Dartmouth Events

This talk explores Black music making as a spiritual quest and ritual practice through which participants deploy improvisation, dissonance, and musical joy as strategies of cultural affirmation and social defiance.

Melvin L. Butler is Associate Professor at the University of Miami, where he teaches in the Department of Musicology at the Frost School of Music and serves as Associate Dean of the Office of Academic Enhancement for Undergraduate Affairs. He taught previously at the University of Chicago, Yale University, and the University of Virginia. In Spring 2022, he was the Royden B. Davis Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University. In October 2023, he began a two-year term as the thirty-fifth President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. A scholar-performer with broad interests in music and religion of the African diaspora, he has conducted field research on popular music and religion in the Caribbean and the United States. He is the author of Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019). At the heart of his work lies a critical reconsideration of how music relates to processes of boundary-crossing, identity formation, and social positioning in post-colonial contexts. An internationally acclaimed jazz saxophonist, Butler has toured and recorded with numerous jazz artists, including Betty Carter, John Daversa, Joey DeFrancesco, Christian McBride, and Jimmy McGriff. For the past three decades, he was worked Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, with whom he is featured on several albums, including the Grammy-nominated Landmarks (Verve 2014). Butler is a featured soloist on the Grammy-winning recording by the John Daversa Big Band, American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom (2018). He earned his bachelor’s degree from Berklee College of Music, and an MA and PhD in music from New York University.