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The American Musicological Society is proud to present an unforgettable performance and lecture by musicologist and music creator Kwami Coleman.
This lecture/performance focuses on stride piano technique, where a pianist’s left hand maintains the rhythmic pulse of a song with alternating leaps between the instrument’s lower and middle registers, simulating the dialogic and propulsive exchange within a band’s rhythm section.
Stride was one of the first methods developed in American popular music where a singular musician could, with the additions of a melody-carrying right hand and the human voice, achieve a texturally dense and polyrhythmic performance. Popularized in the 1920s by virtuoso New York pianists James P. Johnson, Thomas “Fats” Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith, all of whom were thereafter known to as the “Harlem School” of stride piano because they lived and frequently performed uptown, the technique turned the piano into a virtual band-in-a-box in a way that no other instrument had yet except for the church organ, at least until the turntables and mixer of the discotheque decades later.
Kwami Coleman will interpret some of this historical piano repertoire and use it as an aesthetic and technical source for further improvisation, interpolating sounds via synthesizer and sampler—more contemporary, electronic (digital and analog) bands-in-boxes. Coleman will also read aloud prepared prose that highlights some of the historical and technical details, also posing questions for audience members to ponder and respond to. “Taken In Stride” is Coleman’s dialog with a more acoustic past and the thoroughly electronic and more automated present, and this dialog will extend to attendees who, in their presence and participation, will join in, in stride—in rhythmic and registral exchange.
Registration
This event will be held as part of the American Musicological Society’s Many Musics of America Project and in conjunction with the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting. Registration is required.
Speaker
