In cooperation with the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies and the Institute of Ethnomusicology, we cordially invite you to a public lecture by a guest from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Dr. Dave Wilson
on Wednesday, 15 April 2026 at 1:00 PM:
International Jazz Festivals, Blackness, and Sonic Negotiations of Europeanisation: Case Studies from the Skopje Jazz Festival.
This seminar focuses on the Skopje Jazz Festival (SJF, established in 1982), as a case study of international jazz festivals as sites of possibility and limitation for a liberatory and anti-imperialist politics. Taking examples from three chapters of the author’s monograph-in-progress Living Jazz on the Edge of Europe: Institutions and the Possibilities of a Liberation Music, the seminar is situated within a broader project concerned with discourses in Black Studies on possibilities and liberation, and considering jazz as a Black (American) music that has been global since before the word “jazz” was used to label the music. The chapters from which the seminar’s examples are drawn consider international jazz festivals as aesthetically, politically, and economically situated in regional networks of festival production. These festivals thus operate as sites of negotiation of multiple overlapping spheres of racial and gender politics, as well as, in the case of SJF, political processes of Europeanisation. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Macedonia between 2011 and 2018 forms the foundation of this work, where the author participated in jazz (and other) music worlds in Macedonia as a musician, audience member, educator, concert organiser, and ethnographer.
The first example discusses a case from the 2018 SJF, which featured an exhibit of African art on loan from the Museum of African Art in Belgrade, the first ever exhibition of African art in North Macedonia, which included narratives linking African art and jazz. The analysis of the exhibit includes some discussion of the Non-Aligned Movement as an element of the political and economic legacies of Yugoslavia (i.e., SFRY) that continue to inform conceptions and imaginations of Africa and blackness in North Macedonia. The second example focuses on the listening environments of three performances from the 2013 SJF: Roscoe Mitchell and Tyshawn Sorey, the band Harriet Tubman and Cassandra Wilson, and a concert titled “Balkan Fever” featuring Vlatko Stefanovski, Miroslav Tadić, Teodosii Spassov, and the Macedonian Philharmonic. Taken together, the modes of audience engagement with these performances raise questions about the conditions under which liberatory political possibilities are nurtured (or, alternatively, foreclosed) at the site of international jazz festivals.
A moment from the 2018 SJF grounds the third example, where a solo concert of trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith occurred simultaneously with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Macedonian Philharmonic and with the first successful vote by the Macedonian Parliament in the process of changing the country’s constitutional name from the Republic of Macedonia to the Republic of North Macedonia. Considering these concurrent events, together with the other examples, reveals how a jazz festival can be a site for foregrounding the Black radical tradition and its broader emancipatory possibilities beyond a Black/White binary, even as it prioritises adherence to European forms of whiteness and participates in (and against) musical and political processes of Europeanisation.
The lecture will be held in English in the Conference Room of the Institute for Cultural and Memory Studies at ZRC SAZU, Trg francoske revolucije 7, 2nd floor.
Dave Wilson (he/him) is an interdisciplinary scholar, saxophonist, composer, ethnographer, producer, educator, and contributor to the music community of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. His research has appeared in journals including Journal of Jazz Studies, Environmental Humanities, Popular Music, Leonardo Music Journal, and Ethnomusicology, and his co-authored music appreciation textbook Gateways to Understanding Music (Routledge) was published in its second edition in 2023.
With music from his 2023 album Ephemeral, he was selected as a finalist for Best Jazz Artist at the 2024 Aotearoa Music Awards and for the 2024 APRA Best Jazz Composition Award. He appears regularly as a Music Correspondent on Radio New Zealand, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Music at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
Photo by cottonbro studio.