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.
Project: Don Cherry’s life and music
Year of start: 2019
Supervisors: Prof Paul Gilroy (principal) and Dr Daniel Matlin, KCL (subsidiary)

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