Yellow Jazz Black Music: A Conversation with Dr Marketus Presswood

In the heady days of the 1920s and 1930s, African American jazz musicians became crucial to defining the music of that era in Shanghai, China’s jazz Mecca. "Yellow Jazz Black Music" documents the little-known story of the influence African-American artists had on Chinese musicians and the Chinese music industry, an important trend that has impacted the trajectory of popular music in China right up to the present. Using rare archival footage dating back to the 1920s, along with interviews among contemporary musicians and historians, the film presents to us the stories of African American jazz musicians who came to Shanghai a century ago, the decline and resurgence of jazz in China thereafter, and their revolutionary impact on the Chinese music scene.

This webinar will feature a moderated conversation and audience Q&A with director Dr Marketus Presswood. To access the documentary, please register for the webinar at the link below.
**Registered participants will receive a link to watch the documentary 48 hours before the webinar

REGISTER HERE

Discussants:

• Dr S. Ama Wray, Professor of Dance, UC Irvine
• Dr Emily Baum, Associate Professor of History, UC Irvine

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Marketus Presswood completed his doctorate program at the University of California–Irvine in Modern Chinese History. Yellow Jazz/Black Music is the first full-length feature documentary for the jazz aficionado. Dr. Presswood first came to China as a young student in 1997, where he developed a keen interest in the role of race, class, and gender in the political and cultural interactions between the African diaspora and China.

Dr S. Ama Wray, TEDx Speaker and Professor of Dance at the University of California, Irvine where she co-founded AICRE with Dr Tiffany Willoughby Herard and Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Her work habitually brings dance and music back into closer alignment and her ethnographically informed praxis - Embodiology® - traverses the arts, integrative health and indigenous knowledge. In tandem, she continues to explore performance, technology and access through AI 4 Afrika, an initiative she co-founded with choreographers, data scientists, scholars, and entrepreneurs in 2020.

Dr. Emily Baum is an associate professor of modern Chinese history at UC Irvine, where she researches and teaches on the social and cultural history of twentieth-century China and the history of medicine. Her interests revolve around issues relating to illness, deviance, alternative medicine, and popular beliefs and superstitions.