Sam Cleland ’25 visited New Orleans to research the connection between Black American culture and jazz music for his Kutler Center Junior Summer Fellowship project, titled “Jazz in the Big Easy: Conducting Not So Easy Discussions about Race and Jazz in its Birthplace of New Orleans.”
Cleland, a saxophone player, said his history capstone paper about Black musicians’ invention of jazz music inspired him to begin crafting his fellowship proposal.
“I was doing research for my [Honors] U.S. History term paper, which was about the history of jazz in relationship to the inhumanity of Jim Crow,” Cleland said. “I began to wonder if the jazz bands at Harvard-Westlake, which I knew to be mostly white and Asian musicians, had been appropriating Black American music.”
Cleland said he decided to travel to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, to discuss this topic with both jazz performers and scholars in order to learn more about the complex roles of race in music.
“I decided to go to New Orleans to research and talk with jazz musicians as well as ethnomusicologists at Tulane in order to learn about the intersection between jazz and race,” Cleland said. “I wanted to learn how I, as a white jazz musician, can learn more about the culture and bring it back to Harvard-Westlake.”
Cleland said he gained a new understanding of the importance of engaging in conversation about topics that are rarely talked about.
“What I’ve learned is the importance of having difficult conversations, such as talking about topics like race or injustice, that we might feel uncomfortable talking about,” Cleland said. “Everybody in New Orleans was just so kind and recognized the importance of having these not so easy discussions.”
Cleland said that he encourages juniors interested in receiving a fellowship next year to center their trip around something that truly matters to them.
“Choose something that you’re really passionate about that really affects you and something that you’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Cleland said. “I felt comfortable because I’ve been thinking about this for so long, and I was just eager to take that on, adventure and learn more.”
