research was supported by the Lemann Graduate Fellowship for Brazilian Studies and the Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship and he was a fellow at the Harvard University’s Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop. He has presented his research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, ALARI Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies, Latin American Studies Association, International Association of Popular Music Studies, and Jazz Education Network.
Dr. Boccato Kuyumjian integrates his work as scholar/artist and music educator, developing teaching pedagogies that explore the intersection of jazz and other genres of Black popular music. As a graduate student, he created the Illinois Music Residency Program in collaboration with the School of Music, Department of History, African American Studies, and high schools in the Urbana-Champaign area.
Marcelo holds additional degrees from the University of Iowa (M.A.) and UNICAMP (B.A. in Popular Music). Prior to his appointment at Baylor University, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University and served as Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois with appointments at the School of Music, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
His performance and scholarly work focuses on the music of the African diaspora. His work as a leader includes collaborations with musicians from São Paulo, New York, and Chicago, including Dana Hall, Clark Sommers, Geof Bradfield, Tito Carrillo, John Ellis, Jay Sawyer, Diego Garbin, Cleber Almeida. In addition, Marcelo Boccato has also performed with the University of Iowa’s Johnson County Landmark and the University of Illinois’ Concert Jazz Band, Alicia Olatuja, Jimmy Greene, Jim Pugh, Chip McNeill, Larry Grey, Joel Spencer, and Rodrigo Ursaia.
Research
Research
I am a scholar of music and race specializing on music of the African diaspora and more specifically, jazz and urban popular music of the United States and Latin America. My research is interdisciplinary, drawing from methodologies and theories of Africana studies, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and critical theory. My scholarly work is situated in the growing field of global music history, positioning African diasporic communities as transnational and historical agents who shape and are shaped by global flows of music, and highlighting their work as producers of historical knowledge.
I am currently working on a book manuscript project, tentatively titled Unsettling the Aesthetics of Race: Samba and the Making of a Black Decolonial Tradition. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro became an important hub of the Black Atlantic entertainment industry. As the circulation of Black music and dance increased, sound became an important medium for shaping identities, communities, and worldviews. Cariocas—the people who lived in Rio de Janeiro—listened to samba and jazz in ways that challenged and produced racial categories, celebrated the creativity of Black musicians and reinforced primitivistic notions of blackness. Analyzing an extensive archive of sound and text including commercial recordings of music, sheet music, newspapers, and writings on music that documents the city’s musical activities from 1830 to 1968, I examine how musicians, intellectuals, journalists, critics, and audiences produced different techniques for listening to Black music. These techniques reveal two contrasting aesthetic- political projects. The first, created by Black communities, understood music as knowledge for relationship- building amidst difference, while the second was built on the foundation of colonial modernity and shaped cariocas’ perception of musical difference as the representation of racial difference and irreconcilable alterity.
Samba, jazz and other forms of Black music are produced amid transnational cultural networks and increasingly consumed through mass media. Nevertheless, music meaning continues to be negotiated locally and collectively and commodified music is given life through local embodied acts of music making. This project focuses on the importance of local groups and events like regional presses and media, cultural organizations, music ensembles, religious communities, neighborhood associations, music venues, and public festivities in shaping personal experiences with popular music. It is through these institutions that individuals learn how to find in commodified forms of music the rich histories and experiences of Black communities across the diaspora, or the persistent legacies of race that dehumanize black subjects and reinforce racial hierarchies. Examining local groups that claimed a stake in defining samba and jazz in Rio de Janeiro, this dissertation explores the diverse musical representations they articulated through sound, performance, and discourse and examines their role in shaping the contested and relational nature of listening to Black music.
Video
Video
Marcelo Boccato Quintet
Iron Post | Urbana, IL - April 2016
TITO CARILLO trumpet | GEOF BRADFIELD tenor sax
CLARK SOMMERS bass | DANA HALL drums