Erin T. Allen is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the Ohio State University. Her dissertation focuses on the HONK! community in the United States and examines how performance and perception of brass street band music shapes and is shaped by a critical engagement with US political culture and social life. She is also a coeditor of HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge, 2019) and is a trumpeter who plays most often with Chicago’s Environmental Encroachment.
Stephen Cedars is a writer, director, teacher, and scholar originally from south Louisiana. His plays have been published or produced throughout the US and Canada, and his scholarship has been presented at major conferences or is forthcoming in journal publications. He earned his MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU; his PhD in Theatre and Performance is in process from the CUNY Graduate Center.
Jesse Freedman is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on the reception and mediation of Chilean nueva canción and the experience of Chilean exiles in the former German Democratic Republic during the years of the Pinochet military dictatorship. Jesse’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Reebee Garofalo is a musician, activist, and educator, and Professor Emeritus at UMass Boston, where he taught for thirty-three years. He has presented internationally on popular music studies and the operations of the music industry and has written or edited five books and numerous articles on the subject. He is a past President and an honorary member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music–US. His most recent books are Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA and HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism. Garofalo has also spent years organizing and performing in progressive cultural events. He serves on the Organizing Committee for the annual HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, MA, and enjoys drumming with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, an activist New Orleans-style street band, and with the Blue Suede Boppers, a fifties rock ‘n’ roll band.
Laura Lohman is professor of music and director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Queens University of Charlotte. Her music publications include Hail Columbia! American Music and Politics in the Early Nation (Oxford University Press, 2020), Umm Kulthum: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007 (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), and Researching Secular Music and Dance in the Early United States: Extending the Legacy of Kate Van Winkle Keller (Routledge, 2021).
Andrew Snyder is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Instituto de Etnomusicologia at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, having completed his PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. With an interest in the intersections of public festivity and social movements, he has written about alternative brass band movements in Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, and San Francisco in his forthcoming book, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press); two co-edited volumes entitled HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge, 2019) and At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press, 2021); and articles in Latin American Music Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Festive Studies, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Yearbook for Traditional Music. A trumpeter, singer, guitarist, and pianist, he has played in a wide range of styles and ensembles, and he is cofounder of San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band.
Kai West is the assistant editor for Music & Politics and a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of Michigan, where he is currently completing a dissertation on electric guitar culture in the US. A researcher with wide-ranging interests, he recently contributed a chapter on jazz drumming to Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021), and his article on whiteness in the opera Porgy and Bess is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.