Music of the Long ‘70s: Black Power, Punk, Jambands, and Jewish Soul

Saturday, March 4, 2023 · 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. · CASE 4th Floor Auditorium

Jay Keister, Associate Professor, College of Music
Reiland Rabaka, Founder & Director, Center for African & African American Studies
Micheal Sebulsky, Lecturer, College of Music
Jeremy L. Smith, Professor, College of Music
Keith Waters, Professor, College of Music

Watch recorded lecture 

If the “Me Decade” of the 1970s is often treated as the decadent extension of a faded 1960s counterculture, the music offered innovations that continue to reverberate. This CU on the Weekend’s four presenters will discuss influential trends in Black Power and Soul music, Punk, Jambands, and Jewish Soul with a view to the “long” 1970s. Professors Jay Keister, Reiland Rabaka, Micheal Sebulsky and Jeremy Smith, guided by moderator Professor Keith Waters, will view the musical and cultural legacy of artists and groups such as Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Dave Matthews, the Sex Pistols, and Fanny. Following the four presentations, there will be ample time for discussion with the audience and between presenters.

Jay Keister is an associate professor in the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder. As an ethnomusicologist his research interests include rock music and Japanese music. He has published articles and book chapters on progressive rock, glam rock, punk rock, and avant-garde. Keister’s research on Japanese music and dance has been published in the journals Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, and Asian Theatre Journal and he is the author of the book Shaped by Japanese Music (Routledge, 2004).

Reiland Rabaka is the founder and director of the Center for African & African American Studies and professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a research fellow in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Rabaka has published 17 books and more than 100 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays, including most recently The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, Du Bois: A Critical Introduction, and Black Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement. He is also a poet and musician.

Micheal Sebulsky is a lecturer in the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research interests include improvisation studies, philosophy, pop-music form, and DEI efforts in music theory pedagogy. Sebulsky’s dissertation, in progress, codifies jamband musical style through a case study of the Dave Matthews Band. Also, his work has been published in the 2020 Cambridge Scholars collection Musical Waves: West Coast Perspectives of Pitch, Narrative, and Form. Sebulsky has presented research at regional, national, and international conferences and was the recipient of the University of Colorado’s Best Should Teach Award (2017) while completing his master’s degree in music and the Excellent in Teaching Award at the University of Oregon (2020). His primary instrument is the guitar, and he maintains an active guitar-performing and teaching schedule, having performed and recorded with Grammy-nominated pop, jazz, bluegrass, and country artists.

Jeremy L. Smith is professor of Musicology at the University of Colorado. He has just published his third monograph on music and art of the English Renaissance. He has edited a collection of early music and a collection of essays. One of Smith’s articles is a study of Carole King’s Tapestry of 1971. In 2008 he co-authored the Popular Music article “Musical Ambition, Cultural Accreditation and the Nasty Side of Progressive Rock,” with Jay Keister.

Keith Waters is professor of music at CU Boulder. As a jazz pianist, he has performed throughout the U.S., Europe, and in Russia and South America. He has written extensively on jazz, including books on jazz history, Miles Davis, and Postbop Jazz of the 1960s.