Since black music didn’t start here in the United States during slavery, it makes sense for the study of the art form to reach across the Atlantic to its roots in Africa. This is what Ghana-born ...

In July 1913, friends of the African British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor gathered in his hometown of Croydon, England, to lay a plaque on his grave in anticipation of the first ...

Duke Ellington rejected it, Charles Mingus was ambivalent about it, and Wynton Marsalis is okay with it. For many African American musicians the word “jazz” is a double-edged term, sometimes ...

Coleridge-Taylor was also deeply interested in African American musical themes, and his body of solo instrumental and chamber works to this end became prized by Black American classical musicians. "I ...

When nine students and a music professor set off on a fundraising tour from Fisk University in Tennessee in 1871, they had no idea what lay ahead. They just hoped their talents as singers and the ...