Prof. Washington Will Teach, Study Jazz in South Africa on Fulbright Fellowship

Associate Professor Michael Washington, a faculty member of the Conservatory of Music of Brooklyn College, has been honored with a Fulbright Fellowship. He will spend the first eight months of 2009 in South Africa courtesy of America's flagship international educational exchange program.

Under the terms of his Fulbright Fellowship, Professor Washington–-who is known to colleagues, students, and fellow musicians as "Salim," a name he earned while studying to speak Kiswahili as a youth–-will devote his time to lecturing and carrying out research at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, in Durban, from January through August 2009 on the subject of "The Aesthetics and Social Valences of South African Jazz."

By social valences, Washington means "the ways in which the music—the aesthetics of music—informed, or are informed by, the social practices of the nation that the music comes from."  He noted that South Africa, along with Cuba and Brazil, is a place where musicians have adapted jazz to their own particular cultures. "The jazz press has lionized Europe and Japan as the great centers of jazz outside of New York," he said. "But it seems to me that the kinds of jazz that are played in those places are very derivative of the kind of jazz you hear in the United States."

His particular interest, he says, "is in the narrative that surrounds jazz in South Africa, which has a deep jazz tradition and has been playing it for over a century. I'm interested to see how the music has changed over the years."

Washington added, "I've wanted to go to South Africa since the seventies. But going back then would have meant being there under apartheid where I would have had to travel as an 'honorary white.'   African American performers who went there had to perform for white-only audiences. That was repugnant to me."

A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Washington grew up in Detroit. In his teens he mastered the saxophone, the flute, and the oboe and studied piano as well. He attended Harvard University for a while, taking time off to further his career as a jazz musician, composer, and arranger.

Washington founded a Boston-based group, the Roxbury Blues Aesthetic, played with a number of ensembles, and traveled extensively—playing music festivals in Canada, Latin America, and Europe. He also conducted music workshops. Since moving his base of operations to New York, he has become pretty much a Friday night fixture at St. Nick's Pub in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, frequently appearing as leader of his latest group, Harlem Arts Ensemble.

In the latter half of the 1990s, "I went back to Harvard to complete my B.A. and to go on for my Ph.D.," he said, intending at first to concentrate on the Wynton Marsalis revolution of the 1980s but eventually turning to John Coltrane instead. He received his doctorate in 2000.

He revealed that his mentor at Harvard University, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., did not want him to come to Brooklyn College.

"He wanted me to stay in the Ivy League," Washington said. "But I was attracted to teaching at Brooklyn College. Besides, I'm a musician first and foremost, and I wanted to be in New York. Brooklyn College students are for the most part hard working and appreciative. It brings special challenges from time to time—for instance, in one class I will typically have some students with excellent preparation and who perform at a level consistent with the nation's elite universities, and in the same class students who have had much less preparation and exposure. But just like the many different ethnicities and religions represented in our student population, I view this as a strength and a testament to our commitment to democracy."