Whitney Slaten researches how the social positions of musicians and audiences shift, in moments when sound becomes music. Jazz as both a practice of beauty and of extramusical study, ethnography as a confrontational method between “the field” and scholarship, and audio technologies of transduction and amplification inform this analysis of time and resonance, in music and society. A saxophonist and student of James Williams, Don Braden, Kenny Garrett, Babatunde Olatunji, and Clark Terry, Slaten was a member of the Clark Terry Big Band, Olatunji’s ensembles, as well as The Whitney Slaten Project, his quintet that performed regularly in New York City. Slaten previously served as a visiting assistant professor at Seton Hall University and The New School. Whitney Slaten is Associate Professor of Music at Bard College.

B.Mus., William Paterson University; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University.