Gabriel Bristow

Honorary Research Fellow

Sarah Parker Remond Centre, Institute of Advanced Studies

 

Gabriel Bristow is an honorary research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, UCL. He is a historian and cultural critic with research interests in jazz, 'race', and critical theory.

Gabriel is currently turning his PhD thesis, entitled ‘Information About the World: Don Cherry’s Transnational Music’ (2024), into a monograph. Based on archival research in Sweden and the United States, the book reconstructs Cherry’s musical journey through the long 1960s to amplify an unsung pre-history of ‘world music’. Charting the development of Cherry’s music via the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia, his aesthetics are interpreted as a correlate to Aimé Césaire’s call for a ‘humanism made to the measure of the world’. In addition to this book project, Gabriel is working on a radio series about Amiri Baraka and new research into anti-war music and brass vocalisation respectively.

Gabriel’s work has appeared in Social Text, Soundings Journal, American Music (forthcoming), History Workshop Journal (forthcoming), The Wire, and elsewhere. He has been a co-editor of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre’s Working Paper Series.

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Project: Don Cherry’s life and music

Year of start: 2019
Supervisors: Prof Paul Gilroy (principal) and Dr Daniel Matlin, KCL (subsidiary)

PhD Research: My research is focused on Don Cherry (1936-1995), a multi-instrumentalist best known as a jazz trumpeter. In my thesis I trace the arc of his music across the 1960s-1970s—from the birth of ‘free jazz’ to experiments in ‘world music’ avant la lettre—attempting to understand it in relation to the social, cultural, and political shifts of the period. More than a missing piece of the historical puzzle that stands for nothing but its own particular truth, Cherry’s music shines a thin ‘beam of lyrical sound’ onto world history (Ralph Ellison). Or to put it in Theodor Adorno’s words: ‘Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective: the only light in which it glows.’

Research Interests:
Music, cultural history, critical theory, black studies, marxism, poetry

Publications:
John Tchicai's Metal Poems, Point of Departure, 2021
Once Upon A Time In Watts, The Wire, 2021
On Free Jazz Communism, Social Text, 2020
Don Cherry: un film improvisé, La Revue Documentaires, 2021

Translations:
'The Meaning of Attica' by Val Wilmer, Blank Forms, 2022

Honours, Awards & Funding:
LAHP funded