CFP: Mingus Ah Um at 60, Due 5/20/19

In his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, jazz musician Charles Mingus recounts his hatred of being ignored during his bass solos. When it was finally his turn to enter the foreground, suddenly musicians and audience members alike found drinks, food, conversations, and everything else more important. However, this small, and somewhat ironic, anecdote of Mingus’s relationship with the jazz community has now become a foreshadowing of his current status in sound studies–but no longer! This call for papers seeks to re/hear, re/sound and re/mix the contributions of Mingus for his ingenious approach to jazz performance and composition as well as his far-reaching theorizations of sound in relation to liberation and social equality.

In honor of the 60th anniversary of Mingus’s sublimely idiosyncratic album Mingus Ah Um, we invite 250-word abstracts that engage any aspect of his oeuvre with respect to its intersection with sound studies. Your contributions may range from creative work to short essays and/or podcasts. Mingus never confined himself to a singular modality of expression. Therefore, we welcome contributions that work across genres and disciplines. Whatever format you choose, we ask that you critically explore how his work pushes the field of sound studies to listen to the bass player(!), to hear those surprising flights of fancy, raucous shouts of anger, or weeping utterances lurking below in the subaltern frequencies and underneath the margins. How does Mingus’s work illuminate discussions of sound and modernity? How does he disrupt or reharmonize the avant-garde? What might his work teach us about resistance to white supremacy and injustice?–E.B.

Please send your 250-word abstract to guest editor Earl Brooks earlb@umbc.edu by May 20th, 2019. If chosen, your draft (1000-1200 words max) will be due by July 15th, edited by Earl Brooks and SO! ed. Jennifer Stoever and published in a special issue this Fall. Please read our mission statement and submission guidelines for more information.