scholarship
CURRENT Course offerings | Past Offerings
Jazz in American Culture (50A+B) Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA
Tuba/Euphonium Studio (MU 3811) Music Department, Cal Poly, Pomona
Ethnomusicology: History, Theory, and Methods (MU 3811) Music Department, Cal Poly, Pomona
World of Music (MU 1030) Music Department, Cal Poly, Pomona
Hollywood High Steppers Second Line Brass Band/ Marching Ensemble, Silverlake Conservatory of Music, Hollywood, CA, 2019-2023 Women in Jazz Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 2023
Introduction to Ethnomusicology 101 Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 2023
Social Justice Music Research Project/Ethnomusicology Module: Ethnomusicology & Education, Master of Music in Music Education Program at Longy School of Music of Bard College, Los Angeles, CA, 2021
Social Justice Music Research Project/Ethnomusicology Module; Longy School of Music of Bard College, Los Angeles, CA
Jazz in American Culture I (50A; summers), Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 2017-2019
Ellingtonia, Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 2017
Hollywood High Steppers Second Line Brass Band/ Marching Ensemble, Silverlake Conservatory of Music, Hollywood, CA
Dissertation
In New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every occasion is marked with a celebratory parade, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that seemingly take over the city during Carnival Time. But throughout the year, there are jazz funerals and parades known as "second lines" that fill the Backatown neighborhoods of New Orleans, with the jubilant sounds of brass band music. These peripatetic parades and their accompanying brass bands have become symbolic of New Orleans and its association with social norm-breaking and hedonistic behavior. The second line constitutes cultural practice and group identification for practitioners serving as a site for spiritual practice and renewal. In Los Angeles, California, practitioners are transposing the second line, out of which comes new modes of expression, identities, meanings, and theology.
Drawing from nearly seven years of ethnomusicological fieldwork and archival research in two vastly different urban landscapes, this dissertation explores the brass band milieu and its central ritual, the second line, through an examination of the communities that sustain them in New Orleans and Los Angeles. In this dissertation I argue that the second line is a deeply rooted, multi-faceted, and community-based tradition, from which practitioners gain strength, healing, and spiritual renewal that transcends the mundane and crosses the boundaries of time, space, culture, and domain.
The brass band is largely lacking in jazz scholarship. This dissertation represents a critique of the existing literature that perpetuates European hegemony, obfuscates the presence and importance of non-Europeans within jazz, discounts the collective beliefs of New Orleans community members in favor of data-driven research, and fails to recognize brass band as a living, continuing jazz tradition. Because the brass band is so firmly rooted in the visual, sonic, and narrative stereotypes of amateurism, essentialized notions, and poverty, I utilize filmmaking throughout my dissertation as an integral component and sensorial mode of inquiry as a means to construct new visual and sensory ways of knowing second line culture.
PRESENTATIONS
“The Congo Square Ideology”
49th Annual Conference, Society for American Music, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2023
New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz, a special place where African and European aesthetics mixed, creating the unique cultural expression known as jazz. So, the story goes. This well-worn story, known by some as the jazz creation myth, has been told and retold. And Congo Square, an area located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, now known as Louis Armstrong Park, plays a central role. Many scholars have unpacked the myths about the formation of the city's jazz tradition, attempting to correct the "falsehoods" that have crept into scholarly works concerning Congo Square. But, with the use of past tense, jazz historians have relegated Congo Square to the dustbin of history. This paper will argue that Black New Orleanians today actively participate in a thriving, living tradition that traces its roots to Congo Square, where an ideology was born. Marc dempnstrates that Congo Square is more than a physical location where subjugated peoples mingled and vendors sold their wares. It provided a mechanism for cultural survival and a space for creating social bonds and identities, out of which common values, beliefs, and customs crystalized and around which the diverse Black community cohered. I will also discuss my conception of Congo Square Ideology: the cultural expressions of Congo Square performed during contemporary Sunday second line parades, where participants engage in the same activities and cultural expressions documented by early observers, drawing a throughline from before colonial occupation to present-day New Orleans, demonstrating that Congo Square is, not was.
"The New Orleans Second Line: A Tradition on the Move"
The seventh Rhythm Changes Conference, Jazz Then & Now, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2022
In New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every occasion is marked with a celebratory parade, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that seemingly take over the city during Carnival Time. But throughout the year, there are jazz funerals and parades known as "second lines" that fill the Backatown neighborhoods of New Orleans with the jubilant sounds of brass band music. Despite this, and the rapidly growing body of well-researched and well-meaning literature by "new jazz studies" scholars, second line culture remains excluded from jazz history courses the world over in favor of a single text that provides an "easier read" for undergraduate students. The resulting texts provide incomplete surveys that do little to correct previously held assumptions about jazz and are now deeply embedded within American culture, serving as an indoctrinating canon that limits the brass band's role and its practitioners within the jazz tradition. Those scholars who do mention brass bands—past or present—spend little time discussing them. In this paper, Marc argues that jazz historians have relegated second line culture to the dustbin of history, extirpation of a tradition that was not only seminal to jazz with near surgical precision and the use of past tense but one that continues to this day.
"Black Mardi Gras Indians: Their History, Musical Influence, and Audio Legacy,"
Annual Meeting of the Society for American Music, Tucson, AZ, 2022
In Southern Louisiana, Native Americans significantly impacted New Orleans' social and musical milieu. Native Americans there aided abducted Africans in their efforts toward self-emancipation. Over the course of a century, the African and Native American cultures mixed, creating a new hybrid culture, known today as Black Mardi Gras Indians. Coming out of a history of shared oppression and marginality, Mardi Gras Indian tribes (sometimes referred to as gangs) are the vestiges of maroon communities from NOLA's lower-river settlements, whose layered, multi-sensorial spiritual and musical expressions, material arts, are manifest in street performances—a form of sacred theater. For far too long, jazz scholars have neglected the influence of Native American cultures that succored self-emancipated individuals of African descent forge new lives and cultures throughout the U.S., and in Southern Louisiana, in particular, that led to the formation of the Mardi Gras Indian culture in New Orleans and contributed to jazz and brass band culture. Drawing on many hours of conversations with collaborators and archival research, Marc shows how the African and Native American drumming traditions carried on within NOLA's Indian tribes combined with the brass marching band traditions in NOLA to help shape jazz and were later recast and incorporated into popular music idioms, such as rhythm and blues (R&B), hip hop, and bounce.
"Queenie Pie, Ellington and Colorism," panel discussion
CONNECT Series, Lexington Philharmonic Society, 2021
On October 5, 2021, Marc shared the virtual stage with Drs. Everett McCorvey, DaMaris B. Hill, and Kelly Corcoran, where they discussed the music of Duke Ellington, Queenie Pie’s history, the concept of colorism and examples in art and society, and the process of reconstructing this unfinished work, including casting the singers and bringing it to the stage. Thank you Lexington Philharmonic for providing this platform to discuss these important issues.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Marc’s interest in photography and documentary filmmaking began in 2014 when he read ethnomusicologist
Scott Linford's online article, "Historical Narratives of the Akonting and Banjo" (2014). His illustrated essay served as a model of how to present, in a blog-style, a musical culture. Utilizing a variety of story-telling tools, including text, photography, video, audio, and graphic illustrations that serve to support and highlight salient points, Linford conveys knowledge in ways that an essay published traditionally (e.g., a peer-reviewed journal or manuscript) would not allow. At the same time, Marc was struggling with this seemingly one-dimensional representation of many music-centered ethnographies. Thus, to gain a deeper understanding of second line culture through the engagement of multiple modes of communicating knowledge, Marc began studying documentary film as a methodological approach in which to conduct my research.
filmaking
Marc utilizes filmmaking as a rich methodological approach to studying the complexities of the second line: the multi-layered and multi-sensory ways people experience meaning through music and dance; system(s) of symbols; and the interpersonal interactions (social and socio musical). Inspired by documentary filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall, Frederick Wiseman, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Sarah Pink, and Aparna Sharma, Marc is committed to framing the subjects of my study as agents who embody knowledge, reasonings, and experiences. For Marc, film provides a platform for exploring and articulating the "evolving, intersubjective dynamics shared between all documentary actors," within which he includes himself (Sharma 2015:4). Alongside more traditional forms of ethnographic writing, he utilizes filmmaking as an integral component and sensorial mode of inquiry to construct new visual and sensory ways of knowing second line culture.
My Brother's Keeper: ethnographic short (11:18), filmed and edited by Marc T. Gaspard Bolin, 2020.
My Brother's Keeper is a short film that conveys how culture is lived by those who live it. In My Brother's Keeper, Marc explores the embodied practices of group dynamics and behavior within the ritual of the second line and how musicians build meaningful relationships through the social practices of musicking in New Orleans.
"Lessons I've Learned" Artist: Christina Perez, B-camera to the great Lily Keber
New Orleans-based singer/songwriter Cristina Perez unveils her new single, “Lessons I’ve Learned”, inspired by her challenging path into motherhood and inclusivity for all, and in honor of her three-year-old son, Oscar. Cristina has created a new normal for her family, and through much personal reflection and rededication to her music career, looks forward to sharing “Lessons I’ve Learned” as an uplifting anthem for mothers to turn to when things get rough - a motivation to remain strong despite what life throws at you. She strives to give a louder voice to mothers of children with disabilities and rare diseases. The music video, featuring TBC Brass Band from New Orleans, also features other local mothers in similar positions who have overcome challenges, and whom Cristina greatly admires.
Can't Take Our Spirit, ethnographic short (9:36), filmed and edited by Marc T. Gaspard Bolin, 2020.
Can't Take Our Spirit is a short film study that reveals the embodied practices of brass band musicians and members of voluntary associations in LA that provide the settings for social interactions through ritual and music for Southern Louisiana migrant and affinity communities.