Fields

African Diasporic Jazz Cultures; Afro-Cuban and Caribbean Musics; African Diasporic Aesthetics; Music and Religious Experience; Improvisation and Orality; Transnationalism and Migration; Public Ethnomusicology; Scholar-Artist Practice.

Profile

I am an ethnomusicologist, educator, and percussionist whose work centers on Cuban music, spirituality, and transnational Black identity. My research examines how African Cuban sacred repertoire, particularly within Santería (Regla de Ocha), shapes artistic self-making, cultural memory, and diasporic belonging across African diasporic communities.  

My forthcoming book, Sound and Spirituality of Cubanidad (University of Illinois Press, African American Music in Global Perspective series), uses a life-story approach to explore how four Cuban musicians engage Santería repertoire to navigate migration, imperial legacies, and evolving forms of Black identity in the United States. Through collaborative ethnography, the project foregrounds musicians’ interpretive frameworks and demonstrates how sacred sound traditions travel, transform, and endure in diasporic contexts. Ritual sound emerges as a site of memory, resilience, and creative agency.

Across my scholarship, I explore how African Cuban spiritual aesthetics, including cyclical time, call-and-response, relational improvisatory dialogue, embodied pedagogy, and intergenerational transmission, extend into and emerge out of jazz and other improvisatory practices. I look to unearth the ways that African Cuban traditions are intertwined with jazz history and foundational to parallel African diasporic sound worlds. My perspective situates jazz within transnational networks of migration, spirituality, and intercultural exchange shaped by Caribbean and African musical lineages.  

As a scholar-artist, my research is grounded in long-term performance practice in African Cuban folkloric and jazz contexts. I have performed with ensembles including Paa Kow’s Afro-Fusion Orchestra at festivals such as Bayou Boogaloo (New Orleans) and the Five Points Jazz Festival (Denver), and have collaborated with Cuban master artists in ritual and concert settings. Performance for me is a method of inquiry in my work, it’s a way of theorizing groove, improvisation, and diasporic listening from within musical practice. I have also directed ensembles dedicated to African diasporic music, including the Latin American Music Ensemble at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble at the University of Pittsburgh (Fall 2026).  

My current research extends this work by examining jazz as diasporic formation shaped by spirituality, mobility, and intercultural exchange. I am particularly interested in how African and African diasporic cosmologies structure improvisation, collectivity, temporality, and sonic meaning. At the University of Pittsburgh, I contribute to Jazz Studies by situating jazz within transnational African diasporic epistemologies and integrating scholarship, performance, and ensemble leadership into a unified artistic practice.  

Current and Upcoming Courses

• Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble 
• Jazz Improvisation 
• Jazz Styles & Analysis: Thelonious Monk 
• Music in Latin America: Salsa, Soca, and Reggae

Publications

Monograph

Sound and Spirituality of Cubanidad: Santería Repertoire in the Lives of Four Cuban Musicians. Under contract, University of Illinois Press (African American Music in Global Perspective series). 

Selected Articles & Chapters

“Matriarchy and Santería Musical Healing in Diaspora Context.” Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, special issue “The Diasporas Within: American Music, Identity, and Migration” (forthcoming).

Public Scholarship 

“A Guided Listening Journey: Yorùbá Heritage Abroad.” Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (2023).